Today is a good day because I get to talk about Dark Souls.

Dark Souls is one of my favorite games of all time; easily in the top 3. I've played it dozens and dozens of times with different builds and challenges. I've raced friends, done bingo cards, and done practically everything one can do with the game. Suffice it to say, I have spent a lot of time thinking about Dark Souls. I've also played a lot of Dark Souls clones, such as Nioh and The Surge. One subcategory of Dark Souls clone is the 2-D Dark Souls clone (this is how you know your game was impactful, when there are subgenres of people copy you). The most noteworthy game in this subgenre is porbably Salt and Sanctuary, a game which I got so bored with I didn't finish (this is a rarity for me). I'm going to talk primarily instead about Death's Gambit, and about 2-D Souls-like games in general and why the third dimension is a must for Souls-likes.

The biggest issues with 2-D Souls-likes comes when dodging attacks. Without a third dimension, many times there is not even a pretense that your character is dodging out of the way of an attack. It is transparent that you are simply abusing invulnerability frames to avoid being hit. No ability to dodge orthagonally just makes this obvious, as attacks will frequently and clearly overlap on your character mid-dodge to no effect. This isn't really a huge issue, but I would say it is a negative change.

The far greater downside to the shift to 2-D comes in how enemies telegraph attacks and move while attacking. Let's say an enemy draws back their weapon and takes aim along a line. How would you dodge in Dark Souls? You'd probably dodge to the side, so that the attack will pass by next to you while leaving you close enough for a punishing counter attack. Easy to understand and straight forward to execute. It may take you some time to get used to noticing the tell quickly enough, and adjusting for any tracking, but that's it. You could be reasonably expected to dodge this sort of attack on the first try, especially if the devs wanted you to. They could extend the wind-up animationgiving plenty of time to react. Now let's imagine the same attack in 2-D. The enemy in front of you draws back, clearly preparing to charge forward. You can't just dodge to the side now, because there is no side. Dodging forward into the charge makes little sense, and dropping down to a different level is usually not an option. This leaves you with the options of jumping so the enemy charges underneath  you, or dodging backward and out of range. Timing a jump is all but impossible, since no amount of visual indication is going to convey the speed at which the enemy will charge. Similarly, dodging backward is an issue since you cannot know the range of the attack. Your best bet is to simply move away from the enemy as fast as a you can and hope that you have escaped their range. If you ran too far, you probably won't get any counter attack damage, and if you didn't get far enough you'll get hit. These are both suboptimal outcomes, but with the same reactions and information in a 3-D game, you can eaisily achieve a better result.

Similar issues are found regarding any enemy with a front and back. These enemies can turn around, and as is usually the case in 2-D games, turning takes no time and has no animations. The sprite simply flips around. This makes avoiding attacks extremely difficult. It's not uncommon in SOuls-like games to have nemies adjust a multi-part attack midway through as the player moves around. If this causes an enemy to turn around in 2-D, the folowing attack is almost impossible to react to and avoid.  The player must instead predict that the enemy will turn around and preempt that with a dodge. This is unintuitive, and getting hit after an enemy turns around feels cheap.

These are just the general problems with 2-D Souls-like games. What about Death's Gambit in particular? It has its fair share of problems. First I will mention the shocking lack of weapon variety. I found only two weapons besides the one I started with that scaled with my primary stat, and apparenlty most stats get only one or two weapons that scale with them. Instead of rings, the game has "auras", but they are almost all completely useless. I found two in the whole game that were even remotely beneficial.

There are a variety of plumes (the game's take on estus flasks) with unque effects, like curing status ailments (or should I say ailment? poison is the only one) but the secondary effects are negligible and whichever heals the most HP is basically always better to equip. Gear in general is always a strict upgrade or downgrade. There is no equip load mechanic, so you just wear whatever has the biggest stat boosts. Hardly if ever is there a sideways move to consider.

The game features perks, but they are also almost useless. The only one with significant impact on the game is the ability to dodge on midair. Every other upgrade is so insignificant that it makes no real difference to have it or not.

