Death In Unison
A fantastic co-op horror experience for your spooky season gaming wishlist
Its October spooky time and that means I’m out here looking for spooky games to play. My girlfriend and I looked around the store meticulously for something co-op we haven’t already played.
After much searching we decided on a game called Death in Unison a two player co-op game where communication is key.
I really do mean that. You both are split up into different rooms in a prison facility and your only means of communication is through walkie-talkies.
The game takes a lot of inspiration from other titles like Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes or one of my favorites Spaceteam for mobile devices. The former being a bomb defusal game where one person has the bomb and the other person has the manual, and the latter being a spaceship game where everyone has unique spaceship controls but commands are issued randomly to each player.
The common thread in these games is priority management and a lot of screaming, but mostly screaming.
Death in Unison is the horror version of these games, but with some noteable changes that make the experience unique and interesting.
The game asks can you collaborate on frantic tasks, while also being hunted down by the prison’s many supernatural inmates a-la Five Nights at Freddy’s.
Take for example “Chains.” This asshole is deaf and nearly blind, but is hell-bent on murdering anyone his mediocre sensory system can identify. For the player this means: if you hear the sound of chains, for the love of all that is holy turn off the lights.
The issue being that only one of you has a light switch. That’s just one example, and there are plenty of other enemies the game throws at you which you manage all at once while… still trying to do your job. Try explaining over radio how to spell Aruukashki Pravitar while being chased by a murderer.
You may think that’s where the game stops, and if it were any other multiplayer slop game you might be right. Not in this game though.
In-between rounds you get messages on your computer that slowly reveal ways of hacking into the system and learning more about the dark history of the facility. Mind you this is a totally miss-able system, but I’d say a good half of my playtime was spent figuring out some of these passwords. It’s good.
Granted even with all of this info I’m pretty sure I still got the bad ending. It warrants a re-play, but to be honest I’m not sure how replayable the game is. There are a limited number of enemies and I’d say the game lasts about the perfect length.
After all this praise I’d say I only have one problem with the game. The gameplay for both players being extremely intertwined is extremely well implemented. The one place this isn’t good is when your teammate gets killed leaving you alone. Even if you’re playing in immersed mode, meaning we use the in-game walkie-talkies, its quite obvious to tell when your partner is dead.
When you partner is dead you are stranded and practically useless. I can see how the “You don’t know if they’re dead or not” mechanic could be fun and interesting, but in a game like this when your partner dies there is literally nothing to do and the game grinds to a halt.
We ended up just killing ourselves when one of us died so we could start over which ruined the tension if only a little bit.
I think Death in Unison is a fantastic game and provided you have a friend to hop in with you could do a lot worse.
If you like these articles don’t forget to subscribe for free to get then next one. If you want to support the making of these articles consider signing up for a paid subscription for early access to articles and much more!
Thanks everyone for reading and I’ll see you in the next one!