Dead Estate is a game that started at Newgrounds and made it to the big leagues, which explains why it plays like every single indie game released in the last ten years and looks like absolutely none of them. The core of the game is nothing new. Room based action roguelite top down shooter. Same stuff we've seen since Smash TV. What Dead Estate does different is the isometric view that makes dodging a bit harder, and jumping that makes dodging a bit easier. Each room is also fairly claustrophobic ensuring that melee enemies can still keep pressure on you. Everyone has an infinite ammo default gun (Some folks have melee weapons which are for all intents and purposes shorter range guns), and can find a limited ammo alternate gun, which you'll use for the boss and maybe two rooms and nothing else because it's limited. You can find and buy the usual assortment of items to buff your skills but the power creep is kept under control here. You aren't going to see the RoR style item combos that play the game for you and, mostly, you won't find BoI style combos that multiply damage to infinity. You can also upgrade your stats at some shops, which provides a perfect, always available RNG mitigating mechanism: You can almost always see the end credits just buffing your base damage and health with your cash if the game won't give you a killer item.
Runs are about 30-40 minutes, stretched to 50-60 minutes if you go for the true end route which adds extra levels to the campaign. It is INCREDIBLY refreshing to see a roguelite that understand that there is no point in these games being longer than Metal Slug, and the pacing stays fairly tight throughout. It's an incredibly easy game to pick up and replay. With about 9 characters to pick from with different gimmicks for their runs, as well as a few challenge run conditions worth a cheevo or two, and four difficulty settings, you have a decent level of variety. I will say the game skews a bit on the easy side, once you get past the initial learning curve you will win more often than you lose. As an added plus, there is no meta progression nonsense; you don't raise your stats between runs or unlock anything but other characters and costumes.
The downsides are not really unique to Dead Estate but rather symptomatic of most games in the genre: You spend so much dumb time shooting pots for random loot. They drop cash and hearts JUST often enough to mean need to blast them constantly through the game if you are aiming for higher level play. Speaking of blasting pointless HP soaks, you are also chased by a Nemesis style boss monster if you take too long in stages. The problem is he is fat, slow, and almost zero threat to you, BUT he drops so much money if you shoot him enough to make him leave you alone that it's just completely optimal to fight him every time he shows. Problem is he has no move other than walk slowly toward you and has an absurd amount of health, so a good chunk of the game's short playtime can easily be inflated by having to shoot at this lumbering boring fat thing for so long. Plus there are a couple bosses that are a little too heavily scripted, like stare at them for a while until they finally let you shoot them tier scripted, which is fairly irritating for a quick replay roguelite.
Getting past that, Dead Estate oozes heart and charm, and that's really why I love it even when the game itself is fairly derivative. You can see the tiddy witch but it's not just that the game HAS a tiddy witch, it's that the art style allows for a tiddy witch. Every character looks REALLY cool. Trucker with a great beard, punk girl with a shotgun, cop with a fearsome gun and an even more fearsome mustache... This is what Newgrounds used to be able to give us. Art brimming with love and vitality and just coolness. You don't see this in indie games any more, and especially in this genre where the competition is blood-soaked fetuses crying on bugs and poo or generic indie game pixel doodles or bizarre ugly geometric shapes. The art in this game is just wonderful and I really enjoyed the game for it. Combine that with a really groovy soundtrack and a story where the absolute most text the game puts out details how much a father loves his wife and daughter and you have something just oozing with heart.
Dead Estate isn't the best roguelite out there, but I enjoy it all the same as it is nice to see what the internet used to be able to give us from sites like Newgrounds. It's a solid product and definitely worth picking up if you crave another roguelite shooter.
