Death and Taxes
Worth it · Strategy · 2020
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $12.99.
- Length
- 3h
- Value
- $4.33/hr
- Reviews
- 86% positive
Recent reviews trending down: 71% over the last 30 days against 86% all-time.
Watch this gameOne email when it is worth buying.
Minimum on the Steam store: 2 GB of memory, Integrated graphics or GPU with atleast 512 MB of VRAM, 2 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
In this 2D, short narrative-based game, you assume the role of the Grim Reaper... on an office job. Your job is to decide which people are going to live or die. The consequences of your choices are yours to bear, while the mystery of your incarnation awaits revelation!
What drives the score
How to read this
Grades run S to D, read from the buyer's side. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. How the grades work
The value story
January 2026 is where it bottomed out, at $1.68. Its cuts run 70 percent off as a rule. There have been 78 in the 7 years tracked, about 4 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 4 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 4 weeks.
On value it sits in the top 2 percent of its genre. It is pricier than 76 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 90 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Beholder 2 ($2.69, scores 75) beats it on value, while it beats Not For Broadcast ($24.99, scores 67).
Steam's global achievement data says about 20 percent of players ever finish it. On a 3-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. Players rate it 86 percent positive over its lifetime, but the last 30 days run 71 percent. Something recent has soured the room. Of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 15 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written April 2024 to August 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 64 percent of the 1,172 reviews written there were positive, against 86 percent overall, and those are 15 percent of everything written about it.
Finishing takes 3 hours; clearing it takes 18, which is 5.8 times the campaign.
The drop-off
97% start to 20% finishA normal fall-off for a game this long. Steam global achievements
Players
About 30 players at once, as of Sep 24.
Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
Halfway through the game I could not muster the energy to continue caring about what happened next. I guess it's nice to know that a majority of other players that finished probably felt the same considering 82% evidently all got the same ending. If you don't mind "Millenial Writing" and can overlook some of the real-world political biases in the game, then maybe you'll have an alright of enough time playing this.
This game gets boring very fast, I've tried getting into it twice over the years and only got around 2 hours in both times. I saw a lot of people comparing it to Papers, Please but, unlike that game, Death and Taxes doesn't get any harder. The instructions don't get more complex and, in the 2 hours I played, a significant portion of the days had the instructions "kill everyone whose profile is at X position". This...
Steam reviews, mixed to match its Steam ratio and rotated daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic).
Cite this score
Death and Taxes scores 72/100 on the BANG Score (worth it). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/1166290/death-and-taxesReviews set the ceiling, and price against real length moves the BANG Score inside it. How it works, and where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Aug 2, price as of Sep 24.
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