Deaths of Peck makes dying the move that lets you keep climbing
3 min read
Most platformers punish death. This one requires it: each way Peck dies is a new body, and staying whole is how you get stuck.
Death as a loadout
The pitch is one action: you die on purpose, and the way you die is the power you get. A knife splits Peck and he can double-jump. A hammer flattens him into something that sticks to nails. Fire lets him burn what is in the way. Healing puts him back together, which means you lose the trick that was getting you up the tower.
Platformers usually treat death as the thing that interrupts play. You miss a jump, the screen fades, you try the same jump again. Deaths of Peck inverts that so thoroughly that staying alive is the fail state. The mushrooms that heal you on contact are not pickups. They are the thing that strips the power you were using.
That only holds if each death is a specific verb, not a generic "you are stronger now" buff. A knife death and a hammer death have to play differently or the whole joke collapses into a combo meter with viscera on it. The body has to be the puzzle, not the flavour text around one.
Failure that changes the character
We spent a piece on redesigning death — on how a black screen and a rewind is only one option, and how dying can reshape the character or the run that follows. Peck takes the most literal version of that. The death is not a story beat. It is a transformation you have to choose, and then undo, and then choose again.
That is a different answer from the one in are lives outdated game design. Lives survive as a tax on patience. Peck spends the life on a new body instead, which means the cost of a bad death is being the wrong shape for the next ledge.
It also asks the player to keep going through the mess they made, which is the subject of playing past your mistakes. You are not rewinding the mistake. You are climbing with it.
What you actually get
Deaths of Peck is by THE LINE Studio, self-published, listed as Coming soon on Windows. Action, Adventure and Indie, single-player, with full controller support. English.
The store is blunt about the loop: die, heal, die again, and do not fall. Peck is immortal, but he can still miss the platform. The interesting constraint is that healing is always available and usually the wrong move, so the player has to want the injury more than they want to be whole.
If the appeal is a game that puts the cost of dying somewhere other than a continue screen, Echo Zero is the other one on this list — there the clone dying is cheap and the swarm gets closer. Peck keeps you in the same body. He just will not let it stay whole.
