YMMV / Dead Estate

• Anti-Climax Boss: For a True Final Boss, Diavola is revoltingly easy to beat. All of her attacks are slow and heavily telegraphed, and since all attacks in the game only do one damage the player likely has enough health to brute-force their way through the fight even if they get hit. Her second phase is no better, and she can often be killed as soon as she exposes her weak point due to how little health she has. Consequently, on higher difficulties beating her can feel less like a culmination of the entire game and more like a victory lap after having to deal with Chunks every floor and braving the EXIT realm.
• Awesome Music:
  • The main theme of the game, "Dead Estate", is a delightfully simple but iconic Leitmotif you'll hear in various places throughout the game. The best one is likely the main menu theme, as it changes and becomes more complex and triumphant the more of the game you complete, starting out as a tinkly handful of piano notes before evolving into an epic Triumphant Reprise after getting 100% Completion.
  • "Sex Sells", Cordelia's theme, is another great Leitmotif concerning all things Cordelia-related in addition to being great easy-listening muzak.
  • "Here we go (again)" is a song you'll likely be hearing a lot due to it being the theme of the Ground Floor, but with such a catchy melody it's difficult to take issue with such a thing.
  • "Den of Demons", the Arena theme music, is an appropriately anxiety-inducing piece with a cool melody that signals the player that beating it will not by any means be easy.
  • "One Way 3X1T" is a chaotic and hectic track which perfectly accompanies the chaotic danger of the Exit Realm and the myriad battles you'll have to fight your way through there.
  • "Diavola's Cage" and "Diavola's Rage, the themes of Diavola's first and second phases respectively, are pulse-pounding climactic showdown tracks which sell the danger that Diavola poses. The intro to "Diavola's Rage" is particularly awesome since it syncs up with the reveal of Diavola's One-Winged Angel form.
  • "A Grand Escape" is a short but triumphant little song which excellently exemplifies the Everybody Lives feeling of Dead Estate's True Ending.
  • "Safe and Sound" is a quiet and tender but Triumphant Reprise of "Dead Estate" which accompanies the True Ending's credits and perfectly solidifies your accomplishment of getting the True Ending and getting to see the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: Even if someone hasn't played it, the thing almost everyone knows about Dead Estate is its roster of attractive leading ladies, primarily Cordelia, who features prominently in the game's advertising and in fanart.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Very rarely while exploring a level, the player may see a giant hyper-compressed photo of one of the developers' dog float across the screen. It doesn't do any damage or anything, it's just a very strange and random Easter Egg.
• Catharsis Factor: Getting to the Dead Estate level and blowing Chunks to smithereens with a rocket launcher or transforming him back into a normal rodent in the True Ending route if he's been giving you a lot of trouble, especially on harder difficulties like X Must Die. Since Chunks is likely to show up if the player takes their time whatsoever on a level and certain characters are very weak to start with and aren't well equipped to deal with him, it feels very satisfying to finally put him down.
• Fanfic Fuel: A very common point of speculation is just how exactly Jules wound up hitchhiking in the rainy woods in the middle of the night, with many different explanations being concocted.
• Fan Nickname:
  • The grotesque female monsters living in the attic are referred to as "Karens" by many fans of the game.
  • The rat-infested zombies in the tomb are sometimes called Doobus Goobus due to their bulbous heads.
• Friendly Fandoms: With Mega City Force, since the developers of both games regularly shout each others' games out and both games can be bought in a bundle on Steam.
• Game-Breaker:
  • All of the Toilet items that can be purchased in the Bathroom with Toilet Paper. Effects include making you so fast that no enemy can touch you while also giving you triple jump, permanently despawning Chunks, getting double money from enemies and pots, or giving you a MASSIVE fire rate and damage boost. Of course, picking up toilet paper reduces your max HP to 2, so it'll be a challenge to reach a Bathroom elevator without dying...unless you have Wet Wipes, which negate the negative effects of Toilet Paper, meaning you could potentially purchase 3 game-breaking items at once while incurring no additional danger to yourself.
  • If you have enough chance-based items, then Liquid Luck can easily become this as it greatly increases the chance for the items to activate, which can lead to you clearing out bosses in mere moments.
  • Super Glue allows you to make your second weapon your primary weapon. That's right, you could potentially make a chainsaw, automatic rocket-launcher, rad sex gun, Golden Gun, Sniper Rifle, bouncing rifle or minigun your undroppable primary weapon with unlimited ammo. It's as broken as it sounds.
  • Victory Remains and Christmas Gift. The Former gives you a free item each time you defeat a boss (including those in the arena) while Christmas Gift gives you a free item at the start of each level. Getting either of these early ensures that you might end up with over twice as many items as a standard run would normally provide.
