It seems there’s a new game constantly being made available in early access. Some games that are successful and have huge fanbases built those initial bases while in early access. This is a crucial time for games to carve out a space in the gaming market and cement a player base that will return when the game officially launches. I remember playing Concord during its closed and open betas – obviously that game is now dead – but the number of people playing the open beta was even less than the closed beta. People had free access to a game but chose not to play it. Concord then launched with a price tag, and it was dead shortly after.
Deadhaus Sonata‘s first major issue is that it has completely skipped any beta phases where players could try it out, and they’ve just jumped right into a paid early access. Having a beta would have allowed players to try the game out and see if it was for them. The consequence is that Deadhaus Sonata, at the time of writing, has a single player. One person on Steam is currently playing this game, and it isn’t me. The fact that this is a game meant to be played with others hasn’t really been possible for a single moment when I’ve played. This doesn’t appear to be uncommon. There was a game session in which I was the only player. The most people I’ve seen playing this game at a single time was three – I was one of them.
I’ve never seen a more “early access” looking game than Deadhaus Sonata. Upon booting up the game for the first time, you’re greeted with a menu screen that has zero personality. All the UI feels sterile and void of anything to say. It’s the visual equivalent of drinking room-temperature water that’s been sitting in a glass for three days untouched. I also had a struggle getting any of the graphics settings to work at all. As I logged in, the first thing I noticed was that Deadhaus Sonata was extremely choppy and running at a highly questionable frame rate. I brought the settings down from the highest to the medium setting to see if there was any difference. The game looked worse and performed exactly the same. So I cranked the settings up to max and was still facing the exact same terrible performance… not a great feeling.
Once Deadhaus Sonata actually starts, you’re greeted with a tutorial that does its best to explain the game’s mechanics to you, as any tutorial should. You’re immediately presented with a combat scenario explaining how you can dodge out of the way of attacks. Due to the jankiness of the controls, I found that dodging attacks with the intended dodge mechanic was basically impossible because of how Deadhaus Sonata handles its combat. Your character does not flow in and out of attacks and rolls like you can in other adventure games. You have a specific number of frames between actions, and sometimes they seem longer than others. I couldn’t find a consistent way to time dodges, and I can’t tell if it’s a bug or a feature. Regardless, combat immediately feels clunky and overly simplistic. I found jumping was the best way to dodge enemy attacks, but it feels ridiculous, and I still found myself getting hit in the air when the attack was nowhere near me. Deadhaus Sonata‘s basic movement and hand-to-hand combat feel clunky and unintuitive.
By far the most interesting and exciting thing about Deadhaus Sonata is its tarot card system. This system replaces the traditional skill tree you’d typically find in other games and actually provides some potentially interesting building blocks for builds in the future. Throughout your gameplay, you’ll find tarot cards that you can equip to your character. Major tarot cards act as your abilities, and minor tarot cards are your passives. Mixing and matching minor tarots with your major tarots is where the game’s experimental side comes out. Different combinations do different things, and depending on your build, you might want to get a mix of the cards in a specific way. For example, one mixture makes it so that when you kill an enemy, a skeleton spawns where they stood and fights alongside you. It’s genuinely the best thing about this game in its current state, and I’m curious to see where they take the system in the future.
Deadhaus Sonata is being sold as a narrative-driven action RPG, which is very confusing to me, since the game has very little narrative focus. It appears to take the Dark Souls approach by feeding you story beats and lore through books and audio recordings found throughout the world. There aren’t any cinematic cutscenes that show you major story moments; it’s all relegated to walls of text and audio files that most people probably won’t listen to. If you go to the game’s website, you can find books containing the game’s lore that are literally hundreds of pages long. I don’t understand the value of packing so much lore into a game that needs to be approachable in order to succeed. It seems to me that the insane amount of effort that went into building this deep and rich lore could have probably been put into making a smaller and more focused plot that players could latch onto, instead of whatever this is.
The most disappointing aspect of Deadhaus Sonata is the game’s shockingly egregious usage of AI assets and art. It’s apparent the second you pick up a card and equip it that you are looking at something not created by a person – I immediately got the ‘ick.’ From what I can tell, the entirety of the game’s tarot cards, the system I actually find interesting, are all AI-generated. Even the books featured on the game’s website are filled with AI-generated art. It confounds me because the Steam page flat-out says that the content in the game is created directly by the team, but that either has to be a mistake on Steam’s end, or some major stretching of the truth by the developers.
Deadhaus Sonata is in a seriously underbaked state, even for an early access game. There are interesting ideas here – the tarot system especially – but the rest of it needs major polish before I’d ever suggest anybody spend money on it. This game was announced nearly a decade ago and has undergone many iterations to reach the product we have today. The current result is a sluggish action-adventure game that responds to controls half the time, runs at below 20 fps, and crashed on me 8 times. The game’s absurd overreliance on AI is so disappointing. I sincerely hope that the AI is just acting as a lot of placeholders for the eventual final product, but given how much the older generation seems to love artificial generation, something tells me this aesthetic isn’t going anywhere. I never want a game to fail. I’m always rooting for developers to make something worth playing, but given Deadhaus Sonata‘s current state, there would need to be some major internal changes before I’d ever recommend it to anyone.