Push Button B

Karoshi Suicide Salaryman is a great game from 2008 that changes everything you know about platform puzzle games.  Your mission is to guide a funny little “salaryman”  through 50 hair pulling, monitor punching stages. Unlike most games, instead of guiding your man through each level to arrive safely at the other side, in Karoshi your one and only mission is to kill yourself.  Whether it be jumping into a pit of spikes or dropping a safe on your head this game will keep you guessing for different ways to end it all.  Sounds easy right? WRONG!

I applaud Venbrux (the author) for making a game with a bit of twisted character and constantly changing rules along with a good sense of humor. Karoshi has false endings, invisible walls and loads of other things that will keep you guessing, and that’s only in the first few levels. The controls are pretty basic, arrow keys to move and jump, spacebar to shoot your gun when you have one and “R” to restart the level.  Get use to hitting the “r” button, it will be your friend.

But with all that said, the game really doesn’t take too long to beat. You have a number of lives at the bottom that you are trying to get down to zero and at 50 stages it sounds like a lot, but the levels are kind of small and although they can be tricky at times they usually don’t take too long to figure out. Its rare a game like this catches my attention so well that i actually play all the way through it. It left me wanting more… if only there was another game like it that was just as much fun and has similar characters and had the same game play…

Super  Karoshi is basically the same as the first game, with a few things changed.  Now you have even more levels (60)  and a few new game play mechanics.  On the majority of the levels you now have to worry about other salarymen that need to be dead too. You can collect powerups that turn you into something that looks like Goku in a Superman Suit  and use it to fly around the level and turns you invincible and some well placed kryptonite looking stuff to make you mortal again so you can do the deed.  Super Karohsi takes the humor and trickery to an all new level with even more ways to make you invent new bad words.

You can play it over at Armor Games or at the authors website Here where you can also play 3 other games that are download only from the series.