One thing that we all have in common is death. Through our lives we inevitably lose people we love, and then one day it will be our turn. A morbid thought, but one that came to mind a few times while playing Death Howl. This a game about a mother, Ro, who is overcome with grief after the death of her son. She is not ready to let death claim him, so she travels to the spirit realm to find him and bring him back to her.
Death Howl is a roguelike deck builder where you are craft cards and create different decks to help you battle through the four regions of the spirit realm. There are five sets of cards, from the realmless cards that can be used in any region without penalty to the four-region card sets that have unique cards to deal with the challenges each one has for the player. You can mix and match cards for your decks, but using a card outside of its region incurs a penalty and uses up more mana to play them.
It is an interesting system, but the downside is the time it can take to grind out progress to make new cards. This is because of the Howls, the resource used to create both cards and teardrops. Howls are gathered by defeating enemies, but they can be lost by falling in battle and not retrieving them in time, in soulslike fashion. Once you have enough, you have a choice to craft cards where you are with howls and crafting materials to build your deck, or travel to a Sacred Grove to spend the howls to create teardrops which gives Ro new skills that can provide advantages. Sacred Groves also restore health at the cost of resetting enemy encounters. This does add an element of tactical decision making, but it also means grinding quite a lot too.
Aside from region cards, there are also region specific upgrades which means you need hundreds of howls to get all of the cards and abilities, so you will be repeating fights to get them. If you find a nest you may be rewarded with a teardrop which helps, but it may have been better to have two separate resources for cards and abilities.
Death Howl’s combat takes place on a grid, with each arena being a different size and shape depending on its location in the world. When Ro steps onto a grid you can choose a starting square, or walk off before battle commences, with the enemies already in place. Once you pick your starting square you are locked into the fight, only ending once you defeat the enemies, or die trying.
Battles in Death Howl play out in a similar fashion. Ro and enemies take turns to move around the grid and perform actions. There are various enemy types that can have a basic version and a more powerful version. Battles are about trial and error as you work out how far enemies can move, what attacks they can use, and their weaknesses. Even when you know how an enemy works there is a challenge on dealing with the way they act which can quickly switch a fight. One boss fight saw the boss summoning allies every few turns which eventually overwhelmed me because my deck was not good enough. That meant going back out into the world and grinding some more. You can fast travel around the world using Sacred Groves once you have unlocked them, so you can skip some encounters if you want to.
Your card deck has 20 cards which will appear in your hand regularly, unless they have an exhaust clause meaning they can only be used once. Cards provide melee attacks, ranged attacks, defence options, and buffs. Putting a good deck together is key as you want cards that work well together to allow for a good balance of attack and defence options.
On top of cards, you will also find Totems in the world. Totems provide additional bonuses, though can come at a cost. For example, the Beehive totem gives you extra mana but adds a bee sting to your card pile, while the pearl will provide additional defence but at the cost of discarding a card each turn.
Death Howl’s world is open to explore so you can visit the different regions in the order you want to, so you don’t end up getting stuck in one place. Aside from Ro’s main quest to find her son’s spirit, there are other quests to take up in the world. Taking one up can mean getting quest cards, and being equipped with these means you cannot fast travel. What I found a bit of a strange decision was how these cards work. If you choose not to have these cards equipped, they will return to their point of origin, instead of being put in their own inventory slot. On one hand it means you can’t use these cards in other quests, apart from the main one while you have them, but it means Death Howl forces you to go back to a quest location to reactivate it. It seems like unnecessary busy work.
From a design perspective, the world of Death Howl looks good with the various regions having a distinct style to them. The starting area is quite a dark and moody woodland but has you venture further out you will find desert like areas, to areas where rivers are flowing. I like the way it has been designed and how each region transitions into each other pretty smoothly. The card inventory UI could be better to show how many of each card you have, and making it easier to read card descriptions. At the moment, it feels a bit fiddly working out what a card does especially with different abilities attached that also need explaining. The card designs are well done though with the artwork being very good.
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