Honestly, I'd kind of been assuming I was the only person left who actually remembered Grasshopper's surreal 2016 roguelike Let It Die, let alone its incredibly short-lived 2022 multiplayer spin-off Deathverse.
But apparently somewhere along the way someone with money to burn decided it's a franchise, and publisher GungHo has just announced we're getting a new sequel in just a few months: Let It Die: Inferno.
The original is one of those unique oddities of gaming. On paper it's a sort of roguelike with soulslike-style action combat in an urban horror world. But really that doesn't even begin to describe it.
It isn't that fun to play, it runs like crap, and half its systems make no sense—but oh boy, it has personality. The first character you meet in the game is a skateboarding grim reaper called Uncle Death.
Your stable of fighters is a meat locker full of reanimated cadavers that you can slap stickers on to give them skills. You catch and eat frogs to heal. Between runs, you hand in completed quests to the most perfectly disinterested teenage girl in media history.
You should give it a go if you never tried it at the time. It's free to play, and it is worth checking out just to get a feel for the strangeness, even if you likely won't stick with it long.
Inferno certainly looks just as odd, but also like it might have smoothed over some of the original's flaws. In the original, most of the charming fun happened back at base, and the actual runs could be a bit grey and joyless. Here, the world looks rather more strange and colourful in its own right, with rocket hammers, cardboard box monsters, and what appears to be giant shrimp trying to disguise themselves as plastic dolphins.
Combat looks a lot smoother and more varied too, with dual-wielding and explosive special moves—though with only a brief bit of footage to go off, it's hard to make too firm a judgement at this point.
What I am a little skeptical to hear is that there seems to be more of a multiplayer focus this time around. Inferno is "PvEvP"—which seems to mean that you're primarily fighting NPC creatures, but you will run into hostile players during your runs too.
While the original did have some multiplayer hooks, they were asymmetrical—you could raid other players' bases, but you fought their automated defences and AI-controller fighters rather than taking them on directly, and it was all optional. Spin-off Deathverse switched to being fully multiplayer focused… and it was a huge flop, with a server shutdown announced just three months after it launched. I feel like there's a lesson somewhere in there that they don't seem to have fully learned.
But whatever happens, I'm just charmed to see this series inexplicably live on. I've long asserted that PC gaming is the home of weirdness in gaming, so Let It Die: Inferno should fit right in when it launches on December 4 later this year.
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