Death Howl (2025)

Death Howl is a grid-based tactical battler that primarily uses cards to carry out attacks. That simple description doesn't capture the depth of tactical options it has.

The game describes itself as a Souls-Like and it is extremely difficult. But, much like one of my favorite all-time games Underrail, the difficulty never feels impossible because there's always a new way to approach a fight. Throughout the game, acquiring new cards as well as other abilities and then balancing what cards you want in your deck is as important as the fights themselves. And the stamina limitations you face force you to think about each card selection and each move and attack carefully. For the gameplay alone, this game definitely makes it into my top all-time tier.

The story is relatively simple; a mother is mourning the death of her son and enters the spirit-world in an effort to bring him back to life. As a parent myself, that story alone pulls at my heart strings so it's effective.

I played it on my Steam Deck and you should play it on yours if you like these kind of games.

Death Howl describes itself as a "soulslike deck builder". Let me preface by saying I've never played Dark Souls or its close cousins, my experience with soulslikes is limited to Hyper Light Drifter and Tunic, if those even count.

How does a soulslike deck builder work? It's a turn based game, so how would you even do that hard, learn-by-dying type of combat game? Some interesting design decisions combine to make it achieve the soulsy vibes.

First, there's a rich battle system to learn and to master. The fights are gridbased, so you have to think about positioning of yourself and enemies. For example, you have melee attacks and ranged attacks, the ranged attacks don't work in melee range. Some enemies will dash through you on attack, but they can't if there's an obstacle behind you. Some enemies will retaliate when you attack, which might push or pull you. Some enemies will get strong attacks if you end your turn in a certain position to them, for example, the boar-like creatures will charge attack if you end your turn 2-4 tiles away from their front side, dealing additional damage. And not all the rules of battle are explained, so you learn by doing and experimenting.

Then, there are resources to be collected from killing enemies ("death howls", since we're not allowed to call them souls), which you use to improve your abilities and craft cards. These improvements are not infinite, and by themselves just increase the tactical depth of combat. For example, one improvement grants you a temporary card whenever you kill an enemy, with an ability linked to the enemy: killing a boar would give you a one-use charge attack card. But these cards can only be used on the turn you killed the enemy, so if there is no enemy in range to charge and you have no energy to reposition, the opportunity is wasted.

Crafted cards are also never strict upgrades, but they allow you to lean more into archetypes: melee, ranged, defensive, positional play, draw-discard-synergies, etc. Your deck consists of 15 to 20 cards of all the cards you have crafted, so the escalation power is limited.

Also in soulslike fashion, the healing points are static on the map, and after healing, enemies respawn. But once unlocked you can fast-travel between the healing points. So you get into this loop of slowly conquering the map. And losing a fight is not the end of the game: you will lose your death howls, but these can be regained if you do the fight again and win it. Given that there is an inherent randomness in card deck-based combat, this system works quite well.

Most importantly, it all feels fair. If you spend time to study the enemies and create the right decks, you'll be able to get through. Whenever you are juuuust off by one tile, or you are one damage or one block short, it feels like you could have played differently and made it. Even an enemy that feels unfair the first try (or two, or five) feels like it can be defeated with enough tactical thinking. It's all very well designed.

But this also means either experimenting with or analyzing combinations of many possible cards, possibly into the 100s eventually. And if you don't do that work, you will end up hitting the wall at some point. It already felt overwhelming after about 3 hours of play, when I was in the second area of 10+ areas. So I think I'll give the game a rest for now, I'm not feeling the need for a crunchy in-depth tactical game like this right now. But maybe I'll come back to it later!