Death Howl is an impossible and brilliant blend of soulslike, turn-based strategy, and deckbuilding, and you can try it for free now
I’ll admit I rolled my eyes a bit at Death Howl’s self-proclaimed genre, “soulslike deckbuilder”. Reporting on PC games can feel a bit like wading through word salad sometimes, and it’s hard to imagine how two genres so radically different could possibly be combined. But I’m not too proud to admit my first impression was wrong here. Not only does Death Howl bring the two together beautifully, it’s also a really excellent turn-based strategy game to boot.
The game begins in prehistoric Scandinavia, with a grieving mother entering the spirit world to try and retrieve her deceased son. In the ethereal forest she finds herself in, the boy has taken the form of a deer—and she must make her way through a forest full of hostile animal spirits to find him.
You’re able to explore this realm freely, but many paths are blocked by enemies—start one of these encounters, and the muted forest environment is replaced with a foreboding black and red grid before the fight begins. These isometric turn-based strategy battles are the meat of the game, and definitely Death Howl at its cleverest.
Each turn, you start with five energy, and draw a hand of cards from your deck. Each card enables an action for a cost in energy—initially a crude selection, including throwing a rock at a foe, shielding yourself with a lump of wood, or pushing the target back with your staff. But crucially, movement also costs energy—one for every square moved—and positioning is all-important.
Where you stand in relation to enemies at the end of your turn is life-or-death. Birds, for example, shoot projectiles in a straight line. If they have to move, they’ll only shoot one—but if you’re already in the line of fire when their action starts, they’ll hit you twice. Similarly, boars love to charge—it’s often safest to be adjacent to them, because if they’re in line with you and multiple spaces away, they’ll build momentum and slam into you for increased damage.
You’re tipped off to dangers like these by a red exclamation mark above the head of any enemy in a position to pull off its optimal attacks, but the specifics have to be deduced in play, and with no undo button it’s very possible to end up in the path of one accidentally without enough energy left to avoid it. Knowledge is power—the more you fight (and fail), the more you learn the patterns of each enemy and how they might be countered.
As in a more typical soulslike, the result is a wonderful sense of progression in the player themselves, rather than just the character. Your first time encountering a new enemy is likely to be brutal and difficult—it might take several tries to beat, and even then only scraping through with a sliver of health left. But returning to that same enemy again, you find yourself dancing around it with ease, slaying it without taking a single hit. It’s not because you’ve simply levelled up your stats—you do gain in power and unlock new cards, but gradually, and often in a way that simply opens up other strategies rather than simply making you stronger. No, it’s because your hard work has closed a knowledge gap, and you are quickly mastering your environment.
It creates a wonderful combination of simplicity and depth, boiling the feeling of soulslike combat down to core concepts. In Dark Souls, you have a straightforward set of actions—light attack, heavy attack, roll, block, move—but only limited time to use them before your enemy reacts, and your choices (right or wrong) each have a huge impact. It’s the same here, simply with a hand of cards instead and a limited pool of energy creating the decision space instead.
Exploration isn’t quite as substantial as in one of FromSoftware’s sprawling, layered environments, but the way paths are gated by enemies is used to clever effect. Healing at a stone circle (Death Howl’s equivalent of a bonfire) naturally respawns all enemies on the map, once again blocking off paths you’ve previously cleared. But you’re free to teleport between any stone circles you’ve already visited, which effectively makes them your checkpoints. Progressing to different parts of the map, then, becomes a question of what gauntlets you think you’re ready to run. Can I defeat this encounter, this one, and a boss fight without having to retreat and heal in-between, or do I need to push in other, seemingly less dangerous directions first and see what new resources I can gather?
Again, like a classic soulslike, it’s pushing you towards perfection. Beating a group of enemies for the first time is its own victory—but if it leaves you bloodied and bruised, then the road ahead from there is risky. You haven’t really secured your foothold until you can beat them with less of a cost, leaving you fresh for whatever challenge lies beyond them.
In a turn-based strategy game rather than a real-time action game, there is a danger of the repetition being more grating—but Death Howl anticipates that neatly. When you die, you simply respawn right next to the fight that killed you (restored to whatever health value you were at when the fight started), instead of all the way back at a stone circle, allowing you to experiment with strategies without feeling penalised.
And fights are often recontextualised in interesting ways. Approaching one from the opposite direction when back-tracking, for example, starts you on the opposite side of the grid, creating a quite different fight with the same foes. Sidequests add further wrinkles. In the forest, I found a lost bluebird that needed reuniting with its favourite tree. It would fly away if I teleported, forcing me to succeed at a new combination of encounters to reach my goal, and it acted as a curse in my deck—if I drew the bluebird card and couldn’t get rid of it before my turn ended, it would revive a random enemy. This simple combination of effects created a new gauntlet for me to test myself against, combining encounters that I hadn’t had to fight in a row before and encouraging me to remix my deck around mitigating an unexpected disadvantage.
As I reach the end of the forest, the free demo comes to an end—but I’m given a glimpse at an intriguingly large and varied world map, hinting at an impressive scale for the final game. Death Howl won’t be for everyone—its slow pace and difficult challenge demand patience, and not everyone will be interested in repeating fights in search of the perfect strategies. But after just a couple of hours with it, I already think this is a potential GOTY contender for 2025—a wonderfully clever and effective hybrid of two genres I thought would never meet.
