Death Howl draws on Soulslikes to create a brutal tactics game

Death Howl draws on the language of Soulslikes to create a moody, challenging tactics game

Grief isn’t a beast you’re meant to conquer. It can stalk you wherever you go, ready to strike when you’re least expecting it to. Even when you manage to fend it off, it’s only a temporary victory. It will rise again, like a Dark Souls monster resurrected by a bonfire’s unknowable necromancy. In a struggle with no defined end, all you can do is sharpen your war strategies so that the next battles will be just a bit easier.

That knowledge is key to surviving Death Howl, a haunting tactics game launching on Dec. 9 for Windows PC, where it’s also part of the PC gaming library for Game Pass Ultimate. A story of a grieving mother wandering the woods in search of a way to resurrect her dead son sets the stage for an extremely challenging deckbuilding strategy game that draws on the language of Soulslikes to turn its hero’s trauma into turn-based challenges. It’s a thoughtful use of difficulty to communicate pain, even if a lack of tools to help manage some of its most hopeless fights eventually makes the journey more exhausting than illuminating.

Steeped in Scandinavian folklore, Death Howl drops its hero, Ro, into a sprawling spirit world as she seeks a way to revive her dead son, Olvi. It’s not as impossible as it sounds. While fighting through an opening wooded region, Ro learns that she can collect Death Howls by killing the spirits in the world and bringing them to Sacred Groves to resurrect the dead. It’s a smart way to narratively justify a Dark Souls staple, as resting at a Sacred Grove doesn’t just restore your health, but brings any defeated enemies back to life. It’s one of the many thoughtful ways that Death Howl doesn’t just borrow Soulslike staples for show, but actually seeks to contextualize them, even if its broader understanding of the genre feels shallow.

By speaking to spirits, Ro soon gets some direction. There are four Great Spirits scattered in each corner of the world. Defeating them might just be the key to bringing her son back. So begins an open-ended adventure where players are free to explore the world in any way they want and soak in minimalist pixel art landscapes that are powerfully stark. You can feel loss in that meaningful absence of detail. The further Ro explores, the more she earns Death Howls that can be used to unlock skills, discover Sacred Groves that allow her to easily fast travel around, and pick up crafting materials that both allow her to unlock and craft region-specific cards. The lack of guardrails is crucial, as it means that players can always go somewhere else and progress if they hit a wall.

And Death Howl has a whole lot of walls. The challenge lies in its turn-based battles, where Ro manages a grid full of enemies using a deck of attack and movement cards. Players only have a few action points to work with on each turn and there’s no undo action to save them, so every single decision counts. It’s a game that’s as indebted to Into the Breach as it is Dark Souls in that way. Every grid you encounter is its own puzzle to be solved by using the cards you’re dealt in the most effective order you can muster. I jab an enemy away with an attack that knocks them back a square, allowing me to hit it with a ranged attack. That ranged card requires me to discard something in my hand, so I choose a card that grants me a point of armor when it’s scrapped. From there, I can either choose to sprint into it to do a bit more damage, knowing that I won’t land a kill that turn, or use a card to sprint away a few squares to mitigate damage.

Thoughtful deckbuilding is required, but Death Howl provides no mercy. Enemies hit hard and Ro only has 20 health points. There aren’t many cards that allow Ro to heal, and getting to a Sacred Grove to bank Death Howls usually requires surviving two or three battles. To survive, you need to learn and adapt, constantly tweaking your deck to find the right balance between defense, offense, and movement. Putting together a functional deck that can wipe the floor with four spirits is gratifying, because all progress in Death Howl flows from your ability to discover new synergies rather than via rising stat numbers. Grief is a mental opponent, not a physical one.

All of that would be enough of a challenge on its own, but Death Howl is often too eager to turn the difficulty dial needlessly far. Some decisions work in a vacuum. For instance, each region has its own specific cards associated with it, and cards from other regions will cost more action points to play. That forces players to not just stick with one deck, but rather try new cards and make very intentional choices when mixing and matching decks. Restrictions like that compound with others, though. Skill trees only grant region-specific bonuses, so you’re back to square one any time you’re in a new area. Death Howls are used to buy skills, but they’re also one of the currencies needed to craft cards, so you’re left to grind the same battles multiple times if you want to grow. And of course, you drop them all when you die, because of course you do. There are Ro’s limited health points, but there are also enemies with armor-piercing attacks that can nab a chunk of that precious health with no good counter. Those enemies are unpredictable too, as there’s no way to see how far they can move across a grid in a turn — and some battlefields are so small that they can always reach you. All of that is before even getting into the climactic Great Spirit fights, which always have one more twist than you’re expecting that makes them a pain to take down even if you have a killer deck. (The layer of random luck involved with a deckbuilder only compounds all this further.)

I’m of two minds when it comes to Death Howl’s approach to difficulty. From a pure design level, it all feels overtuned to make the adventure hard in arbitrary ways. The forced grinding drags out the pace, especially because every region resets that grind back to zero. Death Howl proudly markets itself as a Soulslike, but I can’t help but feel that its understanding of the genre is superficial at times. Dark Souls presents some incredible challenges and tremendous risks, but it’s ultimately a stat-driven RPG that leaves players lots of room to grow while sharpening their own reflexes. Many games that pull from FromSoftware’s ethos tend to miss that nuance, instead just making things harder while remixing familiar staples like bonfires.

But the challenge is undeniably powerful, too. Ro’s story is gutting, as she puts herself in overwhelming danger for the chance to bring her child back. The world is built to defeat both her and the player, overwhelming them with despair. On several occasions, I just wanted to give up and let it consume me, robbing Ro of the closure she seeks. But I’d keep pressing on, for her. I’d reshape my deck, do the tedious grinding work, and try my best to remember every enemy’s nuances so that I could continue on. I wished I could expand her health or get some permanent video game upgrade that would make it all easier to manage, but grief isn’t easy. It’s not a feeling to be outgrown and overpowered; it scales with you.

Death Howl takes time and work to overcome. You may have to put it down a few times. You may give up altogether eventually. But any progress you can make is a victory worth celebrating.