One thing that isn't useless are the abilities. Weapons have associated abilities that are massively powerful, require no stamina, and have short cooldowns. Building the meter to use them is as easy as attacking, and each class gets a bonus way to build meter such as blocking or dodging attacks. Bosses and strong enemies are taken down almost exclusively with these abilities, with any damage from a weapon being more useful for the meter it builds than anything else.

The game has massive trouble with ladders. Climbing a ladder should be easy enough, but it becomes highly frustrating in this game. The perspective for ladders makes no sense, with the camera apparently coming in at an angle from both the left and right. This makes determining where the ladder can be grabbed needlessly difficult. Your character has no momentum while airborn, so stopping even a bit short will send you flying downward before you realize you haven't grabbed on. Mounting and dismounting from the top of a ladder is also something I still don't understand even after completing the game.

The lore of the game is frankly unintersting, but unlike Dark Souls, which kept lore tucked away unless you went looking for it, Death's Gambit simply cannot wait to shove lore in your face. Plenty of unskipabble dialogue with voice acting, and other story sequences will interrupt your gameplay. There are also the Tomes, which increase damage against bosses by 5% each. Finding one immediately covers the center of the screen in text, darkens the rest of the screen, and removes the hud compeltely. This happened once while I was poisoned and I could not see how much health I had left until the text slowly faded away. If I wanted to read the tome, I would've been happy to do so from the inventory in a sfae area. The story simply didn't interest me, and felt fairly childish. The final boss even pulls an "I am your mother" twist. What a joke.

A major difference from Dark Souls is that Death's Gambit has you drop a plume on death instead of your shards (souls). This makes levelling up easier, but has annoying consequences. Since the game can't just delete your previous plume if you die while one was already dropped, you just drop another one. There is not limit to how many plumes you can have lying on the ground. You can get them back for the cost of shards equal to a level up. This is particularly annoying if you go to fight a boss but aren't yet strong enough. WHen you die, your plume is locked in the boss arena. I had this happend twice while exploring, putting down by two feathers due for no real reason. Punishing the player by essentially taking a level up when they know they need to level up to beat the bosses they found is just nonsensical.

The game also gives you shards based on the lowest point you've reduced a bosses health to. Each new low before death rewards more shards. Why this is a mechanic is unclear to me. I guess it's supposed to feel rewarding to see you got farther then ever before as you try to beat a boss, but it honestly just feel patronizing.

To interconnect the different areas, the game just uses a single long tunnel with ladders that you can ride a horse down. It's pretty lazy. The horse is also not used elsewhere after the tutorial. At one point a message tells you to use the horse to clear long gaps, but this never happens since you can't ride the horse outside the tunnel. Even so, the world is small enough anyway that you cane asily get from one area to any other with in no time flat. The game is just small. It isn't very densely packed either. I completed my first playthrough in under 15 hours.

One area of the game goes full retard, with tons of hidden passages (meaning, walls you can pass through with no indication) and such being required to compelte the area. It's just awful level design. I simply looked up online what to do because I didn't care to waste my time jumping into every wall section in the hopes of finding something.

The game absolutely showers you with unneeded items providing tiny buffs. Some of them are so small I'm not even sure they were coded properly and are doing anything at all. Apparently there are some confirmed glitches like this, including a shield that was meant to temporarily buff you instead *permanently* debuffing you until you relaunched the whole game.

Death's Gambit failed on every level to capture the spirit of Dark Souls. Combat felt like a nubmers game, with cheap hits and out-of-nowhere instant kill moves galore. The game's uninspiried story and philosophy are constantly jumping to take center stage and kill any sense of pacing in gameplay. Building a character was dead simple, leveling up only 3 abilities and sometimes a fourth, and with no interesting decisions to make regarding weapons or armor.

Does the game do anything right? Well, it looks pretty nice. I like the sprite work quite a bit. Some of the bosses have very cool visual designs. That's honestly all I have in terms of positive feedback. Death's Gambit is not a terrible game by any means, it just doesn't do anything very well. The issues I've mentioned are certainly noticable during gameplay, but the game isn't difficult enough that they become a major sticking point. There is enough to explore and do to keep a player busy and somewhat enagaged while playing, and the price point is very reasonable. At the end of the day, it's just another middling title trying to share in some of Dark Souls' glory.