Audio By Carbonatix
It’s no secret the majority of games are about killing things. Soul Tax, a game created by Jarod Long, Lauren Careccia, Devin Presbury and Brad Snyder for the Something Awful Game Dev VI competition is no different, but instead of tasking you with grabbing a gun and unloading into an unsuspecting enemy, you play as a ghost who possesses people and makes them kill their fellow co-workers — all because you need to pay off a debt. After all, the theme this year was “death and taxes.”
The whole thing is rather unsettling for a variety of reasons. First off, the whole office-workers-being-possessed-by-a-ghost-and-killing-each-other thing is frightfully entertaining, and you’ll often find yourself wondering why you’re doing what you’re doing — and worse, why you’re enjoying it. These aren’t faceless entities, either: The beginning of each level kicks off with some usually amusing dialogue that allows you to get to know the characters a bit better, some of which you’ll want to kill more than others. But you have to kill them all.
To do so, you enter the body of one of the workers and attack the others, or commit suicide by jumping out a window. Each worker has a special move that helps diversify the gameplay throughout the 30 levels, including a drill move, a scream, guns and more.
The controls take a bit to get used to, with your ghost handled by WASD and its attacks with JKL. The space bar lets you possess and unpossess the people.
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Give it a go for yourself; we promise you’ll feel a little dirty. If you’ve got an especially large amount of time to kill, we’d suggest hitting up the main entry page at Something Awful and playing through the rest of the entries.
