In 2024, being a soulslike must be a lot of pressure. Not only are you being compared with some of the most popular and highly regarded games ever made, including the expansion to one of the greatest games of the generation coming out months before, but you’re surrounded by games of similar style looking to make a name for themselves. Deathbound follows the strategy of a lot of what you’ll find among it in the same tag on Steam: a dark world ruled by secrecy, and a stamina based sword swing system that turns battling dangerous foes into a game of patience and pattern recognition. It does struggle at nailing these things consistently, even before considering the ups and downs of the novelties it brings to the well-worn genre, but it does charm with it hits just enough to soften the blow of its misses.
THE thing that makes Deathbound stand out in a field of games that might look and feel similar at first blush are the essences, the many characters that meld into a bizarre gestalt of consciousnesses that bicker with one another constantly, but also strengthen (or sometimes worsen) one another’s weaknesses in combat. Instead of having one static avatar which stats you can spend experience on that make a chinese takeout menu of weapons with various different levels of effectiveness in your hands, individual characters forced to take turns sharing the same moral coil provide different offensive and defensive options. This provides far fewer opportunities to explore the weirder sides of min-maxing and build theory, but it does allow for an experience that feels reasonably challenging in a way that is acutely tuned to the player. As with more linear action games of old, the dungeon you explore knows what kind of tools you’ll have at your disposal because it’s designed to make you use those tools to the fullest, unlike more open ended action rpgs these days where the kind of playstyle you choose is its own difficulty slider.
Each of the essences – you’ll find seven in total – excel at some specific. Bloodthirsty zealot Therone’s defense is solid as a rock, and is the perfect guy to take point into uncharted locations. Ranged magic from Haodai can keep consistent damage up from a safe distance, or if you really want to take a risk, use the residual heat casting spells creates to blow you and your enemies to bits. You can assign up to four of these characters at a time and switch between them at the touch of a button. Thanks to the sync system, which allows you to chain attacks and dodges together while syncing, there is an extra layer of strategy to essence selection akin to a tag fighting game like DBFZ. Though each character has a different tag in attacks and effects, I never felt like I had a good handle of which character was coming in. Eight or so hours in, I still don’t really know what determines the tag order.
Every character feels pretty strong and capable, but no single one of them can spend too much time on the field because attacking and dodging takes lots of stamina, meaning you’ll spend way more time waiting for good opportunities to strike than simply overwhelming your enemies with attacks. Stamina is also tied to health, meaning the less health an essence has, the less stamina they have. They can regain health passively when they aren’t the active character, but this happens at a pretty slow pace, meaning any time a member of the squad takes real damage, it puts a lot of pressure on the team as a whole. Your flask style healing item will restore the health of the active character, but will take health from your inactive characters to do so. All of this risk means that teamwork really does make the dream work in Deathbound, and all of the switching and slashing really worked for me, too.
Characters can synergize with one another based on what order you bind them, so long as they actually like one another when placed adjacently on the tiled punnett square-shaped essence chart. If two essences next to one another don’t get along, then they’ll be in conflict. Both synerized and conflicted warrior gain passive buffs or debuffs, and I spent very little time fussing over them. Same goes for the skill tree, which is a limited web of general buffs for all of your characters which stretch out into sub-trees that get more fighter-specific. Lots of these feel like just making numbers go up without any real noticeable change in strength, especially when it comes to stats for which there really is no explanation, like whatever attack weight is supposed to be. This sort of generalized stat boosting also makes my eyes glaze over when looking at the accessories. Even though there is some agency related to how you upgrade the rings and trinkets you find, allowing you to mix and match between two different tracks of buffs a total of five times between them, I really couldn’t tell if I was being helped all that significantly or not by the equipment, and didn’t want to risk upgrade materials to find out I made the wrong choices down the road if I did start to see something.
All this stands in stark contrast to the specific character traits that you can unlock with memory points. Every trait you activate, like giving Lullia an extra life if she falls or adding poison to Anna’s melee attacks, adds a strong tool to your arsenal that feels immediately strong, even if the process of finding memory points in the world is a hassle, since they only appear if the right character is leading your group of wayward spirits.
The cast adds a lot of texture to what is a largely bland story in a world that is a dark mix of fantasy and science fiction. Opposing cults, one that worships true and final death and one that pursues eternal life by any means, have torn a massive techno-medieval city to pieces in their struggle against one another and your heroes are all members of the various factions who were caught in the crossfires. These characters aren’t always well written or interesting, some are even straight up unlikable, but their often pretty simple personalities do help to make the lofty lore of the surrounding conflicts more approachable. Listening to two people who would certainly kill each other if they weren’t stuck together argue does help set the stakes of all this post-apocalyptic carnage.
It doesn’t really help the world itself feel cohesive, though. The jist of locations your in is that they used to be a prosperous stone and metal techno city and is now a broken place covered in haphazard wooden fortifications put up by the occupiers. It’s a jarring clash of styles, maybe purposefully so, but I never came to love any of it. Character and monster designs are hit and miss too. Your regular soldiers, mostly of the Cult of Death, are all pretty standard sword and sorcery knights. The abominations of the essancemancers are usually more dynamic and feral. Some even surprise, maybe not always in form but in function, like when I saw a giant Slender Man-esque beast and was shocked to learn the hard way that it’s arms can stretch across the length of the room I was in. Bosses can occasionally meld form and function in a way that tells a story like The Impending Truth, who starts the fight trying to figure out where you are without to use of its eyes or ears and gradually regains it’s senses as the fight progresses. Not enough bosses do this mind you, of the handful i’ve seen this is the only one that does anything more than just be big and have lots of attacks, but Im staying open minded as I continue my progress.
All soulslikes have a similar camera issue that turns your point of view into a merry-go-round if depending on your distance between you and your lock on target. Deathbound sometimes ups the ante, the camera snapping around with a mind of its own, one that is behaving as if it wants to guide you towards important things happening – an enemy around a corner, perhaps. But just as often it would spin itself unexpectedly, throwing me off my path and sending me trudging into a wall if I’m lucky (off of a ledge if I wasn’t). It’s manageable on the whole, and really only a problem in tight spaces, but its always interesting to see how many mechanical tropes live on through a genre just by way of the similarities in which they’re built, regardless of tone and theme.
Deathbound likely isn’t going to change your mind about games like this if you’re already wary of them. If you can’t get into the very cream of the crop like Elden Ring or Dark Souls, then something like this, that is at least a tier below in quality in every way, isn’t going to show you something you haven’t seen before. But for Souls Heads looking for a fun experiment with the formula, I think character morphing combat is a fun twist that you won’t find anywhere else.
