The overview

Death's Gambit is a 2D, pixel-art, action-RPG, Souls-like, sidescrolling platformer, with heavy focuses on combat and the building of your character's stats. Aiming for the vein of the hardcore, action-platformer genre with simple yet challenging melee combat and interconnected dungeon exploration, how tall could this title truly stand among the tides of so many other games clamoring for the same niche?

Step one, before taking the first step.

Before anything, the player is pulled into a menu to create a character. Presented are 7 classes: Soldier, Assassin, Blood Knight, Wizard, Noble, Sentinel, and Acolyte of Death, as well as a small selection of starting items to supplement the build. Unfortunately, cosmetic options are completely unavailable, so you'll be playing as a green-faced man in the same armor regardless. While the starting class doesn't have a major impact on survivability, each does have a lasting effect on your abilities in the game in the form of innate bonus abilities as well as a unique skill which appears on the talent tree. Regardless of class, one can eventually spec into any equipment desired, with enough leveling, so the starting equipment means little in the long run.

Innate class bonuses run the gambit from the underwhelming "gain soul energy for every attack blocked", the rally-system-esque "attack after receiving damage to regain health lost", the situational yet safe "restore broken save points", and gaining access to a unique merchant, to name just a few. Having chosen the Sentinel class, I was able to equip any weapon and shield while only having half of its required stats; the benefits of which I felt from the beginning to the end. These variances make playing the different classes feel that much more refreshing, and adds some well-appreciated variety to creating alternate builds.

Out of the class-room and into the fire

Following the locking-in of your new avatar, an opening cutscene plays depicting an extremely buff, horny lizard dragging the protagonist's limp corpse from a fire. The protagonist is revealed to be a former soldier of Vados named Sorun who has been recently killed in battle during a curt reprimanding by the lizard. After a roasting, courtesy of both the lizard-man and the blazing fire of corpses, our burned hero shambles forward where he is immediately set upon by Death himself. The reaper offers him a deal: pledge to do his bidding, and in exchange, he will continually revive him upon every death. Being otherwise all but six-feet-under already, Sorun signs the contract without much ado, establishing both the driving plot-point and namesake of Death's Gambit. Following this, the player is turned loose upon the world, and the game truly begins.

At the heart of the gameplay lies a familiar cycle; fight through varied locales, navigate dungeon layouts, ration out a healing item (replenished at checkpoints), defeat the locale's head aggressor, and level up with the experience thusly accumulated. This game sports the full gambit of basic action RPG trappings: blocking, a backstep+dodgeroll, a healing item, special skill moves, and attacks with both a primary and secondary weapon. All these commands can technically be remapped freely across your controller/keyboard, but considering the game makes a habit of resetting your custom control layout at some of the worst moments, that's perhaps not the best idea. There exists a meta of mostly melee combat, though a singular tome weapon, 2 guns, and a smattering of 6 different bows are made available for distant damage. All attacks, jumps, blocks, and dodges drain from a bar of naturally-refilling stamina, so management of this resource is pivotal to maximizing damage dealt while also evading attacks. In addition, a purple bar known as the "soul gauge" will fill as damage is dealt to enemies, drain slowly with time, and is used in order to execute powerful weapon abilities, of which 3 can be equipped at once.

Sorun's potential arsenal consists of 11 different weapon types: daggers, longswords, greatswords, greathammers, halberds, tomes, axes, scythes, spears, guns, and bows, each with their own unique attack animations, windups, ranges, ability sets, and endlags. These arms behave mostly as one would expect; daggers are quick and nimble, longswords are balanced and have good range, greatswords are pretty swell guys all around, not-as-great hammers feel just a bit inadequate in comparison, halberds have great range but wish they could fly like normal birds, and so forth. Though they each have their benefits, and all felt viable, they most certainly do not feel equal.

The first character I tested, with which I completed one full run and most of a NG+, was a full stength-build, meaning longswords, greatswords, and greathammers were the most powerful by way of their strength scaling. The longsword was quick enough to deal decent damage, while maintaining the range and mobility to keep safe. The greatsword did technically deal more damage overall, but the tradeoff was rendered non-ideal by the introduction of significantly more lag in the startup and endings of attacks. Still, this was leagues beyond the drawbacks of the greathammer, which locked you into a veritable 8-act screenplay of startup and endlag while hanging a sign around your neck reading "please wreck my face". It was absurdly slow to the point of grinding the pacing to a screeching halt, even if one did manage to avoid damage while using it effectively, and the damage boost it brought with each hit was so minimal as to be completely eclipsed by the weapon's utter, weighty girth.

