As a Metroidvania fan, I always get excited whenever a new one is announced. However Death’s Gambit Afterlife took me by surprise. I must say that my experience with the game is zero, I know that it had been previously released on Steam and PS4 before and it was available with Xbox Gamepass for PC. I downloaded it and I only played the beginning of the game when your character is riding a horse and I immediately closed the game and deleted it. My reasoning was simple – I wanted to enjoy that game on console since I am not a PC gamer. During that time it was only available on the aforementioned platforms so I decided to wait to arrive at either Xbox or Switch. But that was a couple of years ago so I forgot completely that Death’s Gambit existed. Until now, that is, when was privileged enough to play the expanded version of Death’s Gambit Afterlife from Serenity Forge on Nintendo Switch and I must say that the wait was definitely worth it.
In Death’s Gambit you play the role of Sorum, a soldier that was one of the many casualties of the Great Expeditions. However by a twist of fate, he makes a pact with Death granting him a second chance to complete his mission. But why did Death give him that chance? For what purpose? Those are some of the questions you will find the answer to in this game. I must say that in the beginning, I was not sure what to think about Death’s Gambit. After selecting the class I wanted to start the game with ( there are 7 classes to choose from), I felt that the difficulty spike was quite high. Maybe it is because I was not accustomed to the controls or the fact that my character’s attacks felt slow in comparison with enemy attacks and their animations. So instead of trying to attack like a hack and slash game, I decided to play like you would play a game like Dark Souls: attack, dodge, and jump away from harm and it worked well. The game clicked once I did that. Since you use the stick to control character movement, I still cannot wrap around my head the fact that you need to press down on the D-pad to pick up items, but once you do manage to adapt to the controls everything comes as second nature (although I wish you could pick up items automatically).
Combat is where the game really shines since you have tons of options to defeat your foes regardless of the class you choose. In my case, I went with the soldier class. The soldier’s main weapon of choice is the longsword but that doesn’t mean you are locked to that weapon alone. Conveniently, you can equip any weapon you find even if it’s not meant for your class with certain caveats. First you will not get weapon skills from other classes unless you learn them and second weapons are restricted by certain parameters. Weapons like the longsword and the greatsword require certain strength levels and are scaled by the strength parameter (the higher it is you deal more damage per hit), others like bows and spears require finesse same as above the higher the stat is the higher the damage you deal.
Unlike other Metroidvania games, your character doesn’t level up automatically just by killing everything on sight here things are different. With every successful hit (and depending on the equipment you carry) you gain essence which you can use in Death’s shrines to level up your character’s stats, which allows you to don better equipment and deal more damage to enemies. You also have an item called a Phoenix Plume which you can use it to regain health (Warning: some treasure chests cannot be opened if you used a plume in that area). The number of plumes you carry in the beginning is limited but you can find upgrades as you play through the game, In addition to healing, you can use plumes in death’s shrines to increase your damage output by even further by reducing your stock of plumes. When you die (and you will a lot in this game) you will also drop a plume. If you return to the place you died and reclaim the plume you will get a damage increase that lasts 8 seconds, more than enough time to get revenge for your death or deal a bit more damage to the boss if you died in a boss fight. It is worth noting that the game has a cool feature not seen commonly in this genre. You can find “journals” in different areas of the world, and when you find one, you deal more damage to the boss that corresponds to that journal. In all my life playing Metroidvania games, I never saw anything as cool as just by having an item and geting a passive damage bonus to a boss! I must commend the developer for such a creative idea.
Nothing feels more satisfying than landing an attack after a skill that leaves the opponent burned or one that increases your attack power for several seconds whether it hits or not. The level of player expression in Death’s Gambit is superb in this aspect and even moreso when you get abilities like the double jump or the air dash the hit and run tactics work even better. I do not know if it’s intended or not but I discovered that if you press the attack button and the jump button at the same time while moving forward will have your character do a small hop to attack and timing it right can allow you to hit several times twice as fast and sometimes it interrupts the enemy attacks. I do not think it is a bug but instead a feature so use it well! I definitely enjoy the battle system even if I die like there is no tomorrow. The game uses pixel graphics and I really enjoyed the level of detail in the different environments and how all of them come together to form a cohesive world full of wonders. The boss fights are amazing and each one made me sweat, made me rage, and just laugh at my lack of skill but after I defeated one I felt that I was getting improving gradually but noticeably.
Any Metroidvania fan knows that as soon as you get a new ability you need to backtrack to explore. Death’s Gambit Afterlife shows your current objective on the map, and as a player, I think to myself ‘That is nice but what if I go here to see how far I can go with my new ability?’ This is what l love about the genre – the exploration, the discovery. Death’s Gambit does not disappoint in this aspect and there are some surprises and moments that had me questioning what I just did, or how the game went from a fantasy world to a high tech…. and I won’t say more I don’t want to spoil anything. I believe each player needs to see and judge the game by their own terms. However, I wish that in some areas the character was bigger as the camera zooms out a bit too much. While I appreciate the fact that you can get a better picture of the whole area, it is hard to make out where your character, especially if you are playing in handheld mode. Naturally, playing on TV mode with a good screen does not cause this issue.
The game is not all grim and bloody either. There are some funny moments like the picture above where sometimes Death will make fun of you. Other times it will provide useful tips and you will find Death in the most unexpected places….like a restaurant for example. Even one of Death’s minions will make fun of you saying things like ” Only losers use savepoints”. Ouch. There are some other interesting characters like the lizards (I thought they were frogs) riding on carriages pulled by, um, snails, or one that traps you so you can hear the ” Illest mixtape.” Yeah, real bangers I must say. Performance-wise the game plays well with no slowdowns at all and when you die the game loads quickly and you return to the last shrine visited. There were only two times in which I had issues. One of them was a “Task failed successfully” moment, in the fight against Origa. In the final moments of the fight I performed the greatsword skill Smoldering Guillotine as it leaves the enemy in a burned state. Origa was 1 pixel away from death, I was a couple of hits from dying, and Origa did her sniper attack and killed me. During the animation in which Death’s reclaims your soul to bring you back to the last save….she died. I was laughing so hard because I got all the essence for defeating her then I went back and the story continued, creating a funny moment honestly. The other issue I had was in interaction with Vrael where he finds a paper and you talk with him. You fall into a trap set by a shady character that is upset with Sorum and after a quick quiz (which I failed by the way), you are able to escape the trap. However, in my case, at the time of the initial interaction I happened to be riding the horse. I got stuck since the horse fell into the trap as well and after the cutscene, I was still riding the horse and had no way to dismount or move forward. Fortunately I took a screenshot which you can see below. Luckily I tend to save often so I closed the game and reloaded the save but I couldn’t replicate the glitch. Then I got sidetracked and explored somewhere else.
Needless to say, Death’s Gambit is a really intriguing Metroidvania with a great combat system that allows player expression in a way that I have not seen in any other game. It features a different but interesting leveling system that will have you tweaking your characters stats here and there to create the ultimate warrior. I must say that I am pleased with the game and I give it a solid recommendation to fans of Metroidvania games and newcomers alike.
A Review code was kindly provided for this review. The game was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes.