Our own Talune Silius reviews Deathbound:
Link to Game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1277130/Deathbound/
Deathbound is a prime example of why I love indie games. AAA studios often have a lot more to lose when making a new game. A higher budget is spent on them, and failure can mean the loss of jobs and years of work. For this reason, many AAA studios make games that they know will work. They are unlikely to step outside their comfort zones and redo IPs to generate a profit. However, the indie gaming scene is often allowed to take risks. While you often deal with lower production qualities and shorter games, the stories and gameplay mechanics are often more unique. Deathbound falls neatly into this category.
Morals and Identity
The story of Deathbound is one of Morals and Identity. The game takes place in Akratya, a sci-fi city where the worlds of magic and technology have collided. For a long time, the citizens were immortal and lived peaceful lives. All of that changed when the rules changed, and suddenly, people were dying. Society crumbled as its citizens tried to come to grips with their mortality. In the chaos, the Churches rose to power that followed either Goddess Death or Life.
Throughout the 5-10 hour campaign, you will take of 7 different people who each have their own views and followings. Each of the main characters has died at some point and is revived to share the same body. You will learn what happened to the world as well as each of the characters’ backstories. Which side you choose in this ongoing war will be your decision as you navigate through the infected streets of Akratya to put a stop to the monstrous acts of the churches.
The story of Deathbound is very well told through both the visual design of the world and the various memories you will find scattered about. Each of the seven characters that you will play is unique and has extremely different personalities. There is no true hero or villain in the story, as each side (the church of death and the Essencemancers of life) has their hands dirty. Like many souls-likes, the story is not always easy to follow, but it did leave me intrigued to follow closer.
Voice acting in the game is, unfortunately, a weak spot here (as to be expected of an indie game). While the adult actors can be hit or miss, the actors that are playing children can be laughable at times. The main cast of seven has the most talent and they are the ones that you will spend the most time with. But do not expect AAA-quality writing or acting. Go in with proper expectations.
A Merger of Souls
The gameplay is truly where this game tries its own things. In Deathbound, you have your standard combat that you come to expect in souls-likes. The dodge rolls, parries, light and heavy attacks, magic… it’s all here. But the difference is that instead of a singular character, you play multiple. Each of the 7 cast members are souls that you can find within the world. Each one takes the role of a different class that is added to your armory (Fighter, Thief, Acid Druid, Amazon, Barbarian, Monk, and Mage). Each character has their own attacks, hp, defenses, and special abilities. At any time, you can control four of the classes and morph at the click of a button.
This system is extremely detailed and offers a wide range of options. For starters, the way you lay out your party (in a diamond grid) will provide you with various buffs and debuffs due to their personal biases against each other. Each character has special morph strikes and attacks that can be pulled off if your sync gauge (a bar at the bottom that fills when dealing damage) is filled. Lastly, while one character is active, the inactive party members regenerate HP from your main dealing damage. If one dies, they all die, and it is back to the checkpoint to try again.
Party-based combat is nothing new, but it is extremely rare in the souls-like genre. The only other games that even touch on this is Mortal Shell and Pascal’s Wager. But it is my opinion that here the system is near perfect. Once you get comfortable with the characters and the style of play, there is a deep depth to the skill at play. Picking which four party members to bring and how to best use them to succeed is satisfying. Buffing your party with acid damage as the alchemist, then switching to the thief to deal quick strikes while dodging in and out and filling your sync bar, then swapping to your lumbering tank to deal a heavy sync strike, before back off with your fighter works just as well as it sounds. The classes are all extremely balanced from what I’ve tested and satisfying… if you are willing to play the game the way it wants you to.
The “IF” is the big issue here. If you try to play this game as a standard souls-like where you only favor one build, you will not make it far in the game. None of the characters can survive very long and the attacks from enemies are relentless (especially in the second half of the game). If you just try to focus on one character, you will take damage and die. You must always be conscious of how much health and stamina your party has and remember to be aggressive when needed. The healing potion is extremely limited and does not provide much health. The main way to heal is by allowing party members to rest momentarily while dealing damage with the active character.
A World of Science and Magic
The world of Deathbound is nothing major to write home about. The game is fairly short for a souls-like, and you will only traverse a handful of areas within your playthrough. Your journey will take you from sewers to hospitals to the city streets of Akratya. It is interesting to have a souls-like game where I’m swinging a sword at a lumbering beast in a ruined baseball stadium. The enemies themselves range from members of the churches to monstrous experiments of said churches. While the game doesn’t have too many enemy types to fight, the journey is short enough that combat doesn’t truly start to get stale until near the very end. Each new zone introduces at least one new enemy (excluding the last). I never felt like any of the enemies were cheap or unfair. A few were extremely aggressive and could attack faster than the player, but it always felt like I was in control.
Unfortunately, I feel like the world was sometimes forgettable and lacked a truly memorable moment. It was hard to put my finger on it, but it felt like the game wasn’t going far enough. This was supposed to be a world in shambles where magic had risen up from the ashes. I was swinging around a great hammer dressed as a medieval knight and could change into a mage with a science staff. But then I’m just walking through a normal office building or crawling through a standard sewer. While it was fun to smash through the high rises, there just felt a moment at the end where I would have liked to see the world do more with the scenario given.
What they do provide is at least fun and feels like a post-apocalyptic sci-fi setting. The level design is competent, with many shortcuts and secrets hidden around the city. There are multiple rings and amulets that can be found as well as many consumables and upgrade materials.
The bosses are all fairly decent as well, with only one boss being a bit of a pain due to a cramped arena. Each boss has multiple phases and are satisfying to fight. How difficulty you find the bosses depends on how well you learned the morph system and how aggressive you are. But I only really struggled with the final boss.
A Gem With a Few Cracks
Deathbound won’t win any awards and isn’t the best souls-like I’ve played this year. I also don’t want to sing its praises as if it is the greatest game I’ve ever played. I have a few minor nitpicks that did hold back the game.
-The models and animations during cutscenes really show the game was made by an indie developer. The mouths don’t move when they speak (or scream), and their movement is rigid. This is a problem because the story isn’t bad. But combine this with some of the bad voice acting and it is hard to take a lot of the story seriously.
-The healing flask does not heal for enough HP to be useful and drains health from other party members. For most of the game, I completely ignored the flask because its usage was pathetic. It’s weird because if you use save the consumables, they work as healing flasks on top of giving you currency. The big ones are even strong enough to fully heal your character.
-If an enemy backed you into a wall, the camera would not know what to do and often you were fighting blind.
-Stamina is tied to HP for each character. So if you were low on health on all your characters, it was hard to regain HP because your attacks and dodges were limited now. This means that the game gets harder the lower your health was.
-There is an enemy in one of the chapters that pursues you throughout the entire level. It is nearly immortal and is treated like the Tyrant or Mr. X from Resident Evil. While the concept of this character is unique, I have been informed by the developers that he is not working as intended. He will often bug out and spawn/despawn at a moment’s notice. He also will chase you into locations he should not be allowed. Luckily, he is not very threatening when encountered alone. But if I had one major gripe with the game, this enemy and this entire section (including the boss) is the weakest section of the game.
Deathbound does a lot right over its short playthrough and I haven’t had this much fun playing an indie souls-like in a while. Until you unlock a few of the characters, the game feels lacking. I think it takes a bit to really get going and has a lot of minor issues that are mostly problems with it being an Indie developed game. But I praise any company that is willing to mix up the formula (when it works) and Deathbound has a lot of potential. I hope this isn’t the last we see of the studio. It gets my recommendation.
Final Score: 8/10