Another character made for the purpose of testing was roughly a 3:1 intelligence:finesse build, using a tome (scaling with int) and scythe (scaling with finesse). Glad that I did, it became apparent that the tome is one of the more unique weapons in the game, being able to fire multiple arrows of magic as its standard attack combo while draining naught but stamina. Moreover, its soul gauge abilities generate orbs of different elements around the caster, which can then be combined into a multitude of different super-spells.

The scythe, on the other hand, while decently powerful even at low finesse, had something of an awkward attack pattern on the ground, demonstrating a particular problem that I experienced with every weapon I used. Sorun has a tendency to unintentionally slip right past the enemy while attacking, thereby having the combo break itself. Without a way to hold back your forward momentum while attacking, or pushboxes when colliding with an enemy sprite, you're further limited in the spaces from which you can begin an attack by your weapon's inherent "drift" effect it has on your character, in a game where spacing and positioning is already a focus. If it were slight, this would be little issue, but the scythe in particular puts you on ice skates, acting almost as an uncontrollable vehicle.

The 11 different weapon categories may give the illusion of a vast swathe of tools to discover and test, but unfortunately there are naught but a single weapon in each category, aside from the 2 in greathammers, 2 scythes, 2 guns, and 6 bows, meaning that sticking with a certain weapon type requires sinking all upgrade points into the one starting weapon, with no room for experimentation with equipment within that style. The act of upgrading itself also is made to feel all but worthless. Enhancing a weapon seems to tack on additional damage only after the weapon's been scaled with Sorun's stats, so spending 50+ upgrade materials getting a weapon to +4 will only tack on 4 damage points to a weapon that could very well have 200+ scaled damage.

Due to this mechanic, your growing stats are made the de facto source of escalating damage dealt, leaving little complexity in the act of setting up a build. To level, spirit-like objects called 'shards' are required to be spent at checkpoints, with weaker enemies dispensing relatively smaller numbers of shards and bosses practically exploding 6 levels worth of shards. Interestingly, whenever Sorun falls in battle and Death appears to whisk his soul back to the last checkpoint, it's not the shards that are dropped in the location of Sorun's latest demise, but a single healing feather. Different types and strengths of these feathers are found while exploring the world, and the maximum number of which can be augmented by finding more of them. For every death, one feather is dropped, and one must either reach the spot again to reclaim it or spend the equivalent of one level-up in shards to instantly retrieve it. In this way, feathers can never be permanently lost, which softens the mechanic adequately.

This isn't the only unique function of these feathers, however, as there exists a system wherein damage dealt by the player can be upgraded by 10% for each feather "sacrificed" while at a checkpoint. These are not permanently lost, and can be reclaimed at any time in exchange for reversing the buff. Even such a simple system alone creates a very engaging and flexible risk/reward system, whereby the game's pace is set naturally and dynamically by the player themselves, resulting in an experience tailor-suited to their tastes. Confident players who enjoy fast-paced dispatching of enemies and the thrill of imminent danger will opt to place more feathers into strengthening Sorun, while those who feel more uneasy with this type of game or prefer slow, deliberate, methodical combat will hoard feathers to protect themselves in emergencies. I personally found it best to put all but 1 feather into this damage upgrade at all times, and it was extremely satisfying watching Sorun deftly carve through swathes of enemies knowing that it was because I'd utilized my agency as a player to make it so. It's a very simple, yet flexible tool to adapt the game's pacing around the player's optimal style, and the success of the system lies in just how "invisible" this difficulty slider is, feeling natural to the game itself.

Now, all this would have made for a somewhat shallow, yet decently functional and potentially quite rewarding combat system, were it not for two key flaws. The first I'd experienced, and the less egregious, was just how quickly the game broke in half once I created a glass-cannon of a character. Pouring almost every level up into strength alone, Sorun quickly became a mighty tempest, laying waste to hoards of enemies without breaking pace and taking massive chunks out of boss health bars with every cleave. Whatever semblance of challenge the game possessed quickly drained away, leaving beneath it a hollow experience of blindly hacking through the toughest of enemies, having little regard for my health or true finesse in my spacing. Of course, the skill ceiling for complex play is not lowered by this alone, the floor is simply raised. What truly breaks Death's Gambit's combat is... literally what breaks Death's Gambit's the combat.

