Deathbound is an upcoming soulslike experience from Brazilian developer Trialforge Studio. I got a chance to play the demo for the game and I have to say, while it definitely still needs some polishing, I’m pretty impressed.
Wallflower Writing was provided a review key for the Deathbound demo. This is not sponsored, nor does this influence our review of the game.
Deathbound
Deathbound is an action RPG souslike set in a world called “Zieminal” where faith and science are at war. The biggest thing that sets Deathbound apart from other games — at least so far — is its essence and absorption mechanic, as well as the party system.
Absorbing Essence
So what exactly is essence? Well, basically, it’s the life force of dead enemies. Occassionally you’ll stumble upon glowing corpses that you can interact with and absorb the essence of that corpse.
Absorbing essence allows you to harness the powers and abilities of that fallen warrior and add them to your party. This is definitely going to be one of the highlights of the finished game — the feeling of finding a new essence and being able to find new ways to play the game will really help add to the overall longevity of Deathbound.
Party System
In what Trialforge Studio says is a first for soulslikes, Deathbound utilizes a 4-heroes party system that actually makes for some pretty interesting gameplay. In the Deathbound demo, players will come across a total of five fallen warriors that you can absorb and add to your party, each with their own unique skillset and combat style, with more being available to players in the full game.
The characters available in the Deathbound demo are:
- Anna Lepus (Disenchanted assassin)
- Olivia Heinz (Chancellor to the King of Krulezgon)
- Agharos of Meriva (Remorseless fighter)
- Therone Guillaumen (Living sword of Goddess Death)
- Julia Tchevlaskia (Cult of Life Freedom Fighter)
So far, my favorites are Julia and Agharos. I love using Julia’s spear to keep some distance between myself and the target, and Agharos’ massive hammer deals some pretty gnarly damage alongside his ability to take a hit. I have yet to get the hang of Olivia and her spellcasting ability, it just takes so long for her spells to cast and they have such short range it’s basically giving yourself a handicap by playing her. Which is really unfortunate because I love spellcasting classes, so hopefully she gets buffed pretty heavily by the time the game launches.
The party system in Deathbound was pretty enjoyable, it kept the game feeling fresh and exciting with each new character unlock and upgrade, but it’s not without its drawbacks. Namely, the time it takes to swap to a different character — also known as Morphing.
Morphing
In Deathbound, swapping your character is called “Morphing,” and it’s an essential aspect of the gameplay. Each character or “essence” has its own health and stamina, so when one character gets low on either bar, you can swap to another one and keep up the fight.
As someone who is prone to giving up on soulslikes because of the sheer amount of dying involved this is a huge help, because it allowed me to disengage and take a second to think without having to worry about being one hit away from death in the middle of a boss fight. However, it doesn’t mean you’re completely invincible. If you let even one of your characters’ health drop to zero — you’re dead.
While I do love morphing in the game, it’s certainly not without its drawbacks. The time it takes to actually morph into another character is abysmally slow. Slow to the point of being utterly useless sometimes and actively getting you killed. I don’t expect morphing to be instant, but it takes a solid couple of seconds before you’re actually able to do anything — like dodge or parry — after hitting the morph button.
I really hope Trialforge takes a look at this and maybe drops that time down just a bit, or maybe make players invulnerable within a certain time frame during or after morphing. It just needs some sort of protection to feel viable.
Deathbound story
Aside from an opening cutscene at the beginning of the game, the demo doesn’t really show off much of the Deathbound story at all. All you really get from playing it is that there’s a group of people that worship Death and there’s a group of people that worship Life, and the life worshippers are basically outcasts that are being hunted down.
It turns out, according to the story overview, Goddess Life deceived her sister, Goddess Death, eons ago. Life stole Death’s powers to create the First Men, a race of beings unable to experience death. As they lived for thousands of years, they created a powerful and advanced civilization with magic-like technology and cities that spanned continents.
Enraged by her sister, Death seduced the immortal beings who, after becoming overwhelmed by a never-ending existence, gave up their immortality and let their society collapse overnight.
Centuries later, a new civilization has emerged from the wreckage of the old world, and with it, the desire to once again deceive Death. A group called the “Essencemancers,” a zealot sect of scholars of the forbidden knowledge have long tried to perfect a ritual that would allow for eternal life using the First Men’s long-lost technology. But that eternal life would come at a great cost. The result of the Essencemancer experiments is you.
The Deathbound demo kind of just throws you into the middle of the story, so it’s really unclear how it plays out — but I have to say the way the small bits of narrative have played out are very promising, and the voice acting for the bits of dialogue here and there is really good.
Controls
One of my biggest issues with Deathbound at the moment are the controls. I played the demo with an Xbox controller and some of the controls are just so weird. For example, the default sprint button is A, which doesn’t really make sense for a soulslike as you’re constantly having to use both thumbs to move your character and the camera at the same time. Unless your default is playing claw, having sprint be the A button feels really bad.
Luckily, there’s a secondary controller scheme that allows you to click in the left joystick to sprint. Yay! Unfortunately, the rest of that control layout doesn’t make any sense either. With the secondary layout, the button to dodge moves from B to…left trigger? I don’t know, I just don’t get it. Maybe I just got used to the first layout and then I just didn’t give it enough time to get used to the second one.
While I’m not going to knock the game for having weird controls (because hey, maybe it works for somebody!), I am definitely going to need Trialforge to allow us to rebind the controls sooner rather than later.
Deathbound boss fight
The demo for Deathbound takes you through one boss fight: Impending Truth, and let me tell you — this guy really got on my nerves.
If I was any good at soulslike games, I probably could’ve finished this boss fight in 10 or 15 minutes, but because I play way too aggressively and because of some buggy-ness of the alpha state of the game, it took me just shy of an hour.
Depending on where this boss fight falls in the actual game, I don’t think Deathbound is meant to be as difficult as Sekiro (which is good for players like myself), but it won’t be a total walk in the park either. I’d expect this boss fight is maybe the second or third boss in the full game based on its difficulty level. If it turns out that Impending Truth is much further along than that, then I think Deathbound will be much more of a beginner-friendly soulslike game and won’t be for the ultra-mega-difficulty-chasers out there.
Verdict
So what do I think of Deathbound? I think it needs a bit of work, but overall I can’t wait to play this game when it comes out. I think it innovates in the soulslike genre, it’s pretty well optimized on PC, it’s fun, and I think the story has potential as well.
It took me about 2.5 hours to beat the Deathbound demo — most of which was spent either wandering the map aimlessly because I got lost (Trialforge — please make it easier to figure out where I’m going, thanks!) and fighting the Impending Truth boss at the end of the demo. Someone that’s actually halfway decent at soulslikes — unlike myself — could likely beat the entire demo in less than an hour.
The demo right now is exactly that: a demo, so I didn’t expect it to be perfect and ready for launch anyway, and Trialforge lets you know right off the bat that the demo is not the finished state of the game and that several aspects of the game will be added, optimized, and changed before the release.
As of now, there isn’t a confirmed release date for Deathbound, but Steam says it’s due out sometime this year. You can wishlist the game here if you’re interested in playing Deathbound when it comes out!
Wallflower Writing 
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