Death Howl VIDEO Review

Punishment Everywhere

HIGH Well-executed tactics and deckbuilding gameplay.

LOW Basically resetting every area I travel to.

WTF Sentient Poison Teeth

TRANSCRIPT:

Hi everyone! Eugene Sax here with another review from GameCritics.com.

There have been many metaphors for grief in videogames over the years — distorted and wound-like marks in the world of South of Midnight, how color affects the world in Gris, or the entire journey of Senua in Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. It’s a powerful emotion that lends itself well to striking imagery and connecting players with characters. Death Howl is no different in using grief as a starting point, but here it’s represented by walking the border between life and death to find a mother’s son.

Death Howl is a turn-based tactics title where players control a woman named Ro as she searches the spirit world for her son to save him from death. Players will travel through varied biomes while collecting materials and items, and fighting creatures.

When defeating enemies, players will collect death howls. These are used for permanent progression like unlocking special abilities or unique cards, or for creating cards. There’s also a soulslike element here as players don’t restore health after combat. They will need to rest at specific groves in the world in order to do so, but when their health is restored, all enemy encounters in that area are reset.

Combat takes place on a grid, where players will use cards for their actions. Cards can be movement based, melee or ranged attacks, or temporary buffs like a shield or attack boost. Each card has a mana cost, and players have a limited number of mana to use each turn. Enemies will move toward the player in most cases, but there will be obstacles and terrain to deal with in any arena. All of this slots together neatly to create a tough-but-satisfying puzzle-like style of combat.

Aside from the combat, Death Howl also presents challenge — perhaps to the point of being punishing — in its card collection and permanent progression, and it all stems from the death howls players collect.

Each enemy defeated will grant one death howl, but all cards require at least two to create. Character progression is achieved by using those howls to level up at groves in ever-increasing amounts. It might cost you nine howls one time, but ten, the next, and then eleven the time after that, and so on. Players have to make the hard choice of using these howls to either make new cards or level up. Regardless of what they choose, it’s going to require a lot of grinding through combat encounters either way.

Another type of punishment happens when players go to new realms.

Each realm is composed of two or three smaller biomes, and many of the cards are tied to these specific realms. Using cards outside of their respective realms incurs a penalty in combat. For example, a swampland card that costs two mana suddenly costs three if I use it outside of the swamplands.

Additionally, any progression players make to Ro’s abilities are also tied to the realms. In one instance, a damage boost ability Ro obtains in the swampland is lost outside of that specific realm. In Howl’s defense, progression abilities do change between each realm (trading the swamplands damage buff for an area-of-affect attack in the mountains, as one example), so I assume that’s why players will ultimately have to invest in each different realm, but it doesn’t make the grind any less annoying overall.

Outside of combat, players will spend time with the story connecting with Ro. As she goes through each realm, scenes with primary figures become available. Nanntok is a moose that is helping Ro, while an unnamed entity is trying to break her spirit by focusing on the death and pain she is experiencing.

There’s plenty of grief to go around though, as there are many characters who are also suffering. Nanntok is stuck in this realm after losing their daughter, a tree tries to destroy a fox by burning its own branches, and a fish with survivor’s guilt appears, just to name a couple. There’s a lot of spirituality and dreams that tie into this grief, and the tone and content are effective in the quiet moments between combat encounters.

I have a love/hate relationship with Death Howl. If I have a few bad combats, I’ll curse the game out and shut it off. When I come back a day later and have a better run, it’s easier to appreciate what the developers are doing. While I don’t exactly care for the progression and penalties tied to the cards, the symbolism and use of grief here is strong, and the sharp tactical combat is notable.

For me, Death Howl gets 8 absorbed animal souls out of 10

Rating: 8 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by The Outer Zone and published by 11 bit studios. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 10 hours of play were spent playing the game, and the game was not completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game is not currently rated by the ESRB. There are blood splatters on most attacks against enemies and on the player character. Some of the cards display somewhat gruesome artwork as well as in the world itself. Most enemies will explode into smoke when defeated as Ro absorbs their souls.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: There is text in-game, but the text is not resizable. Audio is not needed for gameplay. The game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: This game has no remappable controls, and does not offer a control diagram. All actions are controlled by mouse movement and clicks (click to move to a place on the screen, click and drag cards onto the battle grid to activate, etc.)

Eugene grew up playing other peopleâ€™s videogames. He didnâ€™t have his own console for some time, and has many memories of playing games his friends owned and beating them. Once he saved up enough money, he finally bought a Sega Genesis secondhand and started a gaming library of his own.

While Sonic and Street Fighter were great places to start, his first love was Final Fantasy X when his dad bought a PS2. Ever since, that love for gaming has evolved — there are a number of game worlds out there, and he intends to explore them all. RPG to horror, platformers to casual and everything in between — if itâ€™s available, heâ€™ll play it.

While his time is short between writing reviews, tabletop gaming, and attempting to start a cheesecake business, he has caught all 806 pokemon and can speedrun Star Fox 64 in less than 40 minutes. Heâ€™s always looking for new things to try and new challenges to conquer. You can find him on Twitter — @eugene_sax.