I've really enjoyed my first few hours with Have a Nice Death. The 2D platformer roguelike has launched in Steam Early Access, and its morbidly charming adventure is already proving to be an entertaining challenge.

Have a Nice Death sees you play as the titular Death. He's burned out and in serious need of a vacation but can't manage to get away with all the paperwork that needs doing. He eventually snaps, infuriated at his subordinates' refusal to give a damn about him, and all the extra work their lackadaisical nature is causing. Deciding that he's long overdue for some respect, Death embarks on a rampage through the different departments of Death, Inc. to remind his lackies who's really in charge.

Narratively, I don't think this setup is anything to truly write home about. Have a Nice Death doesn't seem to achieve any narrative depth beyond the simple messages that "crunch is bad" and "burnout isn't healthy." Important stuff, but the game's early hours are more concerned with inviting you into its charming world. Despite the dark nature of the narrative, Have a Nice Death posits that this situation is more a case of "business as usual," and that these characters are simply your run-of-the-mill office workers trying their best to just get through the day.

On paper, I shouldn't be a big fan of Have a Nice Death. I don't really like roguelikes, despite dropping an ungodly number of hours into Hades. The evolving narrative and incredible characters are what convinced me to stubbornly work through the challenging gameplay loop of Supergiant's game, and though Have a Nice Death implements similar storytelling devices, they don't quite reach the same highs. Instead, Have a Nice Death appeals to me by making the loop of a roguelike more approachable.

Like most roguelikes, the overall objective of Have a Nice Death is to complete a perfect run--completing every available level within a single session. Failing to do so sees you having to start over without all of the fancy weapons and items you managed to find in your last run, though there are permanent abilities connected to three skill trees that you can unlock to make subsequent runs a bit easier.

Beyond that skill tree, Have a Nice Death also features ways of permanently improving Death's arsenal and survivability with new weapons and health items. You buy these upgrades with ingots, which can be found during runs and earned by killing enemies.

Early on, the prices for unlocking these new weapons and health items are pretty steep. Unlocking the Shake Spear costs a whopping 105 ingots to start, for example (you're typically only earning 10 or so a run if you're stuck on the first area of the game). But Have a Nice Death incorporates a challenge system into its upgrades. Kill any 15 enemies over the course of the game (a very easy goal) and the price of that weapon drops by 25 percent. Kill 15 more enemies and it drops even further. By the time you've killed 50 enemies, the price is discounted to one ingot. So even if you're not completing Have a Nice Death on your first, second, or third run, the act of simply killing enemies during those early attempts is increasing the likelihood you can afford this permanent upgrade.

All of the upgrades are similarly tied to challenges that allow you to earn discounts and speed up the process of acquiring stronger weapons and healing items. Some task you with getting kills with a specific weapon, while others ask you to find a way to deal a huge amount of damage with a weaker weapon or reach an area or overcome a boss a number of times.

Because of this, I'm actually spending the first dozen or so runs of Have a Nice Death striving to accomplish smaller goals--one far more achievable than "beat every mandatory boss and level in a single run." I'll get to that challenge eventually, but for now, I'm content with simply growing stronger and seeing how my efforts are contributing to me doing a little bit better on those early levels.

And granted, plenty of roguelikes divide their seemingly insurmountable goal of beating them into more manageable tasks--Dead Cells features metroidvania elements that allow you to chase after small upgrades that make it easier to surpass chunks of the game, and Hades has episodic stories tied to each of its main characters that you can pursue while trying to escape the underworld. But Have a Nice Death is novel in how it allows you to see what you're striving for. From the shop menu, you can see what weapons and health items you're working towards before even trying to go for them, allowing you to determine whether they're worth the pursuit. It respects my time.

And so now, after only a few hours, I'm getting the hang of enemy and boss attack patterns and am discovering new strategies by following the directions of the challenges as opposed to just experimenting on my own. I can't quite get through all of the early areas without taking a single hit, but I've come close a few times now just by being encouraged to try out a bunch of different playstyles and discovering what works for me.

All that said, my efforts aren't making Have a Nice Death easy. While they've certainly made the daunting task of beating it seem more plausible, this is still quite a difficult game. When talking to GameSpot, lead game designer Simon Dutertre compares the process of playing Have a Nice Death to climbing a mountain. In my experience, that seems like an apt comparison--Have a Nice Death incorporates several punishing systems that take a while to get the hang of. For instance, taking damage not only lowers your health, it can lower your maximum HP as well, preventing you from being able to heal completely if you're not careful. This seems to be a game that wants you to play near perfectly through the first half in order to have a fighting chance at overcoming the second. Normally that's too tall an order for me, but the challenge-based upgrade system is making the task seem feasible enough that I'm willing to try.

Friday 'Nite is a weekly Fortnite column that takes a closer look at current events in the wide world of Fortnite, with a special emphasis on the game's plot, characters, and lore.

I have a running joke with some of my Destiny-obsessed coworkers that Fortnite's storytelling merits are on the same level as Bungie's years-long, labyrinthine plot. In reality, they know--and I know--that Epic still has plenty of ground to make up in this regard. Bungie has built an industry leader in terms of merging live-service content and story, and as a Fortnite fan, the hope is one day its own web of intrigue can be given the same care and attention. I love the universe in which Fortnite is set, with its sci-fi themes and carousel of characters. I think Fortnite can stand tall beside Destiny one day as a vehicle for live-service storytelling. But for that to happen, Epic needs to find some consistency in how many proverbial bread crumbs each season leaves behind.

