When I saw the first trailer for Dragon Is Dead, I was almost immediately sold. I have a particular soft spot for Blasphemous—thanks in no small part to friend and former colleague Brendan Quinn’s high recommendation for it—so any game borrowing inspiration from it is going to get a look in from me. But inspiration can be a bit of a double-edged sword, and, as I’ve said in the past, you need to fully understand what you’re adapting before you do it.
In truth, Dragon Is Dead feels like a game that doesn’t really know what it wants to be. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad game, in fact, in a lot of ways, it’s quite good! But the longer I played, the more I began to question so many of its decisions, and it started to seriously detract from the experience.
I’m going to break my usual writing convention a little and talk about the audio/visual design at the top of the review. It’s honestly the one thing I think Dragon Is Dead does particularly well, but it also highlights a bit of the game’s flaws. The game is utilizing a gorgeous 16-bit aesthetic much in the same way games like Blasphemous or Moonscars do to really highlight the brutality of the gore and the twistedness of the world.
The soundtrack is quite similar as well, with a sort of quiet ambiance during levels and bombastic orchestration during boss fights. Even the mid-level rest areas have a kind of sombre, reflective guitar riff that definitely reminded me Albero’s theme. But in borrowing the look and sound of Blasphemous, the game sets up an expectation of what it’s going to play like, and it’s one I don’t think it fully delivers on.
Dragon Is Dead tells the story of a world where once mighty Dragons ruled until they were hunted down and slaughtered by the Gods. Now there is but one Dragon, Guernian, who has succumbed to evil and opened a rift allowing all manner of demons and corruption to pour forth. Players take on the role of a Successor—warriors who can channel magic and defy death—who must venture out into the world to defeat Guernian and his twisted creations.
It’s a decent enough story, but as is usually the issue I have with narrative, the way it’s delivered leaves a lot to be desired. What the SoulsBorne games do best with their storytelling is give the player just enough to get the general idea of what’s going on, but leave a lot of it up to either their imagination, or subtle clues in environmental details, or item descriptions.
But Dragon Is Dead makes the mistake of having too much of its story laid out in plain dialogue, and it comes off both overly complex and less mysterious. It was something I noticed with one of the first characters in the game, who spoke to the protagonist with such transparent expository dialogue that it honestly just came off amateurish. This continued throughout most of the game and was made worse by pretty blatant grammar mistakes that just pulled me out of the whole experience.
“But the strangest thing to me about Dragon Is Dead is how it implements its Soulslike elements.”
Gameplay is where I would say Dragon Is Dead is the most confused about what it is. It’s juggling a lot of different ideas and never really committing to one with confidence and depth. At first look, you’d think the game was a Metroid-like exploration game, much like Blasphemous, where players traverse an unforgiving landscape and face off against monstrous bosses. However, it’s a lot simpler than that in a way that is more reminiscent of a classic side-scrolling action game like Castlevania.
Every level on the map consists of two levels where players must kill every enemy on the board before being able to progress. Once they’ve vanquished their foes, they’re rewarded with two chests containing different bonuses—be it an Artifact that bestows different bonuses, stat boosts, or just currency to purchase better equipment. However, similar to the side-scrolling action games of yore, once you die, you go all the way back to the first level.
Combat is decent but pretty rudimentary and can be broken pretty easily. Players are given a range of weapons, but all of them only really have a simple three-hit combo—except for knives, which have a lightning-fast two-hit and, like Ghosts & Goblins, the weapon that breaks the game. When players level up, they’ll be able to place a point in a Skill Tree, which is fairly restrictive and doesn’t really allow for complex builds to complement the range of weapons. I will give the game points for not having contact damage and giving players a pretty generous dodge.
Effectively, it’s all restricted to elemental effects that can be applied to your weapon — split between fire, ice, and lightning — and special moves based on the elemental attacks. Further in the game, you gain access to a second character whose tree is built on Blood Magic, but it’s more or less the same. Not only that, players get ONE health potion and need to rely on the randomized upgrades they get through the game if they want to get more.
But the strangest thing to me about Dragon Is Dead is how it implements its Soulslike elements. You would assume that when you die, you go back to start fresh as a newborn babe and need to play again, relying on your wits, knowledge, and luck to get further in the game. However, the only things players lose upon death aside from precious time are their experience and one of two currencies they get in-game.
All the armour, weapons, and accessories you find and equip stay with you, as do gems (the second currency), which can be used to gamble for high-end gear at the starting town. And I couldn’t really wrap my head around this because it doesn’t really gel with the whole style of a Soulslike. The game wants to be punishing with its larger-than-life boss fights, but not only is the challenge totally artificial—made “difficult” by some cheesy enemies and a lack of health restoratives—but it doesn’t even really punish the player and challenge them to get better.
And it made me feel like every design decision in Dragon Is Dead was at odds with itself. Its world is simultaneously big, but totally linear and flat, so it’s not really hard to get through, but without any checkpoints, it feels like a lot more tedious to get through. It wants to appear brutal and challenging, but its combat isn’t really robust enough to be super engaging, and it’s super forgiving with its dodge window. It wants to have Rougelike elements, but it implements them in a way that makes them completely pointless and far more of a hindrance than they need to be.
If Dragon Is Dead was a more straightforward game, it would have been a much better experience. Keep the Rougelike stuff if you want, but give the player more health potions, or just go straight for a sidescrolling action game and give the player lives! It would at least give the player a bit of leeway when the punishment for dying three-quarters of the way into the game is having to go back to the start and slog through first-level bosses that aren’t remotely challenging anymore.
None of this is to say Dragon Is Dead is a bad game. I get that the way it comes off probably sounds like I hated it, and I honestly didn’t. There were moments when I found myself getting engaged in it. But so much of what it was doing was executed in a way that just seemed so odd, and I just wished it would pick a style and commit to it.
