Death's Gambit (PS4): Facing Death

My friends. I have a confession to make to all of you: I am a fan of Dark Souls. I know, I know. I'll give you a minute to recover from this staggering bit of realization, but it's actually true. Before even! When From Software put out Demon's Souls they essentially created a game genre that was eventually perfected with their magnum opus: Dark Souls. Since then many companies made their own iterations to try to capture some of the magic. Some are bad, some are ok, some are compared even when they shouldn't be (look'n at you, Nioh). 

But it's the ones that try to take that gameplay style and mechanics system and blend it into their own creations that grab my attention. And when this one came out this past summer, there were certainly more than a few reviews of this one that I started to take notice. Made by White Rabbit studios and published by Adult Swim Games, I felt this would be a good investment for my recent PlayStation store gift card and sat down with....

DEATH'S GAMBIT:(PS4)

In Death's Gambit you play Soren, a knight in service to the nation of Vados. When Soren was born his father was drafted to a war known the "Great Expedition" per the fiefdom of their home. His father never returned, so Soren grew up under his mother, Evelyn, who tried to instill to him to live a life that is one worth remembering. As the campaign continued onward, eventually Soren's mother was also drafted and did not return.

To follow in his mother's footsteps, Soren also became a knight to join the Great Expedition as well and led a company into battle. The game begins shortly after this, where a Vil'dradur (A Dragon/Lizardesq race of people) warrior called Vrael is seen dragging Soren's body to a burning pile of Soren's company. Nobody else survived. Taking a jaded pity on Soren, he tells him to return to Vados. The battle was lost and there is nothing left for him here.

But just as he goes to leave the battlefield, Soren is confronted by Death himself. Death has granted Soren immortality, but only if he accepts a contract into Death's service, asking for a single favor. With nowhere to return to and without any cause other than to try to find his mother, Soren accepts the contract and continues forward.

As I eluded to in the introduction paragraph, Death's Gambit is a 2D metroidvania style Souls clone similar to the vein of my previously reviewed Salt and Sanctuary. Many of the mechanics that you would recognize from these games are going to be in play here as well as a number of unique mechanics as well.

While using the Souls comparison for the game mechanics, I would say its actual play style feels closer to Castlevania. It has a pretty arcade speed to it as the character moves reasonably fast and the jump is quick, although a little loose. It uses the face button scheme instead of the more traditional souls trigger system, which makes more sense given the 2D plane that you play the game on.

Combat is generally what you would expect. You are able to equip two different weapons (usually a melee and ranged) that will deplete your stamina as you fight, forcing you to back up and replenish before you can resume. You have a dodge roll move that like its Soulsian heritage also depletes stamina but gives you invincibility frames for a significant portion of the roll. This is a essentially the core, and about where the comparisons to Dark Souls ends.

You also have a "Soul Energy" gauge and this is bit of a clever mechanic because when designing your character, your character class actually directs how you actually fill this gauge. For example, I use a rogue in this game, and they fill the soul energy by attacking relentlessly and with aggression. But if you were to say play as the defensive minded sentinel, this gauge increases by defending or parrying attacks.

This gauge is how you perform up to 3 different special attacks, in lieu of a magic system. On top of having to fight to build energy for these attacks, your soul energy also degrades over time so you may not always have an attack ready to go at the start of a fight. These abilities also have cool downs that naturally force you wait between uses. In conjunction between the stamina, energy, and cool down it produces this interesting balance that both rewards aggression and pace, while preventing spamming abilities and forcing awareness of your limits and defense.

A good deal of the of the equipment that you use of the game pretty boldfacedly tells you that many of the weapons are stat specific, so right at the onset when you build your initial character you will have general idea of where you want allocate your built stats.

This too, follows the standard RPG/Souls stat system. I'd probably akin it more to Bloodborne as it's relatively simplified to Vitality, Strength, Endurance, Finesse, Intelligence, and Haste. You could balance your build if you like, but more than likely you will find yourself splitting between your main attack attribute and more life and endurance.

Much like its inspiration, your starting character is just a jump off point for you to customize.

Also, much like its inspiration, it bills itself as an open world game for you to freely explore and tackle in any order. It starts off on a somewhat linear starting point and once you reach the main sanctuary (eg: firelink shrine) you are then free to branch out in multiple directions and see what path works for you.

