Rage in Peace Review – Death, Death Everywhere!

NOTE: Rage in Peace features gore. Both the game and this article are intended for mature audiences only.

Introduction

Rage in Peace is a brutal platformer game by Toge Productions in which you play as Timmy Malinu, an “extraordinarily ordinary” human on his last day to live. Help Timmy to fulfill his dream of dying on his bed and in his pajamas, with the help of his assigned Grim Reaper! The game belongs to the platformer subgenre of everything trying to kill you, from mundane objects to ridiculous entities working hard at your early demise.

Gameplay

In Rage in Peace, you run and jump while avoiding both obvious enemies and hidden traps. Due to how ubiquitous these traps are, you will die. A lot. And the deeper you get into the game, the harder it is to avoid deaths. To make it more difficult, you can’t just double jump over most dangers as the game is a big fan of punishing you for going up too high, making Rage in Peace a challenge of doing the right movements at the right time.

Essentially, trial and error in addition to memorizing potential deaths are both required to go anywhere in the game. How much you enjoy Rage in Peace depends on your patience and the pace at which you get the hang of moving past problems, or sometimes even dancing around them. At times I found the game to be fun and admired its creativity in killing you, and other times the experience was exhausting and repetitive. The game does help you out with checkpoints, so you never have to play a whole level in one run.

The deaths themselves are absurd. While boring deaths like office lights falling on Timmy’s head are to be expected, you will die to pharaonic utensils, spiked camels, arrow signs, moving tree trunks, and even men rowing on office chairs- nothing is out of the question! From time to time, you will be greeted with bosses, though they are also learnable through trial-and-error, just like the regular levels.

Visuals, Audio and Other

Rage in Peace somehow manages to successfully juxtapose its almost comedic deaths and the depressing story through its use of colorful and highly stylized cartoon art direction, combined with the usually somber and calm music. Also, the visuals and audio compliment the atmosphere of the levels, so they never feel out of place during gameplay. While Timmy’s deaths always result in his head being cut off and blood splashing, it never felt too real and more in line with the game’s themes.

The story discusses death and its inevitability, Timmy’s life, the thousands of attempts to end his life, and the afterlife. On his way, Timmy meets a lot of eccentric characters that share their experience of life and death, making the story somewhat philosophical even if they are not the cheeriest thing in the world. However, these discussions usually happen in the middle of the levels and are accompanied by the characters going “…” multiple times in a row, which honestly felt unnecessary and interrupted both the dialogue and the game.

Rage in Peace includes a fair amount of achievements and a speedrunner mode, making it an ideal game for deathless runs and other challenges. That said, the game’s demo for PC is available on itch.io and Game Jolt, but disappointingly the full version is not sold on either storefront, making Steam the only choice even when the aforementioned stores were viable.

In Conclusion

If you are a fan of memory-based platformers or love thought-provoking stories on topics such as death, then Rage in Peace is a must buy. Even if surprise deaths are not your cup of tea, the challenges this game poses are worth a shot. And if you’re on the fence, you can try the demos or buy Rage in Peace as part of the LudoNarraCon sale from Steam at 60% off, up until May 2.

Interested in other games by Toge Productions? Read what we think of Coffee Talk and our Mojiken Studios – Double Game Review!
You can also read about Cuphead or Castlevania, two brutal platformers!

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