Postmortem: One Must Die (Extended Cut) Reviews

Postmortem: One Must Die (Extended Cut) is an older game from 2013. It's a venerable 11 years old at the time of this review, but feels more like a game 20 years old. This is a 2D isometric "adventute" mystery game where you are a "grim reaper" sent to collect a soul, except of course you get to decide who dies at an old-timey party. There's a puddle worth of factionism and intrigue. Talk to the guests, decide who to knock off, then you get a little "post mortem" (I guess that's the purpose behind the choice of title) that explains the ramifications of your decision... and frankly it's boring and badly done. There's an overwhelming amount of mediocre Visual Novel/E-book style cutscenes in this game. The developers failed one of the most basic, fundamental requirements of game design.. "Show, don't tell." So you'll spend a huge amount of time not playing the game, but clicking through endless lines of poorly written VN text cutscenes because the developers couldn't work out how to relate their narrative through the game mechanics, and decided instead it would be better to compete with reading a book for your time. We're here to play games, not read through hours of garbage intersituals. My gaming rig is not a Kindle. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the game, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the lacklustre 2D visuals. The game features somewhat lazy, simplistic "retro" looking 2D graphics, and it's hard to say if this is due to the age of the assets used, if it's a deliberate attempt for the game to look bad/retro on purpose, or if the assets are just, well, terrible looking. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game in 2024, such poor quality 2D graphics in the 3D era just aren't good enough, whether it's a deliberate design fault on behalf of the developer or they just couldn't manage to do any better, this is a compromise gamers shouldn't have to put up with. The developers didn't design the game for gaming PCs, as such the best display resolution is set at or below 720p, a very low resolution that was introduced in 1998 and became obsolete when 1080p HD entered the mainstream in 2006. The game simply won't look right on modern gaming displays due to this failure on the part of the developers. The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 110,000+ games on Steam? Postmortem: One Must Die (Extended Cut) is relatively cheap at $3 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 14,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.