The experience system, however, has a few subtle differences that I really liked. As you know with most of the games aping this system as you gain experience, souls, blood echos, diamyo, etc you then use that level your character, purchase items, learn new abilities, and upgrade your equipment, when you collect it and you die, you drop it and have to go back for it. If you die again, it's lost. Right?

That is not Death's Gambit does things. It's equally more forgiving and punishing. Because now when you die, you don't actually lose your experience. So you will never find yourself caught under-leveled and panicking to find the next death statue you spend those points. Instead, you drop your phoenix feathers. These are your primary rechargeable healing item and they are in a limited supply. Say you have 5 feathers and you die in the boss encounter, you then warp back to your last save and have to go back with 4 feathers. If you die again before getting back to the boss, you drop another. Now you have 2 less and still need to get back to where you dropped them. It's a unique punishment to carelessness.

These feathers also have a interesting strength buffing mechanic. When at checkpoints you can choose to limit your supply of them for 10% damage increase. I think the max number of feathers you find is 10, so when I play in NG+ modes I find myself allocating 6 of them to give me 60% attack boost to really layer the damage on enemies and bosses. If 4 feathers isn't enough for me to fight then I am playing much to carelessly. These feathers are not lost for good because you are able to spend experience to reclaim them (including ones yo, but it does cost more to do every level higher you get.

I will say boss fights have an interesting reward mechanic that will keep you engaged. If you happen to lose in a boss fight, it takes you to a screen where it shows you the boss and their life bar. That life bar will deplete to the amount of damage you did. As it decreases it awards you the experience you would have earned by taking out that much health. When you try again, you won't be awarded more experience unless you do better than when you last attempted the fight. This provides a nice little psychological push to make you give the boss another try.

This game as an incredibly chill, piano based symphonic soundtrack to it. It never really dips itself out of the classic territories, and makes for very good ambiance music. I wouldn't really consider the soundtrack to be iconic in any capacity, but it does have a very somber opening theme that I enjoy, and all of the music seems fitting for the scenes. A lot of Souls comparisons could be drawn here as well.

But the best aspect of the sound design is how competently voice acted this game was.  Matt Mercer plays Death and he has pretty much become a staple in the video game voice acting world so naturally he just nailed his part. But a lot of the voice actors according to the IMDB pulled multiple roles, basically reducing all the roles of the game to about 10 or so voice actors. It was very impressively done, I didn't find any of the lines to be particularly cheesy and hokey. Once I actually started to progress in the game, the voice did a lot to help me get lost in the story.

Although I do have to knock that, for some reason, Soren is a silent protagonist despite having lines of dialogue that don't change from play through to play through. What is the purpose of this? I complained about it in Tales of Xillia 2 and it makes just about as much sense here. You gave him lines of dialogue, you armed your game with very established and competent voice actors, many of them already doing multiple roles. You couldn't have one of them read Soren's lines? Fuck, have Matt Mercer just use his Troy Baker voice to continue further to confuse me, and that would have worked just as well. I do not understand this decision.

Graphically, it's another game that draws inspiration from graphics of old so it's another one that resorts to pixel animation as opposed to rendering. That being said the games monster design is fairly well detailed with lots of different frames of animation. Some of them fair better than others, I will admit. There is one particular boss fight, The Tundra Lord Kaern, that has a failing attack that looks like it could have used a few more animation frames to look a bit more fluid.

That actually kinda leads to one of my biggest issues in the game. Salt and Sanctuary managed to completely nail the timing that made their game feel like a 2d souls game would feel. Its timing, fluidity, weight of actions all felt... right. Death's Gambit gives me kind of a loose, arcadey feel to it. Specifically when it comes to jumping. The jump is very fast and immediately halts the moment when you let up off the button, which makes the jump feel very bouncy and forced me to pay more attention to my jumps because now the timing is significantly more important.

Combat as a whole took some getting use to because depending on the weapon you chose it affects how you move in the battle when you swing. I first started the game as a Scythe user and I couldn't get the knack of it because the animations would move me so much farther forward than I was expecting to go and multiple times I'd helplessly fall into traps or miss my target because I was moving too much in combat. I eventually restarted and switched to daggers.

But even then, I found some of these controls to be somewhat unnatural. Perhaps that is not the correct word but some of these actions do not roll fluidly for me. For example, you have a kick move that you are supposed to use on enemies who are in a guard position, to do this you need to hold the button that draws up your shield, then hit a shoulder button that allows you to throw the kick. I never, ever get this right on the first time. I typically will take a hit or two trying to do this, and if I have more than one enemy after chances are I am going to take way more damage than I want to.