At this time, there exists a well-known and frequently occurring glitch where, upon inputting the command to attack with the primary weapon, Sorun will ignore the order. The game will simply eat your input, creating many situations of careening into enemies and bosses expecting to damage them, but simply exposing Sorun to damage instead. Moreover, often times an input to dodge mid-combo will instead be read as "attack with secondary weapon", and sometimes the game will read this input when not pressing any button at all. These were not infrequent happenings either, being constant issues in every fight. It seems to happen most consistently during a period of roughly three seconds after taking damage, well after hitstun has ended, but there have also been quite a few instances of dropped inputs regardless of being damaged. Glitching aside, controlling Sorun never feels entirely smooth, with attacks uncomfortably jerking him forward and the acceleration of windups feeling janky.

As a result of this wild inconsistency, not only was there constant anxiety over whether or not the game would act as intended, but there was little benefit in careful planning and measured attacks. Instead, the game encourages wild button mashing so that any dropped inputs are most closely followed by a successful attack, mitigating the impact of the glitch. Combined with the first instance of an easily overpowered character, the player is rewarded for acting as a blind steamroller, leveling mountains of foes using the same bullheaded tactics each and every time.

Veiled lore and a minimalist method of storytelling.

Upon reaching a hub known as the Sanctuary following the defeat of the first boss, Death speaks to Sorun through the mouth of a crow, informing him of his assigned task. In the heart of a land known as Siradon, in the capital of Caer Siorai, lies an artifact with the ability to grant eternal life to its denizens. Following an unexpected bit of levity on Death's part alongside a cheeky Dark Souls joke about "tolling the two bells of Ascension and finding a vessel to communicate with the souls of the dead", he commands Soren to simply destroy the source of immortality by any means he pleases, thereby loosening life's artificial hold on the people of Siradon. It can be safely assumed that Death wishes to once again reap the souls of the residents there, but it isn't explicitly stated by Death himself. Information is doled out in very small packages throughout the course of the story, infrequently providing direct answers, leaving much to the imagination.

One way in which information is distributed is through very brief interactions with many NPCs. Upon periodically revisiting the hub, to which all notable NPCs gather, further details and lore can be gleaned from them through optional dialogue. Figures of the past turned into bosses to fight, details of nations and races which existed in the past, fought, and died, monarchies thriving and being usurped; without revealing details, these are some of the topics hinted at through dialogues and tomes, but like so many other games of Death's Gambit's ilk, it feels as though the majority of the details are left for the player to interpret and fill in themselves, thus the priming of one's imagination is integral to the success of the format, otherwise the story is left garishly unfinished.

While a shrouded and fractured narrative can be quite gripping, especially when the observer is asked to actively put the pieces together themselves, the world within never piqued my interest beyond the mild curiosity. I think this is down to two key reasons. Firstly, while the story content deals with politics and the like, no real context is given for the more metaphysical aspects of the world. This universe is quite the surreal place, full of mythical-looking tech, bizarre architecture, and unfamiliar beasts, and it sets a primed stage for narrative exploration. Moreover, its bosses are shown to have a myriad of interesting powers beyond the norm, and there exists an artifact which bestows eternal life to an entire nation. While the origins of this artifact in particular are touched upon, representing what I'd consider the peak of the narrative's intrigue, the details of how it does what it does remains completely up to speculation. Without sufficient hints regarding the physical nature of the world, the player is left to believe that the many supernatural elements are the way they are simply because they felt interesting.

The second way it fails is down to the minutia of the writing itself. It's clear that the writers were trying to infuse a grand sense of gravitas to every line of dialogue, however it seems as though many adjectives and verbs were chosen by how "cool" they sounded to the writers first, with the literal meaning being an afterthought. As a result, lines feel like they're reaching for deep meaning, but miss many opportunities to use verbiage that would better convey a message, making for a very shallow read.

