It’s Inspired by… Don’t Call it a Soulslike - A Review of Deathbound for the PS5
Using old games to classify newer games is a sticky wicket for me: Metroidvania, Roguelike, (sigh)… Soulslike. I never called any of the Stone Temple Pilots’ songs Nirvanalike, but some of their songs DID sound like Nirvana. I saw The Meg in theaters (still waiting for Warner Bros. or Jon Turteltaub to send a refund and an apology note), but it never occurred to me to call it a Jawslien due to the suspense building slowly. There is a point where a subgenre classification becomes utterly meaningless categorization. Even though the Deathbound promotional materials describe it as a Soulslike game, that does it and its small team of Brazilian developers a great disservice. Unfortunately, in this instance utilizing the moniker serves to pigeonhole or hogtie it with vague comparisons rather than to celebrate the design risks taken or the things it does extremely well.
Similarly, the word difficult being used to describe a video game has ALWAYS bothered me. I never thought about how hard a game was while I was playing it, the fun was in figuring out the moves, the patterns, and the best approaches to take in order to reach the end and beat the game. As a child of the arcade generation, perhaps my perspective is slightly skewed. In those days a game was far more literally “pay to win”… you just needed to invest enough of your pocket full of quarters. In that sense the cost of any arcade game, beginning to end, was on a sliding scale; some would pay more for the experience and your other, more seasoned players would play less. Designers of games have always talked about trying to give players “a sense of challenge and accomplishment;” however, I posit that the balance of enjoyable game mechanics and a compelling story are far more important than a seemingly arbitrary difficulty designation. I have never stopped playing a game that was too challenging, but I have stopped playing every single game in my lifetime when I have lost interest.
The story of Deathbound takes place in the world of Zieminal—a setting where the downfall of a technology focused civilization has been replaced by one that is focused on the faith and devotion to Goddess Life and her sister Goddess Death. A deception between the sisters has plunged humankind into a feudalistic, medieval Dark Age where the Church of Death and the Cult of Life are engaged in a violent war of ideals. The Church of Death crucifies and publicly burns non-believers; the Cult of Life turns willing and unwilling humans into grotesque monsters while they experiment with perfecting immortality. There is no clear good or evil side, and this is where your story begins.
As The Prisoner of a Thousand Faces (actually seven), your character reluctantly begins their journey in the world. As this entity, you can assimilate the spirit essences of the recently departed and transform into them at will thereafter. You start by absorbing Therone Guillaumen, The Crusader of Death, but as you progress you’ll eventually have the option to absorb The Assassin, The Prodigy, The Spear of Vengeance, The Butcher, The Unbeatable Monk and finally… The Spymaster. Each essence (character) has its own distinct set of four moves, which are assigned to the triggers and bumpers of the DualSense controller by default. Four may not sound like many, but when you include the ability to seamlessly morph between fighting styles while battling enemies, there is a good deal of variety. Essence dependent, all of the moves are either weapon or magic based, save one… CAPOEIRA (the world NEEDS more RPGs featuring Capoeira)! In beautiful succession, all of the styles flow together into a satisfyingly deadly dance of carnage and bloodshed.
When found in the game world, a save point is called a Phylactery. After you activate it, resting there will restore the health of each of your essences, but you can also rearrange your character selection or perform a number of upgrading activities for your team. Only four essences may be bound to you simultaneously, and based on their orientation in a diamond, you may receive adjustments to your stats or special abilities. Bonuses come in the form of Synergies and Conflicts. Generally, the alignment of an essence with either side of the sisterly struggle and their binding position within the diamond determines whether there is a Synergy or a Conflict. Adjustments from Synergies are buffs and from Conflicts consist of one buff and one debuff.
As enemies are defeated they will give experience points and sometimes items. With the experience points you gain from your battles you can do two things at a Phylactery. First, you can increase your level and improve your stats for all of your essences by filling out your skill tree. Second, when used in conjunction with Mystic or Ancient upgrade items, you can improve the bonuses on your wearables. Two rings and one relic can be equipped at a time, and each one you find has a Mystic (green) Bonus and an Ancient (cyan) Bonus that will apply to all of your essences when equipped. The wearable can be upgraded up to 5 times to improve the Mystic, Ancient, or both bonuses. The dropped or found items you gather can range from buffs, to throwables, to healing items, to upgrade items. You can select up to five of these items (except the upgrades) to be available for quick selection while you fight.
At a Phylactery, you are also able to add talents to each of your essences. As you proceed through each of the city of Akratya’s seven unique locales, you’ll find spots via audio clue that can trigger memories if you have the correct essence bound to you at the time. Finding and “playing” them at these spots will grant the corresponding essence with a Memory Point to spend on a talent. Unlike level upgrades, talents will only affect a single essence, but they can add some pretty useful skills or effects to your character. One that I found invaluable was Iulia’s Playing Possum talent which allows a single respawn and restoration to half health after a defeat. When trying to determine the most effective way to take down a boss, PP can be a tremendous time and experience saver.
For the most part the gameplay and storyline are linear. The world building and narrative bits are delivered predominantly through the viewing of memory sequences featuring ghostly settings and characters layered on top of the real world or the inner dialog between the essences which inhabit your body. The voice acting of each essence comes off as “over the top” at times, but it isn’t overly distracting or detrimental to the telling of Deathbound’s tale.
The locales are intelligently designed and “loop back” by unlocking doors or passages, so you won’t have to go through an entire level from beginning to end if you perish mid-level. Each area is incredibly compact, so a mapping mechanism is not necessary to traverse an area. One detriment to this efficient use of space is that frequently there are spots where you are fighting in such close quarters that it can be very difficult to hit the enemy where you want… especially with targeting engaged. The automatic, next target feature didn’t work like expected either, sometimes targeting enemies below or further away from me. In my playthroughs I found that targeting was only useful for boss fights and very fast enemies, so I tried to keep it off as much as possible.
Does Deathbound share a few gameplay elements in common with other Soulslike games? Absolutely, but I would say this game is “inspired by” far more than it “IS” a Soulslike. If you approach Deathbound with preconceived notions about what the Soulslike subgenre should be, you may not enjoy your time with it; however, if you keep an open mind you may be as pleasantly surprised as I was. The small development team at Trialforge not only did a fabulous job with the audiovisual elements of the game, they took a big risk on the combat system which really paid off for me in the fun department once I had absorbed enough of the essences to fill my diamond. If you can see past a few of its aforementioned shortcomings and work around a technical issue or two, you should be able to enjoy this solid 20+ hour long ARPG with a unique and disturbing story, wonderfully thematic music, fun game mechanics, and an appropriate level of challenge.
For more information about Deathbound and the developer Trialforge Studio…
http://www.trialforgestudio.com/en/
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