Let it Die: Inferno takes the concept of roguelike dungeon crawling and tries to apply the gameplay loop of an extraction shooter and the combat of a soulslike. On the surface this seems ambitious and full of potential, but dig deeper into what’s at the core of these different genres and the whole system doesn’t really hold itself up, and Inferno’s gameplay reflects that.
Developer Supertrick Games has tried to mix “go in and collect as much as possible” with “you can barely carry anything” and “you lose everything when you die”, as well as “you’re supposed to die over and over again.” It probably doesn’t take a lot to see the disconnect here; how do players make any progress if they lose everything when they die, and repeatedly dying is itself a gameplay element? Normally, this would be where the roguelike elements kick in; making miniscule amounts of progress to get slightly better each time becomes part of the central gameplay loop.
Unfortunately, Let it Die: Inferno doesn’t offer nearly enough reward to make any part of this gameplay loop feel fulfilling. Players will need to spend countless hours grinding away at the same enemies in the same areas just to make a hint of progressing toward something new, which isn’t itself a problem, but laid over a foundation of the intentionally frustrating combat found in soulslike games, the grind becomes a rather unrewarding one.
Let it Die: Inferno does not do a good job of teaching how to play; each round will only be successful if the player makes it to a randomised extraction point, but as part of the story, this gets interrupted during the tutorial, meaning the game never actually teaches the player how to complete a mission. Players can activate their radar by crouching, which is done by pressing the same button as “sprint,” but if the character has even one iota of momentum when it’s pressed, they will break out into a full sprint and waste all of the player’s stamina instead of crouching.
Once the radar is active, it appears as a soundwave in a ring around the player, and part of this ring will glow yellow indicating the direction of the extraction point—and that’s it. No sense of distance or scale or level of height below or above the player, just a cardinal direction lighting up on the compass, which more often than not just leads to it pointing the player back and forth down the same hallway.
The reason a lot of FromSoftware games (and games that follow in their footsteps) work is that the combat is challenging. Players feel rewarded by throwing themselves at the same area or boss repeatedly to learn the actual layout of the area, the lore behind it, the strategy the enemy is using, and why. Let it Die: Inferno doesn’t feel challenging, it feels unfair, and the only “why” seems to be “to make the game harder.”
Combat is blocky and the hitboxes are terrible, with attacks that clearly hit enemies instead passing through them like air. Enemies are particularly difficult to hit if they are above or below the player, such as being on any amount of incline at all. One enemy is a mostly harmless hybrid cheeseburger and crab that scuttles around on the floor; this creature can be one of the most difficult to defeat in the game simply because its hitbox is lower than most weapons can easily reach.
Enemies often perform an attack and then run and hide, and while just about any attack from any enemy fully interrupts the player (whether they are attacking or dodging; the point of a dodge that doesn’t actually dodge is anyone’s guess), the controlled character seems to almost never be able to interrupt an enemy attack, making combat frustratingly one-sided, and nearly impossible when two enemies attack at once—there doesn’t seem to be a way to lock onto targets.
Another solid hallmark of a successful roguelike or soulslike is the ability for players to learn their equipment and get better at using it, but Let it Die: Inferno breaks that as well, with all items across all runs being completely randomised in their locations, stats, and effects. All of this is made even more cumbersome by the fact that every mission is also timed, and, being PvPvE, the game doesn’t pause, meaning if players decide to stop and read the lore attached to an item, compare stats, or want to simply change their equipment, they’re risking the whole run by doing it. The timer never stops, enemies can and will attack during menus, and other players also pose a threat.
Upon loading for the very first time, Let it Die: Inferno suffered intense model and texture pop-ins, with the player character being invisible for the first few minutes of the opening cinema. That aside, once everything did load in, this never happened again throughout the entire playtest, and on the whole the game is highly detailed and grotesquely beautiful.
The characters are interesting in their appearance and personality, though some have seen heavy alterations from their appearances in previous games in the series; for example, series mascot Uncle Death now sounding like a hyped-up surfer bro from 1980s California. On the whole, Let it Die: Inferno is an absolute treat to look at even if it’s not so much of one to play. The game’s tone has a delightful splash of punk to it, a specific flavor or attitude the devs have gone for, and if nothing else they completely nailed this.
Aesthetically, the game feels like a cross between Silent Hill and Final Fantasy, with characters taking to city streets overgrown with plants and creepy viscera alike, but doing it decked out with clothing and weapons that exude fashionably over-the-top style and character. It’s a shame the game rarely gives players a chance to stop and look at items they’ve found, or the character they’ve built, or even the environments they’re sent into, but each round’s ever-present timer just leads to exploration being as frustrating as the combat.
According to recent statements by the developers, AI tools were used to create some of the assets and characters for the game, which is highly disappointing. Two characters in particular, who appear to the player as hand puppets on a TV show, are evidently completely AI-generated, and it shows. Their speech is meant to sound otherworldly, but because it’s AI-generated, it just sounds like nonsense instead, with one of the characters sounding like it’s just saying “don don don” repeatedly, and every laugh being one laugh that has clearly been copy-pasted to extend it.
This speaks to another issue with Let it Die: Inferno in that it feels like corners were cut at every turn. This doesn’t feel like a game that was made because some game developers had good ideas and wanted to make a fun game, it feels like it was made to cash in on the extraction shooter craze using an already existing IP, without any thought or care put into whether the two ideas actually fit with each other. Legendary composer Akira Yamaoka was brought in to make the music, but only out of stems created by AI. “Mind-boggling” doesn’t even begin to express the feelings that come with that knowledge.
Real money can be used to purchase new items or characters, and Let it Die: Inferno is available in different tiers that also come with different in-game items, but even this has to have a huge caveat in that each “season” of the game will bring a full reset, meaning some items players paid real money for just vanish into thin air, even including some of the initial purchase bonuses.
With the exception of some playable characters, the microtransactions don’t appear to be necessary for play, and so the price tag and in-game monetization don’t feel egregious, but the promise of future progress resets ventures toward that line, and the use of AI tools leaps way beyond it; previous entries in the series were free to play, where Inferno comes with a price tag despite being aided monetarily by microtransactions and AI tools.
All told, Inferno is a game that doesn’t seem to know what it wants from the player nor what it has to offer, leaving them with something that clearly has the skeleton of a great title, but instead devolves into a confusing, frustrating mishmash of different genres and ideas that don’t get along with each other. Let it Die: Inferno stops just short of being fun on its own merits, then lets myriad other problems pile on top until players have forgotten the fun they were supposed to be having.
