You Died but a Necromancer Revived You is best described as an arcade trap-filled dodge ‘em up. Your goal is to simply get to the top of a randomly generated tower and take down the necromancer that refuses to let you die. Along the way there are several different traps ranging from your basic spikes and cannons to trap doors, giant stamps, and weird orbiting ghost things. The theme of Necromancer Revived You is pretty distasteful, but it’s all done in bright isometric pixel-art graphics with very light-hearted violence devoid of anything gory.

There are several different ways to play but most of them come down to maneuvering around on tight paths dodging the traps in your way. There isn’t any combat or ways to help minimize obstacles, so survival ends up being based on reflexes and timing.

Story mode pits the player against the necromancer and has you climbing up a 6 chapter tower and finally get to the necromancer himself. Each chapter presents an increased difficulty and different set of traps. There are a ton of accessibility options you can mess with at any time. You can change how often you respawn from dying, floor and character size, amount of traps allowed per floor, or you can challenge yourself with invisible paths or permadeath. Almost every option can be altered very specifically for your needs to make the game as hard or as easy as you want it to be. Endless mode is exactly what you would expect. Survive as long as possible to get further than last time. Unfortunately this mode can’t be tailored towards your preferences like story mode can, and it doesn’t have any leaderboard support.

Versus mode is where most of the local multi-player shenanigans would happen. You can alter the gameplay as much as with story mode and play with up to 4 players at once. The goal of versus is to simply be the first to get to the end of the floor. Story mode and endless also work in local multi-player just fine.

The controls are designed to be easy for anyone to pick up and play. Since you aren’t focusing on aiming a gun or managing anything but how you dodge around obstacles, the controls are simply moving left, right, up, or down. There’s no options to rebind the controls, but you can choose between using arrow keys, WASD, either analog stick, or the buttons on a controller to move your character. I never found any bugs and the game has always ran fine with zero issues.

There’s a lot of things to find questionable in Necromancer Revived You. Ghosts are often used as an obstacle type and nearly every character you can play as is a skeleton of some sort. Necromancy is a predominant part of the game, although it’s never done on screen and never suggested aside from the loading screen telling you that you were revived again. When characters die they explode into bone pieces with no blood or gore to be found. The theme is hard to ignore, especially when it’s the title of the game and main antagonist.

I have enjoyed my time with Necromancer Revived You. It’s simple and to the point, allowing for quick gaming sessions and accessible local multi-player. It can be enjoyed by nearly everyone because of its vast accessibility options and simplistic control scheme. I wish the theme wasn’t what it was, but if you’re able to look past it, there is hours of fun to be had here.