Let It Die

(written dec 24, 2016)

The notion of a “free-to-play” game tends to be a turn off. Knowing in the back of your mind that the game isn’t full, that the preferable experience burns a hole in your wallet, doesn’t sit easy. Luckily, that’s not the case for Let it Die, the latest from the unconventional gaming visionaries at Grasshopper Manufacture.

Let it Die is a roguelike hack-n-slash, with an emphasis on hyper-violence and high difficulty. In 2026, large seismic activity caused South Tokyo to split open, a mysterious and menacing tower, colloquially titled the “Tower of Barbs” rising from the cracks. Many people have attempted to enter, but none survive, and the player is given their task: reach the top.

You aren’t actually climbing anything, technically: Let it Die is about the player character playing “Let it Die”, a game made on the Death Drive 128, “the best console ever made” says the game’s mascot, Uncle Death; a skateboarding skeleton with a baggy cloak, pattern-changing sunglasses, and a Finnish accent.

The whole time, the player has been playing “Let it Die” in an arcade, sitting across from Uncle Death and a couple of his friends: a fighting game fanatic named Meijin, and a “valley girl” type named Naomi Detox. There’s a blatant and rich “90s punk” vibe the game presents, akin to the earlier-released Watch Dogs 2.

The arcade isn’t the meat of the bone, although. Your character is one of 16 choosable “fighters” who needs to kill as many enemies, collect as many weapons, and climb as many floors in the Tower of Barbs they can. With lightly randomized elements, viciously determined foes, and an ambience of relentlessness, there’s a visible Demon’s Souls inspiration involved (I don’t use this comparison lightly).

The only way I can describe the combat is “charmingly clunky”. It has that feeling of an early PS2 game but not so much it drives you crazy. Movement and combat differ drastically in weight, like skipping a rock into maple syrup, and the lock-on feels flimsy, but there’s gratification in your actions.

Weapons all pertain to the inorganic but organized feeling the tower emanates, ranging from clothes irons and firework launchers to machine guns and grenade launchers. Managing weapons becomes a fun strategic element, giving the player 3 slots per hand, albeit with frustratingly low durability and ammo at first.

I can see where Grasshopper went with their roguelike/Souls design, but it throws up conflicting signs in what they want the experience to be. There’s an emphasis on not getting attached to your character with no customization except changing clothes, but they give you the option to buy back your dead character. Plus, the game provides what is essentially a paid continue button, referred to as “death insurance.”

Of course, this brings me to the elephant in the room: the “freemium” content. The first example of this the player is likely to find is when a woman named Kiwako Seto gives an infomercial-like presentation on “Direct Hell Insurance,” a service that provides the ability to revive your character right where you left off.

This mechanic is surprisingly cheap for what it has to offer; it costs one piece of a not so rare in-game currency. Hell, the first time I saw this, I had 10 of them and never noticed. Overall, the free-to-play element is rarely noticeable. The quality of the game deeply overshadows microtransactions to a point where I genuinely worry about Grasshopper breaking even.

Let it Die approaches microtransactions like tokens. In fact, that’s basically what it’s emulating: Let it Die is a quarter-muncher in nature, a game with high difficulty and an abstract goal, where the desire to succeed makes you dig through your wallet a little.

The same could be said for the whole game, really. It takes two very different arcade tropes, the grimy, danger-riddled tower that’s practically begging to be conquered and the colorfully campy hangout center where kids still say “rad” and “gnarly,” and combines them into an experience that, for once, justifies the free-to-play format. Whether this be an intentional design choice or clever excuse is unclear, but goddamn does it work.

Its a shame that the premisse of Dark Souls roguelike seems so inciting, yet there are so few games that can nail that down. Let it Die is one of such games, while the initial premisse and impressions of the game are solid, the way its designed clearly feels like it was balanced around forcing the player to pay for micro transactions to speed up their progress through the game. The game is a huge repetitive grind, and because it is so stat dependent, a player cant simply GET GUD at the game to overcome the grind. Its a massive disappointment in short, and i would advise everyone to look towards Dead Cells and Enter the Gungeon to get their roguelike action.