A Masochistic Deckbuilder That Delights Around Every Gloomy Corner
My relationship with Death Howl is imbalanced. I have so much affection for it: I’m a huge deckbuilder fan, to the point that it’s probably my genre of choice, and this is an exquisite example of one. But it hates me. Everything it does is designed to kick me while I am down. If there is a choice of two reactions to something I do in the game, it will always, without fail, pick the one that benefits me least.
Death Howl proclaims that it is a ‘Soulslike deckbuilder’, which would normally get me reaching for the sick bowl. Everything, it seems, is a Soulslike-something, so seeing the term bandied about in Death Howl made me worry. But, for once, the term is applied correctly. This is not just a difficult game: it’s a game where failure is punished, progress is removed, and you have to overcome huge spikes in challenge – often debilitating yourself in the process – to gain the biggest rewards. It very much behaves like a Miyazaki joint.
A Little Guillermo Del Toro, a Little Edgar Allen Poe
You start Death Howl as Ro, a shamanistic woman who is determined to bring her son back from the dead. The quest takes you into the Spirit World, where the grotesque and macabre are everyday.
I love the world of Death Howl. Its skull-head creatures, gelatinous blobs and rotting cadavers could have been a wee bit much, but it infuses it all with humour and subversion. You have friends here, and there’s warmth in a lot of the relationships you build. It reminds me of Grant Morrison’s take on Animal Man and Swamp Thing, with death being seen through the lens of flesh, nature and rot. There are thirteen distinct regions here, and they all have something different to say about the afterlife.
Death Howl gives you free-ish reign to explore these circles of death. For a hybrid of deckbuilder and turn-based strategy game, it’s refreshing to find that exploration is such a key component. I love how you can turn a corner and, sure, there might be some combat waiting for you, but there might also be a hidden tunnel, a map-wide puzzle to solve, or a quest-giving fish, lump of flesh or insect. I would find myself only wanting to progress from a region once I had absolutely, for sure, completed everything it has to offer.
Turn-Based Games are so Hot Right Now
Combat introduces itself via some wispy threads of a grid and some enemies. Step onto the grid and it all comes into focus, ready for you to position yourself and take your first turn. As we’ve mentioned, Death Howl is a 50/50 mix of turn-based strategy game and deckbuilder.
Attacks and movement are all done through cards, similar to games like Into the Breach. You have limited mana per turn, and limited cards, so you have to choose the cards carefully. The opening deck is simple and immediate: you have melee attacks, ranged attacks, some defense and some movement. You have enough materials to complete the first region, give or take.
Battles are often a case of warily approaching an enemy and hitting them with enough welly that they are wiped from the board and you don’t have to worry about retaliation on their turn. It doesn’t always happen that way, of course, so the enemies take turns, armouring up, attacking you, splitting via mitosis and generally being utter dicks. If I never see another burrowing weevil that escapes whenever I hit it, I will be a very happy man indeed.
It Would be a Shame if you Lost Some of That Game Progress…
It’s time to list a few ways that Death Howl hates me and you. Death Howl doesn’t explain what the enemies actually do. You have to be hit or killed by them to work that out, which is always a treat when walking into a new area. Any damage is persistent, which would normally be fine, but some bosses are hidden behind three or four battles, and you might be down to a single health pip by the time you get there. You can retreat back to a health-restoring henge, but the enemies will similarly restore themselves.
‘Howls’, the game’s currency, appears on the combat grid on occasion, and you need to waste precious movement and mana if you want to reach them. If you decide they aren’t worth it, the enemies can hoover them up and make themselves into uber-wretches. All of your choices seem to be between rocks or hard places.
You will need these Howls, as they are used to construct cards OR make progress through a skill tree. We say ‘OR’ because you can never have both – you have to choose (and you lose them if you die). You will desperately need a balance of both, because your opening deck is pretty awful, and the skill tree has oodles of beneficial stuff on it, like extra socketing space for relic-like Totems and free cards when you kill each enemy. But the Howls are given so skimpily, and you can only choose between one of the two paths.
Perhaps the most unhelpful, unfriendly design decision of all is what happens when you move to a new region. You will likely have a killer deck, honed to kill the monsters of one region. Perhaps it’s a backstab deck, designed to prioritise movement so that you can sneak behind enemies for massive damage. But the new region will have countermeasures for that: the enemies might deform the terrain, so you can’t move easily, or they will armour up to protect themselves. But Death Howl doesn’t stop there: it actively punishes you for using cards from another region. They cost 1 mana more, which makes the vast majority of them inefficient to use. You’re often back to your starting deck, working afresh to build a deck from the new region cards. We know why this mechanic is there – to stop players from using the same unbeatable deck everywhere – but we can still resent it, right?
We almost forgot: the skill tree resets from region to region. You have to make fresh progress. Because of course.
Gaining the Taste for Masochism
Like a punch-drunk boxer with blood on his lips, I loved the fight. There’s something immensely satisfying about getting a foothold in a new region. I found that there were often Rosetta Stone cards: a single card that makes a new strategy clear and enables that strategy. Get that card, and you can suddenly start notching some wins.
And I can’t tell you how much I loved some of the game’s quests. I immediately started imagining what they might be like in other games: they were that good. They ask you to undermine yourself by adding duff, almost useless cards into your deck. But if you can complete the quest’s goals while using these cards, well, an incredibly powerful Totem might be on offer. I found it too cruel that the quest would reset if I left the region, but the process of completing them when inside a region was brutally empowering.
But for all the love I have for Death Howl, I can’t help thinking it goes overboard with its player-hate. You are, after all, mostly at the whims of randomness: if you get a bad opening hand, you can be stomped and lose health that was desperately needed if you wanted to reach a boss. Cards are often discretely movement cards, attack cards and defence cards, so getting a hand with no movement, for example, can mean a limp, empty turn. Having your rewards stripped away after these random moments feels harrowing.
And sometimes the only solution is to grind. A new region means a new deck and skill tree, plus enemies that hand you your ass. The only way to make headway is to fight the same fights over and over, returning to heal afterwards, and that long, repetitive process won’t be to everyone’s taste. I sometimes stared at Death Howl on my dashboard wondering whether I was in the mood today.
A Little Less Grind. A Little More Control
With a little less grind, a little more control over the random whims of the deck, and a little more respect for my time, I think Death Howl would have been a masterpiece. It’s achingly close to one, its skeletal hands reaching out for poignancy, deft deckbuilding and sublime artistic direction. There are long moments when it is the genre at its peak.
I have all these compliments for Death Howl, but I know it resents me for making them. It hates me more than you can know.
Important Links
Enter The Spirit World In Death Howl On Game Pass, Xbox, PlayStation, And Switch – https://www.thexboxhub.com/enter-the-spirit-world-in-death-howl-on-game-pass-xbox-playstation-and-switch/
Game Pass’ Death Howl Calls Players Into The Spirit Realm – https://www.thexboxhub.com/game-pass-death-howl-calls-players-into-the-spirit-realm/
Download from the Xbox Store, via Game Pass if you like – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/death-howl/9pd9szgncmdz
There’s a Deluxe Edition too – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/death-howl-deluxe-edition/9PNR1VKQR1N7/0010
