i really like the atmosphere and visuals here - it's classic haunted house stuff, zombies and bloodsuckers and just a whole procession of swarming ghouls, which makes it a deserving heir to such greats as grabbed by the ghoulies, zombies ate my neighbors, and gahan wilson's the ultimate haunted house. all games which i enjoyed more than this one and thus couldn't miss the opportunity to mention first (please, go play ultimate haunted house instead!!) .

the 2.5D perspective with the flat characters are cute and cool, but it makes playing the game unfortunately difficult. it's very hard to judge where enemies are in relation to the floor, whether or not a bullet is gonna hit you, shit like that, all really frustrating. i often found myself getting stuck on weird bits of like, furniture geometry, fumbling around on candlestick holders like a damn idiot in front of all these monsters. dead estate encourages you to play fast though, because you have this big rat guy that shows up if you waste too much time on a level, so you gotta be REALLY slick with your movements and stuff but you just can't! such a fast paced, shoot-y arcade-y style roguelike demands very tight controls, and this one lacks in a remarkable way. i guess its playable considering a lot of ppl seemed to like this one, so your mileage may vary IDK.

As of now, I've successfully beat the game with Jules, the sexy shotgun wielding lady in the intro that gets picked up by the trucker Jeff, before the truck breaks down and they are forced to go to the resident evil style monster mansion featuring several floors of hopping heads, zombies, and meat cubes among many other strange and disconcerting monsters. Doing so took me 6 hours across about 50 runs.

The reason I want to highlight this is that this is substantially longer of an amount of time you would expect to beat a roguelite game, with Isaac and Monolith clocking in at maybe 2 or 3. Whereas Gungeon takes significantly longer, around a dozen or so. The issue is not actually how long it takes, the gunplay is very satisfying and rooms go by at a brisk speed. The issue is actually that you are locked to only the 2 starting characters as the only 2 genuinely playable until you successfully beat the game. Which means that your choice of character is essentially gender locked. For me I played as Jules, because I liked how she looked and identify my play more comfortably with women, which is why I must unfortunately remark that the character starts with 4 health to Jeff's 8. This is not an insubstantial difference because on average the highest you can push your max health is around 3. Which means Jeff naturally starts with more health in a run than you would ever need. The effect of this, whether the designers meant this to be the case or not, is that Jeff is a significantly easier character to play due to his toughness. This is sexist, as not only does it not make a great deal of sense that a truck driver would really be like this, but that you are obstensibly punished for not playing a male character. At least in Gungeon I can make an argument for the female characters being strong, with the Hunter having a great starting weapon and a dog, and to that effect with exception of the robot, the health pools are not dramatically messed around with, and to my memory you can play as 4 different characters right from the start of the game, 2 men and 2 women. The sexism is not the only issue with this tho, it also massively constrains the early player space of play to only have 2 characters out of the 8 unlockable vastly restricting your approach to play without doing so to such an extent that all the initial play experiences would be homogenous like in Issac. This is a huge oversight! The actual sexualization of the women merchants in the game is something I'm fine with, because as a dyke I to find sexy women a great motivator for play. But making your starting cast of women way more difficult to play, I can not abide!

That aside the gunplay is as satisfying as it is in gungeon if not more. Similar to gungeon if you use a machine gun the remote rumbles out small vibrations but if you use a rocket launcher there will be a delay and then a blast vibration. This is fundamentally the same as in FPS games, but applying this to the Roguelite formula means that the guns you use are always in flux, and its such that you always feel out every vibration. The one neat factor Dead Estate has over Gungeon and other rougelite games is the velocity. Sometimes you have to jump in the air in order to shoot enemies and you can vary this to different hop intervals as you would in a platformer. This is replaced with a dodge and is very cathartic, you dont have to spend as much time guessing the invincibility frames in a jump. It's not nearly as much a bullet hell gamers test of giving close attention to exactly where your character is on the screen and as a result feeds into the speed of the combat. It's a wonderful intervention into the formula and I hope to see it more as the dodge roll becomes more played out and tiresome for combat.

Now I want to gesture to the core issue with the design, overconsistency in the early game. So, there's 2 seperate shops you encounter on a floor, the Nursing Room and the Witch room. The Witch room will give you various passive upgrades you pay for that can effect your run, and an Ambrosia that can full heal your character. The Nursing Room on the other hand gives you clear stats buffs: Strength, Movement Speed, and Health. The issue here though is that Strength becomes THE thing to hard upgrade, and the fact is these Nursing rooms appear on every other floor. Thus the heuristically best way to play the game ends up being

1. Collect as much money as you can on floor one
2. Increase damage output 2 or 3 times
3. Play until floor 3 with better damage
4. On floor 3, max out the damage buff

The reason why this is should be obvious to any person who has played these games for a long time. Eventually the easiest floor becomes the 1st floor, because youve naturally encountered almost every layout of a room and by design the game leaves its weakest enemies for floor one as not to lead with a feeling of unfathomable unfairness. But as a result it means that eventually the 1st floor becomes the easiest to clear out without a problem and eventually its just about how to get the most consistent edge, meaning shooting for consistent early game character buffs poses no genuine risk to the player. Chunks will spawn, an invincible enemy that chases around and attacks you but poses no real risk to the player. So its all about damage.