  • The Duplicator gives you three of the next item you pick up. With luck, the next item you find is a fire rate or damage up, and you'll basically have already won the game.
  • Glory Box. What's better than finding a treasure room? An item that gives you TWO chests per treasure room! Sure, it costs 500$, but it is worth the price.
  Cordelia: You'd have to be a dummy not to buy this one!
  • In Assignment Anya, the Haunted Bone basically allows you to ignore the game's stealth mechanic entirely, especially when paired with the Fluffy Socks, as nothing can aggro you fast enough to touch you. This can massively help in keeping your Time stat down if you're going for an S rank.
• Goddamned Boss: The Golden Mask, the boss of the Forsaken Crypt. It's designed with an Attack Its Weak Point mechanic that only opens for a very short period of time, pretty much guaranteeing the player will have to shoot it around 3 times. The problem arises in that it only opens this weak point after its very long, easily-dodged three-attack cycle that poses no real challenge even on the hardest difficulties, meaning most of the boss fight is lazily dodging about. Tellingly, the Milkbar Lads gave its attacks gradually increasing speed in the Assignment Anya update to combat this issue as well as making its weak point exposed for longer.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The Old Set is very likely to be the freakiest level in the game, one you have to play through each time if you want the true ending for the game. First, you get a serious dose of Nothing Is Scarier as you encounter no enemies for the longest time. But then you pick up the boss key, leading to the game suddenly crashing and putting up an error sign. Thankfully, the game restarts very shortly after, but not in the way you would have hoped. Because now, everything is in a hardly visible black-and-white color, objects keeps on glitching and enemies are spawning at random, including untargetable enemies. Oh, and the cherry on top? You are now being chased by an even more powerful version of Chunks until you reach the boss. Have fun.
  • The Portrait Demon. Not only does it contain one hell of a creepy face based on a regular Screamer Prank, but it will slowly follow you through the entire level and is simply unkillable. Once it hits you, it will drag you down to 1 HP and make you easy pickings for any foe. And making matters worse, it can return at any given time on the same level and on higher difficulties, you might run into two of them at once! And that's not even going into the Animation Bump it possesses compared to all the other characters in the game. They are quoted as being one of the main reasons why some fans refuse to do looped runs, just to avoid having to encounter it.
• Nightmare Retardant: Before the Axe to Grind update, Chunks was a lot less scary when he showed up after players realized that they could just run to an empty room and play ring-around-the-rosy while blasting him with everything they had, and he'd get knocked out for that entire floor, allowing them to explore at their leisure. It was for this reason that Chunks was later given two new attacks to ensure that you have to stay on your toes and always keep a safe distance from him, meaning that he can once again potentially be scary if the player is low on health.
• One-Scene Wonder: The Cordelia Mimic in Assignment Anya only really shows its face for one big chase scene to the nearest safe room, but because it's such a legitimate "WTF" moment and will likely scare the bejeezus out of the player on their first playthrough, it's an extremely memorable and frantic chase.
• Paranoia Fuel: When entering the key room upon doing a looped run, you will sometimes hear the same creepy chime that is played when the Portrait Demon arrives, making you wonder if he has appeared early or if the game is just messing with you.
• Player Punch: Cordelia's normal ending: She gets to find out that by defeating Chunks before giving him the antidote hidden away in the coffin, she has just killed her only way of getting her father back from the 3X1T Realm.
• Scrappy Weapon:
  • Shattered Glass. Not only is it an incredibly underwhelming item, but it is even moreso due to being a Toilet item. You'd think that an item that allows you to find other items in pots would be wonderful, right? The problem is that the chance is so tiny that even with Lucky Juice you can go an entire playthough and never find any items dropped from pots and only maybe find one during looped runs. And considering that any other item sold by the Toilet is a borderline Game-Breaker, one expected a lot more.
  • The Wind Staff. It has a very wide area and does some rather good pushback on enemies. But sadly, that does little to compensate for the miniscule damage it deals, even on lower difficulties and with strength maxed by the doctor. And on top of that, there are very few (if any) items to make it better. Just stick with the default weapon or find something else if you come across it.
  • Chaos Token, an item that switches around your collected items to something different at the start of the next floor, something that can easily screw over any build you have been planning and end up replacing your established items with something that doesn't fit your playstyle at all. In fact, it can even give you items that won't do anything unless directly picked up, such as the Map and Ambrosia, and can even reroll one of your items into another Chaos Token, forcing you to have your items randomized again.
  • Super Finger, an item that neuters your fire rate in exchange for a triple shot. "Oh, it's like The Inner Eye, that must mean it's a good item," you might think. Except it also has the unmentioned effect of increasing a weapon's inaccuracy and spread, to the point where many weapons like shotguns or other wide-shot weapons suddenly fire in a radius around your character and are unable to hit anything.
