Death Howl is a mean game. It deals with some pretty tough themes, so I wasn’t expecting an easy time, but I also wasn’t expecting such a steep challenge either. It’s an isometric soulslike adventure game, with turn-based combat on a grid-like map, and it kind of hates you. Or at least, it seems that way.
Set in a Slavic world of darkness and nature, Death Howl casts you as Ro, a mother grieving the loss of her child and prepared to tackle any obstacle or terror to bring him back. It’s immediately grim, even when a magical eldritch force grants Ro the power to do just that – because the power comes at the cost of her sanity and humanity, and will pitch her against nameless horrors over and over again.
Initially, Death Howl feels quite simple. You have a map that highlights the location of enemy encounters, nests, and Sacred Groves, where Ro can rest, heal, and invest the energies she has gleaned to improve her abilities. It also resets enemies, which is where a lot of the difficulty comes from.
See Death Howl has no heals, at least not at the start, and Ro is comparatively weak when faced with the mutated horrors of the dark forest. Death drains her of “Howls”, the haunting cries of defeated enemies that are emitted when they die and harvested like Souls or Blood Echoes.
You can of course retrieve them, but only by engaging with the enemy that killed you again, which means if you lose your Howls to an insurmountable enemy, you’re kind of stuck. Also, every time you heal at a Sacred Grove, the enemies respawn, replacing the obstacles in your path that you already struggled to overcome once.
Ro’s abilities come from her deck of cards, which you will have a drawn selection of when a fight begins. Initially, your options are severely limited, with a few weak attacks, an even weaker ranged attack, and the ability to sprint. You have five action points which must be used to spend cards, and when you’re out it’s the enemy’s turn. What stacks it against you is that the enemies can often hit you from really far away, or target you with debuffs from anywhere on the map. Effects like poison and other DoT attacks are a nightmare early on, and it really does feel like a battle of attrition.
And this is my main issue with Death Howl: it’s unnecessarily hard. And there are those who will play it for exactly this reason, and more power to them, but I found it difficult to even enjoy the experience. It’s such a miserable time that even when I did claw a victory only to immediately die in the next fight, or have to limp back to heal and then do it all again, I just felt disheartened.
You can harvest body parts from enemies or pick ingredients from the world to craft new cards, and so perseverance will eventually see you develop an arsenal that includes armour, debuffs, and evasion moves, as well as more ranged attacks and damage-dealing combos, but the grind for new cards is steep and unforgiving.
Mileage may vary of course, and whether or not you like the hauntingly minimalist pixel art or not may have an effect on your enjoyment. I appreciate the tone, with muted colours on dark or drab backgrounds that effortlessly convey a sense of imminent dread, but it won’t be to everyone’s taste. The sound design is similarly minimalist, which creates a wonderful sense of atmosphere as you die and die and die again.
Death Howl is a tough game that rewards your perseverance with more challenge, and for fans of iron-tough soulslikes and deceptively complex tactics games, it’s a definite gem, but I found it too relentlessly grim and punishing to enjoy for any length of time.
