Deaths

By: Derek Yu

On: July 15th, 2008

Deaths - Jesse Venbrux

Deaths is a simple platformer where the last 50 deaths from all of its players are loaded into the game. Your own corpses, and the corpses of people you will never meet, are strewn about its six short levels and can be stepped on and used as platforms. The game, which is labeled as “demo,” is a successful proof of concept, and here’s hoping that its creator, Jesse “2dcube” Venbrux, decides to expand on it.

Jesse, who’s also responsible for Execution and the Karoshi series of games, obviously has a fixation on death (in video games). Well, I should mention Frozzd and Mubbly Tower, too, lest you think that’s is all he thinks about. But in any case, I’m really glad people are spending time exploring the concept and our perceptions of it. Morbidity FTW!

(Source: Tim, via the Indiegames.com blog)

TIGdb: Entry for Deaths

Posted in Freeware, Platformers, Windows | Tags: JesseVenbrux

http://www.eurogamer.de Robert

I find this a really cool idea. The first levels in the game instantly remind me of adventure movies taking place in holy sepultures with lots of deadly traps, each signalled by a new crowd of dusty skeletons lying in front of it.
Zeno

The next logical extension of this is to have you actually play with the last 50 people to do so with “recordings” of their play.

Like a semi-multiplayer Chronotron.
so

is there a way to download this? i don’t want to install yet another browser game plugin just to try one game.
so

never mind, i’m stupid. found the link. they sure hide it well though.
Quetz

I love this idea so much! I lol’d so hard when I went through the first level without seeing a single body, then I enter the second level to see a huge pile right under the falling spike, and was like “lol, something’s gonna kill me here, isn’t it” and I ended up dying with everyone else.

The music sounds totally like a remix of a song I’ve heard by Hammock. Can’t think of which song though.
http://chaoseed.com/garden JohnEvans

Damn, this is genius! It’s like I Wanna Be the Guy but with focus group testing. It’s the fun of a MMORPG with none of the lag.

What would be really awesome is if you could customize your avatar…give different shirts or hats and stuff. So you could really see that the bodies were from people all over the world.
http://www.cymonsgames.com Guesst

It’s clever. I like how the dead bodies give you an idea of what to look out for. But in the end it was too short.
Phasma Felis

Did levels 5 and 6 seem awfully empty to anyone else? There were no corpses there when I arrived–notable since they both require a ramp to get past obstacles…
http://www.venbrux.com Jesse

Phasma Felis, it can change quickly actually. Because it’s only 50 deaths a few playthroughs can change the landscape of bodies.

I think it should load the last so-many deaths per level, not for the whole game, that should make it better.

I’m suprised to see the game on this site actually. But it is a neat idea, and maybe I will do more with it later.
curezen

always fun, but god damn those three guns in level four kept me from beating it. took me half an hour to get past it.
Quetz

If you die a lot early on (or someone else does), then there will be fewer bodies later on due to the 50 body max. A likely reason that the game is so short is because of this max, and if the max is increased that would probably just create a bigger server load. The obvious solution would be to set the body max to be on a per-room basis, but I guess he’s not working on it anymore.
falsion

An interesting thing about the game is that the dead bodies act like things you can stand on. In level 6, I purposely kept killing myself to make a “staircase” of bodies which I used to beat the level.
Petri Purho

*SPOILERS*

I just played through Pazzon (the other new Jesse Venbrux game) I got to say that the kid has an unhealthy fixation with death :) I’ve become a total fanboy of guy! I love his stuff.