'But hold on' you might be asking, 'surely damage is not ALWAYS the best pick, sometimes speed or health would be, right?'. In a purely theoretical sense sure, but factors like health caps dont matter besides ambrosia refuel being healing for slightly more. The real problem though is that damage matters for challenge rooms in which you have to dispatch enemies within 40 seconds in order to recieve rewards. These rooms are simply just stat checking for damage and so, in order to garuntee getting 'free' items you need to max out damage the most possible.

They could easily have redesigned the game where the nursing room is less consistent or gone entirely. But they didn't do that, which means every early run becomes the same and the only reason that is fun is because I like how satisfying the pots are when I crack them open.

In isaac the only way I have a high consistency across is either by visiting a shop or by getting a devil deal. The first of which is a substantial and often inadvised opportunity cost, and the 2nd which requires perfect play of not getting hit by the boss which only really good players are going to consistently attain and which still requires an incredible amount of skill and knowledge of the systems.

Visually and in terms of being a post-newgrounds love letter to crudeness this is solid stuff and something I want to like more, but because of this, its probably something I'll only keep playing for a month and then mostly forget about.

I will say tho I appreciate they didn't pull the external character buffs progression stuff, and instead just leaves a difficulty toggle for people who want to play on easy mode. I can't stand when games let be basically pay with in game 'currency' to make the game ostensibly easier, and looking even to popular works in this genre like Hades which also do this, it would have been easy to succumb to.

I love roguelikes and this seemed like the perfect play considering it's Spooktober. Unlike a lot of other action roguelikes coming out recently, Dead Estate is more of a classic roguelike – not the type where progress carries over between runs. You would think that this would make it really difficult, but I managed to beat the game on his first run. Maybe I got lucky, or maybe I’m just a god gamer – whatever the case, it’s a really neat top-down shooter regardless.

There are a bunch of neat upgrades to find (usuals like knockback and such, but some unique ones too), a bunch of cool weapons (minigun was my personal fav), some neat boss fights, and the enemy variety is solid for a game of its length. It never felt like I was fighting the same enemies over and over - or even reskins. Granted, a single run takes around an hour to clear on normal difficulty, you unlock more once you complete your first run.

That and there is more replayability in the different characters and such. I may have cleared the game in my first run, but that only got me 10 out of the 84 total achievements, so there’s definitely some more stuff to find. At its pricepoint, I would recommend it to other roguelike fans, maybe if you can catch it on sale.

Leaving aside the frankly embarrassing, sexist character design that mars a consistent and readable aesthetic, its sore flowing on the game's otherwise 'neat' face, Dead Estate suffers from parity with reference to its inspirations iconographically but not in its lineal procedural coherency; while we may see the presence of Sweet Home or Gungeon, we are not able to walk those halls and shoot at its inhabitants. Dead Estate is trying to affect itself with the liminal associations of being in the haunted/infested/infernal of its posthoc adopted game parents, but the replayability built into the interactions with the space make it neither so ingratiating nor horrific nor memorable as its influences did with their spaces, and consequently, not so triumphantly returned to with mastery and banishment of anxiety.

There are a few mechanical limitations that may initially seem like problem solvers for calmly limiting chaos in the play space which hinder the toy boxes hinges: the isometric perspective which plays with three dimensions tricks the brain into drawing vectors which plot the cubes of each room with a horizon but because the sprites are 2D and are not affected by distance, any off the ground aiming is pure chance; the economy of smashing and grabbing under clock is trying to force the tension of maximizing prosperity like in Spelunky but with the entire economy structured around the wholesale of an Isaac type item system, it falls apart because there is so little actual player expression or ebb and flow of good and bad acquisitions from the shop in comparison, and the economy is prohibitive to truly wacky builds or exploits (essentially, it follows a flat curve - something the best roguelikes almost never do); its character selection seemingly offers many ways to traverse in and engage with the house, but in practice more blatantly shows that any engagement with the playspace is, at its baseline, so simplified to allow for progression (which in my 10 hours with the game, never got much beyond what you'd experience on the Basement of your first Isaac run - or in horror game terms, what you experience in the pre-game cinematics of Silent Hill) that all characters will play the same until you force them to play differently by meagrely changing item preferences.

Dead Estate doesn't necessarily play badly, it just plays it safe and relatively boring. It enjoys the iconography of its influence but not their pathos, and definitely not their systemic complexity. And also, you know what? I don't really want to leave aside the embarrassing and sexist character design - its childish and uncreative, and works perfectly for a game which effaces only that it can show itself off competently as something vaguely familiar but obviously worse.

After completing the game on numerous runs, I can say that I have unfortunately warmed up to this game and like it a bit more now. Original review below.

Enter the Gungeon, but for people who are fans of
-Big boobs
-Crammed rooms
-Big boobs
-Newgrounds

da game started off a bit underwhelming and was just fun but it got so much better and so much more fun da more i played idk how agshdkjbrgure, i love da simplicity and da mansion of horror kinda deal here and i love da charm dis game has

my only big gripe is da fact da game is in an isometric perspective and you can jump and idk if it's just because i'm bad with depth perception but it makes it really hard to tell where some projectiles are and if i try to hit flying enemies oog

also i would die for cordelia agsdhjghewfje <3