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Review: Death Howl
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.
Impressions: Grounded, pt 2
While the first Impressions post for Grounded was a week ago, the reality is that I have been mainlining the game daily for the past three weeks. That first post was written based on my first dozen hours or so, but I ended up playing so much that I never got around to actually posting it. So here are my impressions about the game after some 50+ hours.
Grounded is good. Sometimes annoying. Definitely still Soulslike.
The game world continues to be a huge star of the show. Survival games sometimes have to make huge contortions to accommodate varied biomes – lava must coexist with snow and deep oceans and deserts all in the same map – but the way Grounded interweaves its own biomes is a masterclass in design. The backyard is a believable backyard. And yet going from the Grasslands to the canopy of the Hedge is a big transition. Or to the pond. Or in the sandbox, with it’s deadly Sizzle effect when you traverse the dunes without shade. These are different places, with different resources, and different challenges to overcome. And it all feels… coherent. Believable. Or at least, as believable as teenagers crafting crossbows out of grass vines and crow feathers can be.
Some aspects of the game have begun to provide friction. As you become stronger and explore further afield (ayard?), you… well, have further to go each time. Ziplines become a means of faster-ish travel, but they require a LOT of setup – constructing a vertical tower in the yard, carrying supplies to build destination anchors, and slaughtering dozens and dozens of spiders to turn their webs into silk to craft the zipline itself. Meanwhile, the only way to repair your Antlion Armor is to kill Antlions in the Sandbox, the best healing component must be farmed in the Pond, and you feel in your weary bones how much more time will get wasted with each unblocked attack you take while exploring the Upper Yard for the first time. It gets pretty exhausting, especially when you have to leave an area, inventory laden with loot, and know how much busywork is ahead of you before you can go back again.
Perhaps the better recourse would be to build multiple bases instead of one major hub. Problem with that is some of the more advanced crafting stations can’t really be moved easily. Plus, it’s arguable as to how much time you would really be saving building several bases.
In any case, I am decidedly approaching the endgame. Having achieved upgraded Tier 3 Armor and Weapons, I can say that most fights with bugs are less Soulslike than they were in the beginning. As in, I don’t have to Perfect Block every single attack in order to not die. The tradeoff, as explained earlier, is that you end up needing to farm up considerably more healing potions and items to repair your gear. Some of the bugs I am facing do indeed still pose an incredible threat even with all my gear, so don’t believe you can necessarily gear your way past everything. Plus, there are required boss fights in this game, including different Phases and novel attacks.
And this is kinda what gets me about Grounded. The setting, premise, and story do not match the gameplay. Teenagers from the 90s shrunken down and running around their backyard for flimsy story reasons leads you to believe this is a game that might appeal to younger players. On Normal difficulty, it most decidedly is not a game for younger players. Or older players that may be reflex-impaired. Every time I think I’m hot shit crushing bugs left and right, I take two unblocked hits and I’m sprinting away chugging healing potions. And this is in a game where I can hit Save after every encounter!
I have my frustrations with Grounded, but I’m still here mainlining this game for like 3+ hours every night. There isn’t anything special about the story, and yet I find myself eagerly traversing the yard to clear out the labs to get the next morsel of plot. Or, if I’m more honest, to unlock the next piece of gear and craft the latest weapons from the bones exoskeletons of my enemies. And all this feels fine to me, as there is a definitive conclusion on the other side. No “keep playing until you get bitter and jaded” purgatory here as with ARK or other survival games.
So, yeah. Grounded. Not the worst way to spend 50+ hours.
Impressions: Grounded
Grounded is a Honey, I Shrunk the Kids survival game from Obsidian, which recently graduated from Early Access. I played it for about a dozen hours during Early Access, but decided to wait until full release before diving in for real on Game Pass.
What I have discovered is… well, a fun albeit highly incongruent survival Soulslike.
To start out, the world of Grounded is amazing. You wake up in a small cave that opens out into a forest of grass and weeds that towers above you. Although there are giant juice boxes and other items to hammer home just how tiny you are, they are really unnecessary – everything about how you move around the yard, the distances involved, and of course the creatures keeps everything front and center.