In addition to the bits of lore found throughout the world and its inhabitants, the story also utilizes small peeks into Sorun's subconscious, shown at key points between deaths. In the etherial rift, while Sorun's soul waits for life once more, he seems to dream, sometimes of the past, sometimes of his desires, and often times of his own anxieties. It soon becomes evident through these moments that Sorun's mother, Evelyn, was a soldier of Valm and his only guardian. The two of them are shown to have had a very close relationship, with many life lessons and values playfully and lovingly passed from her to him. One day, as soldiers tend to do, she shipped off to war and never returned, and so Sorun seeks to locate her in order to reunite their tiny, fractured family unit. It's a motivation lacking in complexity, but through the interactive flashbacks occurring between resurrections, a genuine sense of love is developed between the two, creating a feeling of empathy. As a result, Sorun's fervour becomes increasingly more believable, and his core motivations as a character begin to blend sufficiently into the overarching narrative.

Unfortunately, while the flashbacks are compelling when conceptualized as glances into the bubbling subconscious of a free-floating soul, they could not have picked a worse moment to appear in terms of the gameplay and flow. As mentioned, these occur when Sorun has died and is waiting for revival at the last checkpoint. After being killed, however, the first thing on a player's mind is likely going to be the re-acquisition of the healing feather dropped at the spot of death, and the routing of the path towards it. The dropped-feather mechanic is designed to create a sense of tension, as the player is slightly crippled until they can reach their lost feather, so one is meant to hasten their way to the enemy which killed them in order to regain the status-quo. This is no mood to make a player receptive to heartfelt story content, or a slow, wistful flashback of soothing times past, and as a result, they're significantly less likely to absorb or appreciate the content being shown. This content does factor heavily into the story's climax, however the reveal itself is so mishandled as to be at best inconsistent with what was previously established, and at worst exhaustingly nonsensical.

The other type of "dream vision" shown to the player, the one used less often, is meant to act as a reflection of Sorun's inner psyche, playing out depictions of his greatest fears and anxieties. While an excellent concept of 'show don't tell' , these nightmares often share the same lack of subtlety as the writing. In one instance, Sorun appears on a small island beach, with water stretching out on either side, and a bright sun in the sky. As you walk through the shallow waters, however, there is an abrupt flash where the water turns to blood, the sky turns black, and the background fills with contorted figures, shortly before the vision ends. The cherry on the cake is that it's accompanied by a clichéd, dissonant orchestral sting, the kind you'd find in cheap horror movies looking for an easy jump-scare. It's genuinely as if someone spliced a few seconds of a bad creepypasta into the game, and it's far from the only instance of such absurdly cheesy imagery.

Aesthetics and acoustics.

Alright, let's get the glitches out of the way before mentioning anything else, as they are truly at the forefront of this category.

• Firstly, the game cannot be run in fullscreen on higher refresh monitors. If attempted, the game will either lock completely on a white screen, or more often, run at ~20 fps in an unplayable slow-motion. This game is capped at 60 fps, so it's a wonder from where this glitch originates. While there has apparently been a fix pushed out for 144Hz monitors, anything other than that will still trigger the glitch. Instead, the game needs to be run in a bordered, sub-native resolution, hence the strange resolutions of my screenshots. The developers are aware of this issue, and promise a fix in the future, though at the time of writing, none exists.
• Sprites have issues meeting together properly when scrolling the camera quickly, often showing gaps and breaks in scenery where there should be none. Moreover, many sprites show large, garish lines of pixels stretching across the screen and off of their models. This may be a result of the resolution at which the game is forced to be played, but I can't test.

• At certain locations involving large-scale platforming, the camera is meant to zoom out to give the player view of where is/isn't safe to jump, but sometimes it will just fail to do so.
• The camera focuses into the center of each room and needs to snap into place to show the player whenever a new location is entered.
• Loading screens are uncommonly lengthy, leaving an uncomfortably long gap of pitch blackness when transitioning from one screen to another.
• The game will frequently hitch when attacking, when the game loads enemies or large set-pieces, every time you rest at or leave a checkpoint statue, etc. Being that Death's Gambit is a sprite-based, effects-light, 2D, sidescroller, there's little obvious excuse for the performance issues.
• Pressing the B button to close the menu will simultaneously perform whichever action is set to that command. A small, almost inconsequential glitch, unless you happen to set weapon abilities to B, as it will drain what could be precious soul from your gauge every time you exit the start menu.
• Sorun's cape will almost never stay attached. It behaves as if stuck on the end of a loose rubber band attached to Sorun's shoulders, but during some attack animations it will affix itself rigidly to the air 3 feet in front of Sorun.
• Infrequently, the incorrect animations will play, such as the running animation during a jump. When titling the left stick slightly, Sorun's running animation will trigger while not actually moving him, producing this pseudo-moonwalking effect.

