Death's Gambit Responses!
Added 2019-11-06 17:53:41 +0000 UTCHey there. We're getting ready to record our final episodes on Death's Gambit, and we want to hear your thoughts on the game. Reply with a comment on this post by Monday, November 11 if you can!
Remember our general guidelines for responses: We're looking for comments that are brief and novel.
Thanks so much for your support.
K
Comments
I love how this game handles death (and also Death). It's something I wish more Soulslikes would take into account; given that challenge is an accepted part of the genre, it would be nice if designers made an effort to do something with all those inevitable failed runs against super challenging bosses. Death's Gambit's brilliant choice of sometimes (but not always) giving you cut scenes when you expire helped to ease the frustration and tedium of bashing my head against particularly rough encounters (fuck you very much, Eldritch Council). You could argue it runs the risk of robbing the "perfect" player of content, but Souls games always have things you miss on the first playthrough, and it's amazing how generous it felt to know that the people who made the game knew I was going to die a lot, and wanted to make sure I was still having a good time.
Zack Handlen
2019-11-12 13:35:48 +0000 UTCI appreciate Death's Gambit for not only offering a tradeoff system with the feathers, but for making said tradeoff reasonable. Early on, I hit one of my only walls in Forgotten Gaian, and I ended up beating it by sacrificing ALL my feathers for the damage buff. From that point, I played nearly the entire game with all feathers sacrificed, and it was surprisingly reasonable to get through most fights with only one health bar. Had this been a latter day Fromsoft game or certain other soulslikes, that simply wouldn't have been reasonable for me, even with a damage buff.
Juliet St. Moon
2019-11-11 18:19:32 +0000 UTCI'll keep it short and novel. Thalamus was easily my favorite boss. Really cool aesthetics and atmospere with varying moveset made this a very entertaining encounter. Love the fast travel system. Love the "estus" tradeoff system. F*cking worship the no fall damage...system. Personally, I'd prefer if there were no voice over though. As with most 2D games, I would probably feel more emerged if I just conjured up the different voices in my own mind instead of seeing a still picture talking with no expressions to fit the mood of the character. Death is cool though.....Death can stay.
Super_Swede
2019-11-11 16:04:19 +0000 UTCMy first playthrough of Death’s Gambit quickly showed me the game had some tricks up its sleeve. Underground sci fi cities, usable guns, a pile of your own dead corpses? Crazy stuff! One day I sat down for a session, hit load game and awoke at the Gaian Cradle death’s idol (the very first one you find), with no items, not even my weapons. This wasn’t were I quit out last time? I didn’t even have a HUD! I was amazed! What kind of game gets weird with your save states? I began exploring, waiting for Death to show up and start messing with me. I found the same items that spawn in the area normally, including the bow and arrow, and secondary weapon in hand proceeded to move through the area, until getting to the fight with your first big armored knight, who I tediously plinked down with my arrows. Upon killing him...the game crashed to the PS4 home screen, with an error message. Holy cow! I wasn’t expecting the game to get *this* meta. I loaded my game again expecting to see an explanation for what had just happened. Maybe Death would appear immediately with a witty comment? Instead I repeated the fight against the big boy with only a bow three more times before accepting that my save had been corrupted. I think the game was crashing because my game had no way to count the souls I got for killing that enemy due to my lack of a HUD. Oh well, but I found it funny that with the turns the game had already taken, a corrupted file just felt like more weirdness the game was pilling on. Odd fact, if you run out of arrows in the starting area, you will find 10 more in the same spot you find the bow. I can’t imagine why this would be needed outside of my specific situation.
Eli Leslie
2019-11-11 13:39:41 +0000 UTCDeath's Gambit has some fab ideas, a beautiful world and top notch music. Plus the bosses, those I've seen, are cool. I was looking forward to hearing you talk about some of the neat twists to the formula by White Rabbit and enjoyed it as always. Unfortunately my incremental progress at this and the stunning Hollow Knight seems to suggest I am in fact terrible at 2D games, what with the very different approach to movement, evasion and so on. They have never been part of my gaming diet, but with so many that seem well worth trying I'm now set on learning how to do them. Not to mention restarting this one with the scythe.
