What do mutated rodents, buxom witches, hordes of the undead, and a sprawling estate all have in common? They’re all prominent fixtures of Dead Estate, an isometric action roguelike developed by Milkbar Lads and published by 2 Left Thumbs. Based on an original game developed for Newgrounds, a prolific online community, this colorful action game is loaded with plenty of spooky treats for the Halloween season.
With Dead Estate‘s final content update due to release on October 28th, there’s no better time to sink your teeth into this sweet confection. But does it hold a rotten core inside of its delectable exterior? Is this candy-coated combat simulator full of nastiness? Is another candy metaphor necessary? Who can say? Let’s talk about it.
Playing Dead Estate
A dark and stormy night. A lone hitchhiker, doused in rain and misery in equal measure, flags down an approaching semi truck for assistance. Miraculously, the bulky man behind the wheel offers her a ride, eager to keep his mind busy on such a late night.
But their few scant moments of solace are quickly interrupted by a flat tire. The two disperse, desperate to keep their mutual trip going. In the bright glow of blaring headlights, a figure emerges, followed by another. And another. And another. They’re missing teeth, fingers, and eyes, but their taste for flesh and blood is vividly apparent. Seeking refuge from the monstrous horde, the duo lock themselves inside an abandoned estate, unaware that it’s the origin of the madness surrounding them.
For better or worse, they’re not alone.
Dead Estate is an isometric roguelike whose complexities gradually open up the more you play. You start with a total of two characters to pick from—Jules and Jeff—with a grand total of ten to unlock through various means. Each character has their own unique attributes. For instance, Jules has below-average health but above-average speed and a shotgun to start with. Jeff, meanwhile, is a bit slower and only starts with a handgun, but he has more health to compensate.
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From there, you’ll traverse the many, many floors of the estate, with each successive floor bringing a new set of horrors and monsters to face. All you have to do to move onto the next floor is find the boss, kill it, and ride the accompanying elevator up. Sounds easy, right? Not quite.
For one thing, you’ll need to power yourself up as much as possible to give yourself a fighting chance on the game’s more difficult floors. Items of all sorts exist to modify your character stats and grant you new abilities, additional weapons can be carried for particularly dangerous situations, and cold hard cash can be collected to exchange for goods and services.
Speaking of which: the shops. Item shops, weapon shops, and stat shops all exist to provide useful items, powerful weapons, and stat upgrades for your convenience. You just have to have the cash to afford them. Fighting enemies, blowing up pots, and defeating the boss at the end of a floor all give you cash, though you’ll have to be a bit conservative with how you spend it. It’s far from limitless, and you’ll have to scrounge just about everywhere on higher difficulties for any modest returns.
Just don’t waste too much time wandering around. It may come as a shock, but you’re actually on a hidden timer on almost every floor. What happens when it hits zero?
Chunks is what happens. Chunks is a giant, hulking enemy that perpetually gives chase throughout the floor, only ever pausing when you enter shops or battle the boss. He’s incredibly tanky, difficult to fight, and can quickly end a run if you’re not careful. That said, he’s not immortal. If you have the skills (and the firepower) to temporarily bring him down, you’ll be sufficiently rewarded for doing so.
While there’s some satisfaction to be had in definitively blowing up Chunks at the end of a standard run, things open up more and more as you play. If you want the true ending, you’re tasked with double the amount of floors to traverse, the amount of enemies you’ll have to fight, and the number of unique bosses you have to face. Oh, and twice the number of Chunks.
There’s definitely a learning curve here. While Dead Estate does feature some varied difficulty options, the jump between each of them feels more and more apparent up until the highest setting. By then, Chunks will make a beeline towards you if you’re not heading immediately to the boss room, and your health pool will be shredded to ribbons if you so much as take one or two errant blows. The alternative floors you unlock are also substantially more difficult than what came before, with one in particular even throwing in a unique mechanic that we dare not spoil for you here.
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All that said, what you have here is a perfectly fine action game. The isometric camera takes some time to get used to. Still, you’ll sooner or later find yourself circling each room, jumping over obstacles and enemy attacks, quickly gathering up scattered coins, and probing for secret rooms wherever possible. There’s a fun loop to be found in clearing rooms as fast as possible, scanning walls for secret areas, and strategizing where to go first in order to maximize your efficiency. It’s not exactly survival horror, but the need to avoid Chunks at all costs does evoke a similar feeling.
Being a roguelike, you’ll need a healthy dose of luck and a modest eye for strategy in order to survive. It’s not so much a game of hoarding everything you can find. Instead, it’s a game of considering how certain items work best with your character, whether you can form meaningful synergies with your existing items, and how certain items can completely screw everything up. You’ll also have to keep the shops in mind: Do you want to save up for a permanent stat upgrade, or do you want to take a risk in grabbing one or two items?