Your first experiences with the yard fauna is usually benign. Aphids, Weevils, and Gnats are basically mobile food and resources. Red Worker Ants are curious about you, but only go hostile when you hit them. Same with the lumbering Lady Bug, although they will quickly one-shot you in the beginning when attacked. Mites are typically your first hostile mob, and they are only really dangerous when you’re distracted or get surrounded. But it doesn’t take a lot of exploring before you encounter the apex predators of the backyard: spiders. Orb Weavers relentlessly patrol their territory and Wolf Spiders are the terror of the night, ranging far and wide through the yard from dusk till dawn. Daylight does not offer much comfort once you journey further afield though, as you encounter Larva, Stinkbugs, Mosquitos, and more.
And this is where things go a little off the rails for me. Grounded has all the trappings of survival games, including a huge map where you can build bases just about anywhere, resources needing to be gathered, and so on. But what you are actually doing to progress at all is a series of escalating Souls-like melee encounters. I say “Souls-like” because everything revolves around performing Perfect Blocks against insect attacks, then counter-attacking. You can technically just regular block attacks (with a shield made out of Weevil meat), but you still take a significant amount of damage, can get debuffed, and eventually stunned depending on the frequency of attacks. Meanwhile, you completely block all damage even with a Pebble Axe from any enemy if you Right-Click your mouse at the correct time.
In games like ARK, there’s no Perfect Blocking a T-Rex bite. But, you can still take out a T-Rex through clever terrain and/or structure use. In Grounded, most enemies ignore most terrain that otherwise slow you down, e.g. grass stems. And even if you happen to engage from on top of something they cannot reach, your (early) ranged attacks with the bow don’t deal much damage. Indeed, since you cannot block while using the bow, the game seems to discourage any realistic use of it outside first-strike or fleeing bug scenarios. “What about flying bugs like Mosquitos?” Yeah, sure, try to get a few arrows in. But you will 100% die if you don’t perform Perfect Blocks with a regular melee weapon of some sort, even if you have the clunkiness of having to toggle between it and the bow.
The worst part, IMO, is how there isn’t much of an escape from the bug-based progression. I guess I cannot claim that it is impossible to complete the game without learning each bug’s song and dance, but it is a fact that several crafting stations require bug parts to be constructed. Again, in ARK the dinos are “soft” required because nobody has time to collect 10,000 Stone and Iron to build the goodies you want. In Grounded, you simply aren’t building a Drying Rack without Bombardier Beetle parts. I haven’t made it into any of the later Lab story areas yet, but there are plenty of bugs between me and where I think the front door is, so… yeah. Prepare to “git gud” or die trying.
(Or play on a lower difficulty, I guess.)
Overall, though? I’m still having fun. The first dozen or so hours had me running from everything more powerful than a Solider Ant, but I’m basically approaching Tier 2 equipment and a general level of confidence to take on most things. Had it not been for an Orb Weaver Jr joining the fight in defense of its momma, I would have taken one of those down already. Luckily, the game features both the default survival “fuck you” of dropping all your gear on death AND the ability to Save your game at any time. Which… is weird. I’m assuming you don’t get saves while playing Multiplayer and that’s the difference. In any case, saves won’t, er, save you from getting owned by spiders or whatever, but it at least affords you the opportunity to practice Perfect Block timing as many times as necessary to get the last bug part to craft a new Hammer or whatever.
In An Age 
Like Souls
Feb 13
Posted by Azuriel
In the past two weeks, I played a few hours of Blasphemous and Salt & Sanctuary. Both of these games are in the increasingly crowded 2D Soulslike genre, made famous by Dark Souls (or Demon Souls if wish). As I was farming some currency to level up a bunch of times in Salt & Sanctuary – and before remembering I had previously played the game for 10 hours a few years ago – I had a thought. I have played a lot of Soulslike games over the years… and not actually Dark Souls. That’s weird, right?
So, it’s happening.
Not certain whether I’m going to chronical this shit, or just give the occasional summaries. Not much oxygen left in the room between Elden Ring and decades of Youtube videos of people beating the entire Dark Souls trilogy without taking a single point of damage while using a DDR dance pad as their controller. That might be two separate videos. Whatever.
If you want to see me “Git Gud” or otherwise maintain my adequate levels of Gud, buckle up.
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Tags: Dark Souls, Git Gud, Soulslike, What Could Possibly Go Wrong?