Roguelite's is a tough market to enter, especially right now.

Not only are there many good ones out there, but they offer a gameplay cycle that keeps things fresh in a way that linear games do not. You simply keep playing and keep making progression.

For a new roguelite to be successful, it has to have enough pull that it gets you away from the other ones you are playing. You have to trade your progression in your favorite ones to spend time in a new one. It really has to either offer something as good or more unique, and that can be tough to pull off.

This game... there's nothing wrong with it. Honestly they have made a decent game here. I really quite like the art, and the combat is generally pretty good. Slaying swaths of foes is pretty rewarding. The top-down angle as opposed to 3d isometric was an interesting choice, but it works out well enough. I'll double plug the character artwork, because that was really well done here. The problem is you don't get to appreciate it during the run because of the top down view... so this creates an unfortunate circumstance where the art doesn't really give you a reason to keep playing.

What this game suffers from is a bit of a lack of understanding of roguelite gameplay in general. If this were a linear RPG, it would be really cool. The problem though is that there is a lot of nuance to mid-run upgrades and the synergies you can build out, and I don't feel like this game quite grasps that well enough. You get upgrades but they are kind of... isolated from each other. You end up just picking random things that sound neat, and really don't seem to build up any strategy. The enemies tend to be easy, and stun locking is powerful. That means most of your difficulty comes from crowds and enemy AoE abilities, which is fine. It is an older tactic though and doesn't particularly feel refreshing.

The maps, at least as far as I have seen, are very repetitive and, if I'm honest, pretty bland. There's very little useful terrain other than some spike traps. There's not really a lot of thought into making arena's here, it's more like a procedural dungeon run in a pixel roguelike. The runs also tend to be very long, which magnifies this problem. To be completely honest, I got bored before I finished my run. I ended up dying only because I was done playing and started taking odd risks. That's a death sentence for a roguelite... I have never experienced that feeling in Hades, for example. I was too busy stressing about how to beat the room. But here it just doesn't feel like that. I ended up hoping the run would end around every corner, and that just feels like a poor way to spend my time.

There are special abilities and ultimates and such, and maybe each of the characters feels super unique. That could be a positive. But like i said, if this were just a linear dungeon crawl all of that would probably work a lot better. But the way this game is built, I have to choose between spending more time in Hades or Ember Knights or Children of Morta vs spending time in this one and.... it's not really a choice at that point.

I wish this game the best of luck, because I do like what they did build here, and I hope they find some way to spice it up a bit. That said, I really don't think this is the next big entry in the roguelite space.

i really enjoy this style. i own a cpl top down rogue likes. this 1 is great

TL,DR: Jank but fun. Not enough content or diversity between the characters to be spectacular, but a decent snag for about 10 USD when it's on sale.


More in depth thoughts -

SotD is like the Devil Slayer Raksasi we have at home. It's got good ideas in it, fun things that are different from the norm, but a lot of strange and outright silly or seemingly stupid design choices. Each of the characters plays a little differently but not entirely uniquely, such as Arthur and Ginzo both coming with a parry mechanic in addition to their standard dodge, and within the characters themselves it's difficult to maximize their own unique potential due to the innate randomness that comes with not just acquiring skill books during a run but also acquiring skills you'd actually want or that would be useful to you: Each character does have unique skill sets available only to them, such as Arthur maximizing stun potential or Ginzo having "Slay" or Stephanie doing a mind boggling amount of elemental damage while slowly putting you to sleep, but when you pick up a skill book you're presented two random options as well as the "Chaos" option which is just random itself. When you select one of these you can pick from three randomly chosen perks from that set, so you COULD get a basic mechanic for your character which should be on by default (like Slay for Ginzo) or you could get a 20% to knock some coins out of enemies when you hit them which is honestly decent but usually not what you need.

Also, the Puppet skill tree is totally useless. It needs to be removed, reworked, or rolled into Phyllis' skill set because all it does is make it even more difficult for you to get something that actually benefits you.

As you go up in difficulty levels the enemies start hitting harder but it's fairly easy to avoid getting hit so it's not altogether an issue. I've seen SotD referred to as "baby's first rougelike" but I don't think that's fair, though I've also seen it said that it stacks the odds heavily in the player's favor and that (in spite of the randomness) is actually true! Ginzo's parry is outright insane, especially if you can get perks for it, but can you get perks for it? Roll the dice, we'll see. Unfortunately the main problem with the difficulty is that the bosses start beefing up and getting absurd amounts of HP which at first seems like a "git gud" problem but which is actually a "you usually won't get things that actually boost your damage in a meaningful way" problem. Yeah, you'll find better weapons, but if you don't find the Dragon Knight (or similar) perks and learn to play with the minimum amount of HP possible - which is a lot harder than it sounds due to perks that improve your dodge also being randomly acquired - your DPS will amount to little more than lovingly tickling the enemy's armpit.

And that's not even beginning to talk about the optional shadow realm side paths where the boss is a negative version of one of your characters with even more HP than usual. It's not fun and not overly difficult, it just bores you into going bleary eyed and unfocused for ten minutes in an attempt to trick you into nodding off so the game can stunlock you to death since you (usually) can't dodge out of being combo'd or hit rapidly in quick succession.


All in all the core combat experience is decent enough barring a few jank oddities (targeting is whacky and sometimes just doesn't work right, some perks don't seem to work well with certain characters if they work at all, etc.), it's just rough, unpolished, and surrounded by bad ideas. Ginzo's "Katana" and "Tachi" are the exact same weapon, for example, just with a faster or slower attack speed and different reaches. Stephanie, Phyllis, and the new spear lady don't even have a secondary weapon type to use which makes them incredibly dull and samey (to say nothing of the spear lady's innate skill being entirely useless and, actually, usually detrimental to your experience), many of the skills are just weird or straight up inferior to other choices (most of Arthur's don't do damage and only do stun when they could have just a little bit of damage added and be perfectly fine when compared to, say, the spear's fire cross skill which is stupid overpowered), etc.

At maximum level you don't get enough skill points to unlock all of your persistent skills which is certainly a choice, and I assume it will be rectified later on, but this is the release version we're talking about here? In addition the rune system (basically equipment) is also half-baked at best and outright bad at worst because it, too, is entirely random what you will get from drops or the shop (once you spend skill points to unlock it, so I hope you did before you hit level cap) and you can't fuse lower stat runes into higher tier versions of them for no discernible reason at all. You can, however, try to combine skill runes together to produce one that has both of their skills but there's no way to spend diamonds (the special in game unlock currency) to guarantee a desired result or even increase the chance of it, so what's actually going to happen is you're going to lose both runes and get one that gives Arthur's second combo hit a little bit of frost damage or something equally meaningless considering you can only equip one of each of the three shapes of rune.

It needs work. A lot of work, perhaps, and a lot of tweaking + balance changes. Arya and spear girl need their basic secondary skills entirely reworked to not be outright bad, Stephanie and Phyllis need different weapon types to make them interesting outside of being the strongest characters due solely to the fact that they don't have to be close to the enemy, more enemies with more meaningful differences than "they block your attacks from the front" need to be added, and every zone needs at least one other boss that it can tag in every now and then to spice things up. Enemy HP and damage values also need to be rebalanced but that's a minor issue as long as you're vigilant, I suppose, so...

Do I recommended it? Sure, yes, overall, but with a whole bunch of caveats and a "buy it on sale for no more than ten bucks" attached. If the devs stick with it and work out the kinks it could be a great game, or at the very least a really good one, but right now it's sort of a junk food time waster while you wait for Silksong or Raksasi 2 to release.