Dead End Job Review

Busting ghosts has seemed to become a more popular profession these days with the return of Ghostbusters coming in 2020, Luigi’s Mansion in 2019, and now a new take with Dead End Job from Ant Workshop Ltd. Dead End Job takes its ghostbusting skills from the latter with the ability to vacuum ghosts but adds some interesting roguelike features that continuously keep the gameplay fresh.

Dead End Job is a rogue-lite twin-stick shooter where you play Hector Plasm, an employee at a paranormal pest control office called ‘Ghoul-B-Gone’. The opening of the game explains the simple story with a catchy song, but because it’s a rogue-lite, the story doesn’t really seem to matter until the very end. In the song, you learn that your partner/mentor – Beryl Ware – has died while choking on a sandwich and her soul has become trapped in this world. It’s up to you to save her soul, but you only have 30 days to do it with each level taking up one day, completed or not.

To save her soul, you have to build a machine that opens a portal to the ghost dimension to get her to the other side. Since this is a rather expensive machine, you have to take jobs from different districts and earn the money from exterminating ghosts and saving civilians, or idiots as the game likes to call them. Since the story is rather thin, there isn’t much to grab onto so you tend to stop caring about the plot rather quickly, but the game has some decent comedic writing that definitely feels Ghostbusters inspired.

Your main weapon is a plasma blaster and the vacuum on your back that is used to suck in the ghosts; both feel great and are always fun to use within the levels. You’re essentially shooting down a ghost’s health with the plasma blaster and then sucking them in the vacuum when they are down, but your weapon can overheat when being shot/vacuuming continuously. The gameplay loop never really changes from that, but getting experience will allow you to be promoted, and in turn, will allow you to get upgrades to make you feel more powerful.

There are quite a few upgrades to choose from, but you only have three randomized options each time you get a promotion. Some upgrades make your plasma blaster and vacuum stronger while others make you stronger with more health and the ability to earn more experience per ghost. Since it’s a rogue-lite, these upgrades will be lost when you die – unless you manage to get the upgrade that lets you keep everything once – and it hurts a little more than other rogue-lites because of the way it’s set up.

When you die in a rogue-lite, most likely you’ll start from the very beginning, but with Dead End Job, you can start back exactly where you left off but it’ll be much harder because you lost your upgrades. It feels like it adds that extra slap in the face when you die because you’re able to access the levels you were just playing, but aren’t able to actually survive in them. Since the amount of money needed gets larger and the days are counting down, you might try and go back to those harder levels for the cash, but dying early might have you earning less money than in the earlier levels along with all your promotions once again.

The jobs are separated into five sections with each of the sections costing a certain amount of money to unlock, so you just have to keep doing jobs until you earn enough to move on. You can also get money from completing challenges from the help wanted section as well. Since the maps are procedurally generated it doesn’t ever really feel like you’re playing the same level over and over and the variety of enemies help with that as well. The number of enemy variations there are in Dead End Job is impressive and there is even an encyclopedia-style handbook in the game that allows you to rename them if you so please. All the designs for them are rather unique as well while also having some fun names such as a dead chicken being named ‘Poultrygeist’ or a copy of the Microsoft Office Assistant Clippy named ‘Office Assisthaunt’.

Enemies and destructible items in the levels can drop items/money. The money you can vacuum up to collect, but items you have to pick up and can only hold two at a time. You never know what an item does until you use it, but even then, sometimes you will still have no clue what it does. The items are also logged in the handbook mentioned previously, but it still doesn’t give a description of what it does which makes that section of the handbook rather useless. The items that do simple things such as give you health or freeze your weapon so it doesn’t overheat are quite useful though and help a lot with the later levels.

Visually, Dead End Job is a colourful blast from the past with an art style that the developer is calling “Ren & Stimpy-esque” and that statement is very much true. The character and enemy designs all have that 90s cartoon feel to them, even with the music and the opening song as well. The animations are fantastic for the ghost’s abilities and for the vacuum when sucking everything up. Seeing all the money, enemies and debris getting sucked into my vacuum was a satisfying experience every time because of how cool the animations looked. All this was accompanied by a solid performance throughout as well. It should be mentioned that there is a couch co-op as well if you wanted to hunt ghosts with a buddy.

Dead End Job is a great game that takes parts of Luigi’s Mansion and parts from the roguelike genre and merges them wonderfully into this very stylish and surprisingly entertaining ghost-busting game.