Jon Cheetham
2019-11-11 08:39:57 +0000 UTCI picked up Death's Gambit a couple months back, but it took my four tries and a whole Bonfireside Chat episode to actually click with it. My first try was a Blood Knight (axe guy), but I really didn't like the way melee felt--my range seemed too short, and clanging off enemy shields drove me nuts. Yes, there's a kick for that, but it's slow, awkward, and mapped to an unintuitive button combo. Bleh. So, then I switched to the mage, and I loved it! Well, for a little while. The levels became way more fun to be in, shooting bolts, managing range, and not bouncing off shields, and I absolutely melted the Owl Kind on the first try! This was the first time I got a taste of the game's sense of humor, too, with Death's Dark Souls fake out and a meeting with the drunken Lumberkin. Buuuuut then I got to the next round of bosses and hit a wall. I was dying super fast and making no appreciable dent, and eventually I was was like Fuck it, this game hates me. Then, some months later, I listened to the first BSC on it, was reminded of the stuff I actually enjoyed, and decided to give it another go with the "easy mode" scythe. Oh, the range! The lack of shield clangs! Finally, the melee was enjoyable! But then I hit that first round of bosses, and while I wasn't completely shut out, I was still dying too fast to break through. Turns out I'm just bad at avoiding damage in this game, so I went back to look for something with more survivability. Didn't they say something about some class having Bloodborne regen? Or, right, that was the axe. I tried the axe already. I HATED the axe. Boys, I have now axed my way through a full run and a half, and it rules. I imagine there's probably a lesson to be learned here about persistence or perspective or walking a mile with another man's scythe or something? Anyway, thanks for convincing my to take another shot at this great, weird, surprisingly charming game! P.S. I tried the corpse shield thing! I'm glad I didn't need any of Sigur's skills, because it resulted in her death roughly 45 seconds later. P.P.S. Ghost of a Tale for BSC 2020!
MrReciprocity
2019-11-10 15:42:01 +0000 UTCLiterally the most fun I’ve had dying in a game. Great job White Rabbit, you made death: the character, concept, and consequence, absolutely amazing!
CoalmineCanary
2019-11-07 02:16:05 +0000 UTCIn the last 3 months, I've played through Momodora 4, Blasphemous, and now Death's Gambit, and man, I love a short 2D semi-souls game. You already touched on a lot of the things that Death's Gambit adds to the Souls formula that are so good. For me, the biggest ones are: A) The character focused story - I don't think this is as good as it could be, but I like where they're going with it! I prefer a tailored experience to a blank slate I have to project onto. I didn't buy this game just so I could make up a story too! That's your job, devs! B) Turning in feathers to increase attack power - Such a tiny tweak, and such monumental consequences. I really love this system because it really rewards learning the enemies and bosses. I played through the whole game with a max of four feathers in my possession, even after I had all 10, but honestly I don't think having more would have helped me out nearly as much as the bonus attack power did. C) Tech trees and recharging special attacks - Look, I don't love a tech tree, but the ones in Gambit are fine. I could appreciate how a deeper tree might work in a bigger Souls game, and I think that's worth exploring. Little tweaks like that could help expand the meta beyond just naked two-handing, and I'm all for it. A little of layer of customization on top of gear, weapons, and stats could be pretty cool. I really liked it. I really liked how short it was. My only worry is that games of this scale might not be super cost-efficient to make. Maybe I'm wrong about that, though, because they're a dime-a-dozen. Most just aren't this good.
Brian Perkins
2019-11-07 00:20:39 +0000 UTCThanks guys for doing an episode on this hidden gem of a game. While I did have a lot of fun on my 1st playthrough of the game I did encounter a strange glitch. I was about one third through the game when I loaded up my save file one day. Only to discover that my character had been teleported back to the first Bonfire, de-leveled to lvl 1 and my entire inventory had disappeared. Including my contract with death. I decided to start over. Then I had many, many, many, many attempts at a mortal run. It was a rewarding challenge, but I did have one glitched run and I think I know what happened. After I beat a boss I immediately ran off screen before the title had disappeared. My FEAR did not go down, nor did a gain a new perk from the skill tree. I'm sure that's my fault for leaving the arena prematurely, but I want my fellow listeners to be warned. Speaking of the Mortal run, not only do you need to not die, you also have to beat the Eldritch council boss fight without taking a hit. Which I find incredibly infuriating as she's the 3rd to last boss I fight in the game. Like, why are you gatekeeping the secret ending behind a no death run and a hitless run of the Dracula boss fight? Thats too much for me. Im currently playing seriko on NG+5, i find it easier. I could stomp Owl all day with a smile on my face.
Cthulhu R'lyeh Flatagan
2019-11-06 19:44:44 +0000 UTCInstead of listening to the full episode of generalities I stopped half way to start my first go at this game. I decided to go for a super OP wizard build because magic is always OP right? Well it wasn't so bad. The light spell you can get let me maintain a +10 to my INT at all times thanks to one of the auras. It wasn't until I watched someone else melt a boss with their sword that I felt like something was wrong with my playthrough. Oh well. Ps. Fuck those dragon dudes with their massive swords.
Matthew Woodyard
2019-11-06 18:31:24 +0000 UTC