Of course, knowing what to do and when helps immensely as well. You’ll rarely glide through a brand-new floor on your first playthrough, either falling prey to environmental hazards or dangerous boss patterns or even just an enemy you don’t immediately recognize. Each of the floors being relatively compact means you’ll quickly find trouble areas and how to best deal with them.
Plenty of Life In this Estate
Dead Estate is gorgeous. Delightfully cartoony and colorful in equal measure, Milkbar Lads—comprised of artists and programmers hailing from Newgrounds—really forge a unique sense of style with their exaggerated proportions, unique silhouettes, and thick outlines. From high-quality sprites of characters like Cordelia, the friendly and comically well-endowed witch, to the many grotesque baddies you’ll stumble across within the state, just about everything is terrific to look at.
The same can be said for the soundtrack. Composed by MajorWipeout, it’s a series of delightful chiptune tracks that accompany the action on-screen. It’s moody at points, energetic at others, and otherwise provides a balanced soundscape that gives each stage and boss fight a fun sensation for the ears. It’s also conveniently available on MajorWipeout’s Bandcamp page. You’ll be listening to these tracks quite a bit, so it’s nice that they sound as good as they do.
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You won’t be starved for content here, either. Dead Estate‘s suite of trophies, character skins, and medals will keep you playing for hours and hours. Take it from someone who has personally put in over 40 hours across dozens of runs, successes, and failures alike. Boredom is nary a concern when there’s so much to do and discover.
The game’s plethora of content updates ever since its original release has only ever added more to discover as well. In addition to receiving a boatload of new items to interact with, as well as brand-new bosses and enemies to fight, they often threw in wholly unique mechanics to master as well. Alternative shops, brand-new hidden floors, curses and blessings, and even a brand-new game mode that plays completely differently from what came before have all been added to Dead Estate post-launch.
That’s right: you can now play the additional Assignment Anya campaign from the very get-go. Taking a turn into survival horror, Assignment Anya places you in the shoes of an innocent actress who faces off against the estate’s horrors prior to the events of the main game. Left without a weapon, you’re forced to navigate the winding walls of the estate in order to solve puzzles, avoid enemies, and ultimately escape before your soul is lost forever. It’s a fun distraction from the main game, taking its existing content and revitalizing it in a way that feels both unique and engaging. The same update that brought Anya to the table also introduced a series of one-off challenges to complete as well, placing you in wholly unique scenarios that’ll test your skills in a variety of ways. And yes, there are rewards for getting them.
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There’s an addictiveness here that’s really hard to break. Even if you practically steamroll a run leading up to the final boss, you’re given the option to descend all the way back down the first floor, complete with more challenges and more items to gather. This can even be done multiple times. It’s almost like getting a hot streak at a poker table—you feel this compulsion to stop, but deep down, you know in your heart that this “may” be the run to rule them all, the run that’s so broken and ridiculous that you’ll remember it forever. It won’t be since you’ll die fairly quickly soon after, but that temporary feeling is incredible.
The characters you can unlock also add some additional strategy to the mix. One is restricted to a single weapon that can’t be changed for their entire run, for instance. Another has the ability to hover around in addition to their regular jumps. One incentivizes speedruns by gradually building a combo meter with every successful kill. Another even grants you free items in exchange for gathering a large portion of cash, albeit at the cost of gradually losing money over time. Each character’s quirks really make for a unique run every time, one that can flip-flop from going great to going terrible in an instant.
Should You Buy Dead Estate?
Though this game initially debuted in 2021, it has continued to see semi-regular content patches ever since. Its latest (and final) update, the “Goodnight” update, is currently slated to release on October 28th, bringing years of post-launch support to a close. Because of this, there’s no better time to jump onto this colorful action game whenever possible, especially with how snugly it fits into the Halloween season. Dead Estate mixes the same irreverent and slightly immature stylings of its original incarnation with plenty to see, do, and unlock in a modestly priced package.
Is it something that everyone will enjoy? Well, maybe. The isometric camera will certainly need some getting used to, and it’s understandable if it’s more off-putting than enjoyable to deal with. It can occasionally be difficult to discern how to best dodge enemy attacks in a particularly chaotic environment. Still, I’ve found that you can acclimate yourself to what Dead Estate demands, opening the door to a frenetic and fun action game that’ll melt your free time away.
Dead Estate is currently available on Steam and itch.io. A playable demo can be found on the game’s Steam page, and you can even play the game’s first incarnation on Newgrounds for free as well.
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