This game also has an incredibly frustrating barrier to entry. From a relatively stable easing into the game, one of the first bosses you come across is the Bulwark. Now, I've heard this guy can be beaten at level 20 (and there is already a level 1 speed run) but mother fucker this guy put a massive roadblock up in my game. Tack this on a period of still figuring out the controls and it's going to lead to a significant number of deaths in a row.  I'll be honest I was getting ready to put it down after a while

They say that the game is non-linear, but it really feels like it's not. There is a pattern I've found where the curve is definitely more forgiving and that you really should do because it unlocks all the necessary NPCs required to learn the skills in the game. I usually end up dealing with the Bulwark next to last. By finding this path it ended up giving a more fair leveling path and now I have pretty much have it down to memory.

The amount of equipment is tragically minimal. Most of the gear in the game only has one or two variants, and some weapons like the daggers there is no 2nd version at all. So you don't really need to worry about leveling up the wrong equipment because honestly there isn't much to level, just wear what matches your leveled stats. So it doesn't leave very much in the way of customization and that is pretty disappointing. This is also hampered in addition to the game's skill tree because there is no option to respec (even in new game plus), so it's entirely possible that you can miss big sections or treasures because you didn't commit to a specific skillset that allowed you to get there.

I was sort of prepared to go after the game for its story because it felt like your standard fantasy speechifying where they sling a bunch of names and fantasy terms together, and it felt like I wasn't retaining much of it because it doesn't sound like it means anything. But there was one area of the game that took a very strange tonal shift that caught me completely off guard, and by that point I was starting to find my groove in the game that was progressing a bit more smoothly. There is a lot of lore in this game, but again, like Dark Souls you have to go out and find it.

And this game feels like it is hiding a lot of secrets that I haven't unearthed. It has to be, there are too many mechanics that haven't been explained that have to mean something: You can cancel your contract with death, so when you die it deletes you game. You have to make story decisions on some characters at one point. NPCs can be killed (or murdered by other NPCs) and you can stop that, There is a NG+ option where you can raise the level from 1-10. There is an unexplained "fear" mechanic that has to do something.  So I hesitate to rip this story apart because they did actually put in a pretty significant amount of voiced over lore. There has to be more to this than what I am seeing.

Not every boss is beaten by fighting. Sometimes the goal is just to survive.

But worst of all, most unforgivably of all is this game crashes. Constantly. This game crashes with out any rhyme or reason to it. This game crashes when transitioning from one map to another, this game crashes when there are too many enemy projectiles on the screen, this game crashes when I am jumping to much and the animation doesn't catch up fast enough, this game crashes in the middle of dramatic boss fights in prompt of nothing that I can immediately see, this game FUCKING CRASHES WHEN YOU ARE SAVING YOUR GAME CAUSING ME TO LOSE ALL MY FUCKING PROGRESS WITH A CORRUPT SAVE.

This game has been patched more than once already, so the amount of crashes I have had with Death's Gambit is fucking unbelievable and ridiculous. No game close to release, and especially months after release should be crashing as much as this game has. So either the patches you are putting in is not fixing the problems, or you haven't even bothered to address them yet. Either way, it is a completely massive fucking black eye on this game because now I can't enjoy it to its fullest because I am constantly in fear of having this game just randomly close on me for no reason, and possibly lose all my work.

Look. The bottom line here is that I like Death's Gambit. It takes some pretty established mechanics and does a good job of implementing it and tweaking it for their own system. The sprite work is well done and the sound design is pleasing. It has fun boss fights when I get the controls down, and I'm working through a third play through of the game as I write this.

But son of a bitch it doesn't feel like it's ready yet. There is just no excuse of a multi-platform game to have this many problems months after its release. I hate day one patches but I would take 30 of them if it got this game to run properly. So I am torn how I want to deliver this. I want to give Death's Gambit a recommendation because ultimately I got a great deal of play out of it once the game started to click for me. But frankly, it might be worth waiting a few more months so they can hopefully address some of this shit.

If you lost your progress because you left Death's contract, that's on you. If you lost your progress because Death's Gambit crashed on you, that's on the devs. Purchase at own risk.

I'm going to be pissed if I finish NG+10

and there is no secret ending.