Let It Die: Inferno Preview – Uncle Death returns to smash up the roguelike

If you call your game Let It Die, you’re sending a clear message to your players. The thing is, the first Let It Die game – released all the way back in 2016 – probably did want you to die, because its free-to-play business model meant that if you died, you could pay real-world money to revive yourself.

Lucky for us, that didn’t really catch on in a wider sense – imagine if Elden Ring charged you each time you died? – but it caught on enough that Let It Die is now entering its 32nd season and remains one of the most unique FTP titles we’ve ever seen. It’s little surprise then to herald the arrival of its direct sequel, Let It Die: Inferno, but this is now a roguelike that’s taking everything good about the original and turning it into a full-price premium game. A Let It Die game without the microtransactions? That’s definitely worth talking about.

Roguelikes weren’t really all that popular back in 2016, so in some ways, the first Let It Die was seriously ahead of its time. Given that pretty much everything is a roguelike now, it feels as though Let It Die: Inferno is coming out at the perfect time, ready to hoover up all the more recent fans of the genre. Producer Shin Hideyuki told us, “Absolutely, this was the best time for it. In the original game, it had the concept where if you die, it’s over. And that concept in this game is even more pronounced. Death is still something that’s kind of taken lightly because the more you die, the stronger you will become, but it will still be an over-the-top, overwhelming death.”

We didn’t get to see all that much narrative framing through our hands-on, but given that the original was largely centred on you being at the whim of the idiosyncratic Uncle Death, that’s probably all the motivation you need. Uncle Death himself – or at least a member of the team who was wearing the rubber mask – told us, “He’s going to be making appearances in the game in that aspect. So, the electricity you experienced yesterday [they strapped me to a machine that electrocuted me when I took damage] was all him, and anything you see in the Let It Die world is probably his idea. In many ways, this is the game made for Uncle Death and, sort of, by Uncle Death if you will.”

That’s all getting a bit meta, but what is clear is that the team at Supertrick Games are thoroughly set on embodying and imagining the game that its iconic frontman would make. Given that they spun off from the original Grasshopper Manufacture devs, and that the follow-up Deathverse: Let It Die took the franchise into a creative cul-de-sac, it’s not all that surprising that they want to be true to the original ethos of Let It Die. Through our hands on, that seems to have been achieved with plenty of success.

While you still begin the game with a spot of character selection, Let It Die: Inferno sees those choices become more curated, and the ‘Body of the Day’ basically has you choosing between different builds with different starting stats. Through our demo, Timothy has balanced stats and healing skills, while Pearl specializes in offense, and has skills that can break through enemy defenses with ease. In action, Pearl certainly had the upper hand in our playthrough, so much so that I accidentally make it all the way to the boss without levelling her up, but one of the team members reassured me that death at any point is a good thing.

This being a roguelike, death is the point of the game. As you die, you can turn some of the accumulated experience or currency into permanent upgrades, meaning that the next time out, things are going to be easier, and you’re going to make it just a little bit further. They’ve also retained a flavour of Deathverse: Let It Die with a Battle Royale-like system that sees you fighting against a clock, trying to make as much progress and then escape before the area becomes utterly toxic to your character.

The team told us, “This time you have escape pods that are inside the levels, and they’re placed randomly through every run. You have a time limit in which you have to reach these escape pods to get out of the level. You might just completely luck out and get an escape pod right near you. So that is just good luck, but there are times where you will absolutely not find one, and in those times it is definitely going to be very challenging.”

The roguelike framing for Let It Die: Inferno feels like it’s stronger than ever, and that fight, that rush to collect experience within the time span, just works incredibly well. I really wanted to push the boundaries, and after my death to the first boss, all I wanted to do was jump back in with another run. That bodes very well.

After the last game’s short-lived success, it was clear that the team didn’t want to repeat the same mistakes, but there were still important lessons to be learned from it. They told us, “In Deathverse, the previous title, we couldn’t have PvE – it was more PvP – so that’s something we wanted to include. In Let It Die: Inferno, we’ve managed to put in the PvE aspect while retaining the PvP aspect from Deathverse that players liked.”

That sense of legacy, and that sense of continuation, runs very clearly through Let It Die: Inferno. The combat, the inventory management, and the overarching setup remain absolutely recognisable, but this is the 2025 reimagining of that original vision. The visuals are fantastic – as you’d expect with a jump in generations and the shift to Unreal Engine 5 – and there’s a newfound vibrancy and energy to the game which wasn’t there before. That unique weirdness, that Grasshopper Manufacture flavour, is still here, but it’s been refined and reinvigorated for the modern day.

The key improvement is the game’s shift in business model. From all of the people I’ve spoken to about Let It Die, it’s clear that the number one turn-off was its free-to-play setup. It was clearly an inviting and hardcore roguelike action game – not quite a soulslike, but certainly a challenging hack and slash – and its gameplay loop was perfectly paced to draw you in. It was when it started asking you for money as you died that many players switched off. Hopefully, players will remember just how much fun the combat was and buy into the idea of Let It Die: Inferno as a full-priced title. On early impressions alone, it’s well worth the asking price.

Let It Die: Inferno is due for release on PlayStation 5 and PC on December 3rd, 2025.