Death Tales (Switch) Review
Release Date: December 3, 2020
Publisher/Developer: Arcade Distillery
Platform: Nintendo Switch (Reviewed), PlayStation 4, Steam
Price: $9.99
Death Tales is a cutesy grim game where you play as a brand new Reaper for Death and travel with your companion/Soul Bearer Spaura (who can be Player 2 if so desired) on a quest to harvest souls. Unfortunately, several base design decisions make it hard to enjoy your time with the game, as the simplistic control scheme can get muddy and work against you at the worst possible times.
Our hero is simply a Reaper, not really named, and unfortunately this simple design is spread across the entire title. He’s a dark black face inside a hood on an armored body, with palette swaps for various weapons and equipment. The Reaper can attack with a scythe or obtain spells that can be assigned to shoulder buttons. As you progress, you find or purchase equipment that allegedly improves stats, offense or defense, or grants new abilities like higher jumps. Play consists of basic left-to-right platforming, with a very repetitive slog of enemies that are very hard to suss out weaknesses on. For example, early on I received a fireball spell. A little monster was destroyed in one hit, whilst a normal sized one would be hit like he was injured, but I unloaded my entire magic bar into them and didn’t feel like I scratched their health one bit (though I couldn’t even tell, with no health bar to show me otherwise). Most of the combo attacks are relegated to different presses and holds of the same one attack button. The enemies all tend to have large areas of effect to their own attacks and can knock you back, but don’t seem to be effected by any of the hazards that you have to dodge either. This basically translated to losing all strategy and frantically whacking at enemies. When you defeat an enemy you get souls that replenish some of your health and magic, and I usually got enough of a recharge that my frantic whacking was all the strategy I needed.
Other design decisions make me feel like I’m aimlessly walking around. There is a map screen, and there are branching paths, but they open up as you clear areas, so there’s no real feel as to which way to go. All of the levels are very same-y. You know how in say, Super Mario 3, you can look at the world map and know exactly which level is behind each box? These levels are represented by glowing, unmarked circles, and no real challenge differences. Levels are made up of simple flat ground and floating boxes with the occasional ramp. The graphics are very soft, and the hypercolored backgrounds and foregrounds kind of meld into each other making it hard to naturally see where to go, and some of the enemies have glowy rainbow projectiles that are hard to determine thanks to their erratic nature and how they blend into the environment. Most attack noises and impacts are near identical, further exacerbating the confusion when you’re spamming melee attacks.
Those frustrating battles that tended to even out by healing me for what I was hurt bugged me to the point that I started avoiding them, unless it was an area that I was walled into and had to kill a certain number of enemies to continue. These sections seemed random and there was nothing different to show what or why they existed, they were simply platforming zones that you had to kill everything to proceed on.
With floaty controls, blaring glowy attacks that cover up the action, and confusing animations or auditory cues on attacks, Death Tales does not offer an experience that draws you in. It attempts to draw you in with a Tim Burton-esque combination of whimsy and macabre, but most of the jokes I heard fell flat. By the time I got to the first real “boss,” I felt as if there wasn’t much more they could iterate on to keep my attention. Death Tales really needed to focus on making the gameplay experience cohesive instead of doubling down on the psychedelic colors and macabre cuteness.
Pros:
-Bright world
-Two player compatible
-Weapon upgrade system
Cons:
-Floaty controls and combat
-Overkill on the psychedelic colors makes it hard to navigate
-No real direction
Thanks to Arcade Distillery for providing a code for review.