Death Howl is a self-described “Soulslike deck builder” that I completed in about 24 total hours on Game Pass. It features low-fi visuals, a trippy pre-historic Scandinavian story, deck building combined with grid-movement, and some evocative and deadly enemies.

The general gameplay is you moving Ro around the spirt-world landscape in a click-to-move way, collecting resources laying around, and then encountering the outline of a grid near some static enemies. Cross the grid and you will see the claustrophobic fighting arena, which enemies are present, and any special terrain. At this point, you can exit the battle without penalty. Choosing a starting square (based on which direction you came from) will begin combat.

The fights are relatively quick, brutal affairs. You start with five energy, with movement consuming one energy per square, and the cards consuming the card-specific amount. You can glean a little bit of information from hovering over the evil spirits, but it is limited to their movement range and if they have certain buffs. It is actually quite frustrating how little information you are given during these fights, as you do not even know ahead of time which enemies will go first. Into the Breach this ain’t. At the end of your turn, you discard your hand, the enemies take their turns, and then you draw more cards. Defeating all enemies awards you with both additional resources and “death howls,” which are necessary to craft more cards.

Incidentally, the whole “Soulslike” marketing basically describes what happens when you die/save the game. If you die in a given battle, you come back to life with the same HP right outside of the grid of the battle you lost. What you lose are any accumulated death howls, which are now floating on a random combat square. Should you start the fight over, you can recollect them, or an enemy will get a huge buff if they walk over them instead. To save and/or heal your HP, you must navigate to a Sacred Grove (e.g. campfire) and convert any death howls into a progression currency. This process will also reset ALL enemies on the map. Luckily, you can freely fast-travel to any previously-unlocked Sacred Grove, so you are generally only ever 2-3 fights away from a save point.

Your deck building options are limited to start… and kinda stay limited. Decks have to be at least 15 cards but no more than 20. You can have no more than 5 cards that have the Exhaust keyword (e.g. one-time use per battle). As you collect resources, you’ll hit thresholds at which unlock four more cards for the specific Realm that you are navigating; actually crafting these cards to be put into your deck require the consumption of resources and death howls. The Realm-specific cards are almost always better than the generic Realmless cards you start with, but are generally keyed to a certain style of play. For example, the beginning Realm of Distorted Hollows features a lot of discard-style synergy or cards that do bonus stuff if it kills and enemy. Meanwhile, cards from the Realm of Hostile Plains focus on movement-based synergy or cards that do bonus stuff if it’s the first card you play in a turn.

A limiting wrinkle is that as you move around the four Realms, cards not of that Realm cost 1 more energy to use. This generally makes it close to impossible to leverage previously-unlocked cards to jumpstart your fights in a new zone, but some exceptions do exist. For example, some 0-cost cards are still good at moving around the battlefield at 1-energy. Considering that by the end of the first zone I had a deck capable of playing dozens of cards per turn, I did actually appreciate the game forcing me to try new strategies as I progressed. It can be somewhat annoying though having to play with jank until you unlock enough Realm-specific cards though.

Overall, I enjoyed the first 16 hours (of 24) of Death Howl, but it definitely started to drag after a while. Each Realm has three maps, and each map generally has side quests with interesting card rewards and “Nests” that can contain slottable Relics to enhance your strategies. Or they can just contain the progression currency which you could easily farm from simple enemies. Fighting 8-10 battles to complete side-quests only to be given more of the same currency you already earned completing those same battles feels terrible. If the devs could have some visual indication on these quests/Nests that something special is in them, that would have been great.

If you’re a fan of deck building games with a movement grid, I say give Death Howl a shot. This isn’t a roguelike and won’t scratch the Slay the Spire itch, but it gets close. Just… stop when you’re done, IMO.