• For whatever reason, the ability to take screenshots is broken.

All of these glitches I have experienced personally, and almost every one I've seen corroborated by multiple users on the steam forums, along with a litany of countless more I'd not seen. These issues are well known by the developers at this time, and they claim to be actively pursuing fixes for most of them, though more than a month following the release, all of the above are still present.

Blatant errors aside, I can address the game's artistic direction directly, though I'm afraid things are a mixed bag. Death's Gambit opts for a low-fi, large-pixel, retro-inspired art style, while also producing a great amount of depth and detail in the game's architecture, animations, and sweeping backgrounds. While the art excels when it comes to static images, such as backgrounds and character dialogue portraits, animated assets suffer from a number of faults. The sprites themselves appear to consist of 2D artwork pushed through a filter to give the appearance of pixel-art, and while in many ways this is a solid idea in theory, the way they've executed it leads to a lot of sprite-shimmering during motion, as well as frequent gaps forming for a frame or two in what are meant to be straight lines. The shimmering and flickering edges of sprites give the visuals a rough look, but also make quick movements during the action just a bit harder to read, almost as if things were ever so slightly blurred.

(Left: line shimmering example on moving sprites. Right: nicks in Sorun's sword where there should be straight edges.)

Tweening, the act of translating or rotating a static image along a path to create motion in place of drawing multiple unique frames, is often used to animate enemies' limbs about joints during attacks, and it has an overall detrimental effect on the game. The technique can be a clever way to save on animation time in areas the viewer would never notice, but as it appears in Death's Gambit, it's rather glaring. Many animations are genuinely vastly detailed and fluid, so the fact that yet so many others can appear so half-baked and choppy gives the impression of time or budget constraints. More importantly, enemies' animations, both tweened and frame-by-framed, often do a poor job of conveying windup acceleration and active hitbox frames, making it both difficult to properly time dodges on many attacks, as well as creating moments where Sorun takes damage a bit after the attack appears to conclude.

Sonically, the game is surprisingly solid. White Rabbit have splurged on many lines of voice acting for a number of characters, and for the most part, it goes over well. The highlights of the cast are, in my opinion, Death himself and Jaco the trader. Having only looked up his VA now, it seems that Matthew Mercer himself provided Death's voice, and his talent clearly shows. There are many moments in his readings where he has Death express an emotion or quirk not inherent in the context of the writing itself, and it gives the character much needed definition. Not only Death, Mercer voiced Zuma as well, and in fact many of the VAs were shared between characters, with no immediate detriment that I could perceive. While not every line of voiced dialogue necessarily helps to further define the character beyond what the lines themselves already revealed, but I found no voice so glaring as to impede the overall quality of the game, so it's a net positive.

The soundtrack also deserves commendation, with songs being these swelling and waving orchestral compositions meant to sweep the player up in fantasy and imagination. While nothing I believe stands perfectly on their own, there were many instances where I felt the background music added quite a bit more emotion and context to an area where it would not have been otherwise, hitting both exciting highs and calming lows, so I would call the soundtrack quite the success.

Score/10?

How do I score a game like this? How would I really rate this experience? Having played this and being asked "how good of a game is Death's Gambit?" feels tantamount to being shown a cow and asked "how good of a steak does this make?" I don't know; it's not a steak yet. The game is not finished. Granted, I could guess at what kind of quality the finished product would be like, but it would only be an educated guess. This product is wholly unpolished, something I would have expected to play from an early access game in a very rough beta at best, so I could not accurately guess what quality game come out when the game is finished. If it were to be finished at all, that is, as developers have been known to cut and run after producing broken games on Steam before. What I do know is that something with this many glaring issues, glitches affecting the most fundamental of the game's mechanics, I would not feel comfortable giving an 'average' score of 5/10. I must admit that there is genuine fun to be had in brief instances, and the game does have its niche audience who enjoy it, but even if working correctly, I find everything Death's Gambit attempts to have been performed more adequately by other games of its kind, making it difficult to recommend. If you are interested in the game, I strongly suggest following the news and updates pages on the steam listing in order to be sure that the developers will continue addressing issues and adding content as time goes on. If not, well, I'd recommend turning your attention elsewhere.