• Serial Numbers Filed Off: Several enemies and items are practically ripped straight out of The Binding of Isaac. Slime is Rubber Cement^note an item that makes your shots bouncy, Pea Pod is Soy Milk^note an item that massively increases your fire rate but also massively decreases your damage, an enemy on floor 3 functions mechanically identically to the Mask and Heart enemies^note The moving parts of the enemy can't be damaged so you have to attack the heart, etc. This only got more egregious when the devs started lifting wholesale mechanics from Isaac in updates, like adding room modifiers similar to the curses and alternate rooms and the Hellmart and Heavenmart shops which evoke the Angel and Devil Room concept.
• That One Achievement:
  • "The Assassin", Lydia's costume B, requires you to complete a full run as Lydia without breaking a single pot. Lydia's primary weapon is one of the least accurate and least-damaging in the game, and pots provide a valuable second source of hearts and cash, both of which Lydia desperately needs. Not to mention that several rooms are practically designed for you to destroy the pots in them as collateral damage or to make more room for yourself to move. It's not easy, to say the least.
  • All the Luck-Based Mission achievements that require a certain character to pick up a certain gun or for you to buy out the Toilet's entire stock at once. If you don't ever achieve these through normal gameplay, then say hello to a fun grinding session of restarting over and over until you get what you need. The Toilet one is probably the most egregious, since you need to find three Toilet Paper(already a rare drop) and then find a bathroom elevator, only one of which is guaranteed through normal gameplay^note A bathroom elevator will always spawn on the floor after the one you pick up the toilet paper on, meaning you may potentially have to loop several times in order to get all the parts to line up for this one. And that's not even mentioning how Toilet Paper reduces your max HP to 2 without a special item, which has a random chance of dropping in and of itself...
  • "Vermin", which can only be obtained by holding 50 Chunks Medallions at once. Keep in mind that a maximum of seven Chunks Medallions are obtainable on a single playthrough, and that's by getting the True Ending on X Must Die, meaning the player would have to play through every floor in the game on the hardest difficulty a minimum of eight times without purchasing any curses from Filia or anything from Faith in order to get enough medallions for the achievement in the shortest amount of time. Alternatively, there is always the method of repeatedly knocking out Chunks, but such a method is slow and grindy since Chunks only drops 1 medallion per run, requiring the player to knock him out on the Ground Floor and then restart 50 times. Long story short, there is no way to get this achievement without dedicating a lot of time toward it, especially compared to the rest of the achievements added in the Heaven and Hell update.
• That One Attack:
  • Any attack that spews a rain of projectiles down onto the player. The isometricity of the game means a lack of depth perception, which makes dodging these attacks unusually hard, especially since there's no ground reticle to show where they'll land. This winds up making these attacks feel like almost a random chance of getting hit if you can't clear out of the way entirely before they go off.
  • Chunks' Shockwave Stomp. It spreads out relatively quickly and Chunks doesn't wait around for you to jump over it, meaning you have to jump in a way that avoids the attack, avoids Chunks and doesn't put you in a disadvantageous position like backed into a corner. You need to think about and do all of this in a matter of seconds or it's likely that Chunks will just hit you again, starting the whole process over.
  • Both Cybil and her patron Diavola have a move where they swoop in directly at the player from a random direction, which requires both quick reflexes and careful positioning to avoid.
• That One Puzzle: The flower puzzle required to open the chest containing the Summer medallion in Assignment Anya. Essentially, there's a flower for each member of the Estate's Nuclear Family in wildly different parts of the house which each have a different color and order in the sequence that correspond to the directions in Roselia's note. The aggravating part about all this is that it essentially forces you to backtrack through the entire house and manually write all the colors and the sequence down on a cheat sheet so you don't forget them, as there are five to remember, all while wasting precious time which will affect your final score.
• That One Sidequest:
  • Fuji's challenge, "Massive Attack". Basically, every enemy is Giant and you must clear each room with in a time limit. Playing this challenge will make you very quickly realize that while Fuji is a Mighty Glacier, she is not great at doing persistent high damage without putting herself in danger, meaning that the relatively high damage from her fists becomes worthless and every floor becomes a dangerous slog to get through. It's also maybe the only time where defeating Normal Ending Chunks is actually hard due to his gigantic health boost and Fuji's natural disadvantage at fighting Chunks due to being a Close-Range Combatant.
  • BOSS' challenge, "Mutants". Despite the tremendous bomb upgrades you always start with, the gimmick of the challenge is that BOSS starts every floor with 1 HP and that Chunks spawns in much quicker than usual. This clashes violently with BOSS' usual high-risk high-reward playstyle by making it almost exclusively high-risk, and you'll frequently find yourself nearing the end of the challenge only to die to a trap you didn't see because you couldn't find a heart pot fast enough.

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