I've been playing Fortnite since Chapter 1, Season 3, but I only got into it in a more meaningful way in Chapter 2, Season 2. Since then, one of the driving factors in my fandom has been the story. The Fortnite omniverse is a fragile one, with villains routinely on the move to swallow the island, control the Zero Point, or achieve some other end goal of tomfoolery.

For over a year, I felt like I was playing catch-up with the story. I needed to read about The Visitor, The Paradigm, and other early members of The Seven before I could understand why The Foundation is so important. Before I could form an opinion on Doctor Slone, I needed to better understand entities like the Imagined Order, Ghost, and Shadow, as well as characters like Midas, Jules, and even Peely, the game's beloved anthropomorphic banana.

It took a lot of nerdy deep dives into wikis, YouTube videos, and Twitter threads, but I'm now at a point where I feel I can explain the plot to others and be a reliable resource--even if I don't always agree with the consensus about what's coming next. Being at the finish line, for now anyway, has also revealed something to me that has nothing to do with the characters or story themselves, but rather a meta issue with the game's storytelling ambitions: They're inconsistent.

Some seasons, such as Chapter 2, Seasons 3, 6, 7, and 8, were loaded with story, while others, like Chapter 2, Seasons 1, 5, and the outgoing Chapter 3, Season 1, were sparse in their lore offerings. I think for Fortnite to take the next level as a live-service game with a meaningful story, Epic needs to find a consistent storytelling "voice."

In my experience, the best season Epic put on with regard to story came in the alien invasion-themed Season 7 of the previous chapter. Each week, players would be given Slone's orders to study the aliens, undermine their invasion, and learn more about what it might take to defeat them. This culminated in the awesome finale event, Operation: Sky Fire, which included betrayal, twists, and character reprisals dating back to Chapter 1. In short, it had stakes. It delivered on its intentions because players were directly involved in the story all season long.

When challenges tie into the story like they did in that season, the plot stays front-and-center every single week. On the flipside, challenges like we've seen this season have tended to have nothing to do with the plot. Hiding in dumpsters? Ziplining around The Daily Bugle? These aren't plot points. They're boxes to check. I love completing my Fortnite challenges every single day, week, and season, but my investment as a player increases exponentially when it feels like I'm tied directly to the ridiculous story myself.

This season's story is just a few sentences long: The IO was stranded beneath the island when it flipped, then they drilled their way back to the surface. Meanwhile, The Scientist has been trying to get the previously ousted Paradigm to help The Seven in their defense of the island. We got a few cool beats featuring Joel McHale's Scientist leaving messages for Paradigm, but these developments came few and far between compared to the game's better story-driven seasons.

While the IO tunneled back to an attacking position and sent literal shockwaves across the island, Epic never really bothered to tell that story. It's there to see should you come upon it, but we lost several landmarks due to faultlines opening--cafes and other buildings disappeared into sinkholes, and players were never led there in the plot. Instead, they were expected to just wonder what happened as they web-swung past these holes in the ground.

This is all leading into what is rumored to be an all-out war between the IO and The Seven in Fortnite Season 2, and maybe that means next season will be another story-heavy season, but it's impossible to know until we get there. After all, who could've predicted that the start of a new chapter would be so light on plot? Fortnite's more than four-year reign atop the gaming world is an enviable position for other studios, and while not faultless, Epic is doing things right much of the time. Gameplay changes, frequent crossovers, and an expanding game mode buffet continue to make the game an ever-evolving success the likes of which we've hardly seen before. But from a plot perspective, Fortnite is still wading in the pools of the ordinary.

There's a huge universe to explore, full of funny characters, epic boss battles, and twists no one sees coming. I only wish fans could rest assured that they'd see that plot develop all throughout the year, and not just every few months or so.

Let's say your company decided to invest in a website redesign to improve lead generation, and you're responsible for managing the project.

The dust has settled after Elden Ring's release and now there's a moment to check out the last-gen versions - the state of PS4, Xbox One, Pro and One X, and fundamentally, to see if any of these consoles can deliver a decent experience. With current-gen console stocks thin on the ground, do you really need to upgrade? Bearing in mind the discourse surrounding Elden Ring performance, the prospects may not seem great but as it happens, of the four last-gen renditions available, PS4 Pro and Xbox One X aren't bad, the base PS4 is acceptable - and it's only Xbox One S that must be avoided.

That isn't hyperbole: Elden Ring on the base Microsoft machine is a profoundly unsatisfying experience - the version with the heaviest compromises in both playability and visuals. We saw it during the network beta of course, so maybe we shouldn't be too surprised. Again, developer From Software uses several tricks to try squeeze base Xbox into a playable state, at a reduced 900p resolution and 30fps frame-rate. Just emerging to Limgrave, a low setting is used for environmental shadows. Grass density also uses the engine's very lowest setting (seemingly lower than low on PC) and ultimately it makes Limgrave look barren, lacking any depth. Worse still, visual features such as ambient occlusion and shadows are significantly dialled back on the base console - leaving scenes with a low-cast sun with an unusually sparse appearance.

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