Trainee Death Simulator Harvest Souls, Pay Your Debt

Every event puts two options in front of you, and each one nudges four attributes: Faith, Energy, Strength and Evil. Let any of them hit the top or the bottom and your run ends, which for a Death mostly means waking up in the Death Tower and starting over. The catch: Evil rises when you do something cruel and falls when you are kind, the opposite of what your gut expects, and it takes a few runs to stop picking the wrong option on purpose. You can slack off in bed since the debt is endless anyway, or follow your senior to earn extra Souls. Since dying costs you little, the game invites you to pick the option you actually want and see what happens.

Half the game's pull is its look: hand-drawn, cartoonish art with a white-haired, red-eyed little Death standing beside you through every event. Complete objectives in random events and you earn outfits, from reaper robes to an ordinary school uniform, and mix them freely piece by piece. The dress-up is the part people keep coming back to, and it is a highlight. It sits oddly and charmingly against the setting: a gothic tower, a vanished Lord of Night, gods bestowing Oracles that may just as easily ruin you as revive you, and a trainee in a cute new hat deciding whether to be evil today.