Game review – Life Goes On: Done to Death is a killer title

Life Goes On: Done to Death

Infinite Monkeys

4 out of 5 stars

Here’s a throwback genre we can get into. Remember Lemmings? That absurd, impossibly addictive early 1990s PC game in which you had to guide a group of creatures hell-bent on death through a puzzle environment? Yeah, that rarely happened – admit it, it was always more fun finding ways to kill the little rodents than it was to save them. Life Goes On: Done to Death taps into that same morbid fascination with virtual death and runs with it.

Its story is simple – a king is searching for a “cup of life”, and sends out an endlessly regenerating knight to attain it. Your goal isn’t just to die during your infinite crusade, but to die cleverly. Modelled heavily on the aforementioned ’90s classic, your comically bouncy, armoured knight is sent through a series of puzzle-filled environments with the cup always at its zenith.

There are steampunk environments where swinging axes take a slice at your life; Amazon-like landscapes where impractical conveyer belts send you through magic-realism orbs; horrific infernos modelled after the fiery pits of a medieval hell – all levels are incredibly inventive and all puzzles can only by solved through the use of dead bodies.

So say you need a weight to hold down a button or something to shield you from a flaming floor, you kill yourself on that exact spot, your body splayed in a heaping mess, while your clone-knight tramples right over it to the goal. Simple. The trick, though, is to use as few knights and as little time as possible in completing your quest. That’s the real challenge, but it isn’t to say we didn’t have as much fun constantly sending our wayward adventurers to their doom.