Let It Die is essentially Dark Souls reimagined as a free-to-play roguelike, with a monetization scheme that sounds incredibly predatory on paper. And yet, for many hours at least, it never really threatens to empty your wallet. It's got clunky combat and a nebulous sense of progression, but it initially showers you with premium currency and wraps it all in a enticingly weird and violent package. The appeal wears off in time, but in its chaotic first dozen or so hours it achieves something like magnificence.
The bizarro setting is partially to thank for that. Let It Die embraces the increasingly popular view that the world could go down the toilet in the next few years, specifically after some tectonic cataclysm in 2026. On an island outside of Tokyo, the Babel-like "Tower of Barbs" shoots up to the skies, ringed with skyscrapers and populated by baddies with dreadfully poor AI all trying to reach the top. Others shoot through underground tunnels in subway cars while hooked up to skin-piercing tubes straight out of The Matrix, and you start off by choosing whichever one of these lab rats suits your fancy.
If that's not strange enough for you, consider that I learned about all this from a consistently entertaining Grim Reaper-type who calls himself "Uncle Death" and cavorts about on a skateboard and calls me "senpai," all while dropping hints in balloons during a tutorial that seems to go on for hours. And then Let It Die goes meta, pulling back from the action to reveal that I'm actually playing a game in a sad old arcade where a bored waitress sends me off on quests to kill this or that NPC in-game. But Uncle Death exists here too, making cracks in his cool accent. Is he just a cosplayer, or something more sinister? Does the actual tower exist outside the arcade? Let It Die is at its best when it prompts dreamlike questions like these, and it might have been a masterwork if all of its elements achieved similar success.
Let It Die is at its best when it prompts absurd, dreamlike questions.
Sometimes it stumbles in the strangest places. Your goal in Let It Die is to join the ranks of the savage souls climbing the tower, with each floor growing more challenging as you ascend via elevators and escalators. Part of the appeal is that these floors randomize in roguelike fashion each time you visit, which would be cool if most of Let It Die didn't rely so heavily on minor variations of the same steel and brick corridors to the point of nausea.
Rarely do these areas come close to matching the personality of the "waiting room" where you can rest or bring blueprints to order new gear. Here you’ll find a seductive pole dancer who sells stickers that grant boosts or a robotic cephalopod that plugs into you and lets you allocate stat points when you level. Enemies aside, the playable world beyond the waiting room comes off as bland by comparison, looking only about as weird as the backstage of a high school theater.
Fortunately, Let It Die manages to sustain its attractive absurdity in other ways, though with varying degrees of success. For instance, you regain health by chomping on giant frogs or grubbing for mushrooms, some of which are poisonous or can be lobbed like grenades. It’s delightfully bizarre, but you’re forced to interact with these bits with the DualShock controller's touchpad, a frustratingly awkward method that once found me gulping down an explosive fungus rather than throwing it. It's funny early on, but the laughs stop when you lose a character you’ve carefully poured hours of time and effort into over so simple a mistake.
Let It Die’s wild variety of weapons—which include everything from hot laundry irons to fireworks launchers—are another part of its odd, macabre charm. Weapons and armor that drop off of enemies usually have the durability of tissue paper though; it was never long before my latest toy would break, which meant I rarely had time to decide if I actually liked using a steel bat before I'd have to switch to chainsaw fists or a ridiculous pistol that looked like something the Joker would bring to a shootout. You can pick up blueprints to make sturdy new ones back at the waiting room, but they eventually end up costing so much that it's usually best to scavenge. It's annoying at times, but I begrudgingly came to enjoy how it constantly forced me to change my strategies and thus prevent any sense of repetitiveness from setting in.
If you try to play it like Dark Souls, you should generally prepare to die.
It also works because Let It Die's combat lends itself to this kind of chaos. Its animations certainly look like those of Dark Souls, but Let It Die's design rarely encourages the kind of careful thinking and well-timed rolls that Souls fans so adore. Rather, I enjoyed Let It Die the most when I approached it as an aggressive hack-and-slash, carving up enemies before they had a chance to beat on me while jamming to Akira Yamaoka's phenomenal soundtrack.
Played this way, Let It Die it provides hours of ridiculous fun. Unfortunately, if you try to play it like Dark Souls, you should generally prepare to die. Dodging sometimes sent me in the opposite direction I wanted, or didn't respond at all. The cumbersome melee lockon oddly only works as intended if you're actually aiming the camera at the target, which is made all the worse by Let It Die's practice of swarming you with enemies who stunlock you with abandon.
And then, yes, usually you die. Here's where Let It Die gets tricky. As its title implies, Let It Die doesn't want you to get attached to anything, which can ruin any meaningful sense of progression in the long run. We've already seen this approach in action with weapons and gear, but Let It Die extends it to the characters you play as well. They're expendable, a point driven home by the way you store multiple fighters on hooks in a "freezer" for later use, or in the way the late game makes you abandon the fighters you spent hours with for ones with higher level caps. This technically being a roguelike, you're theoretically supposed to just "let them die."
You can save them, either by paying Uncle Death some gold back at the freezer (and thus getting back all their gear) or paying premium "Death Metal" currency to revive right at the spot where you died and continue hacking and slashing as though nothing happened. If you don't, they wander around as NPC "haters" who attack both other players and you (although you can win them back—minus their gear—if you beat them). If you manage to keep them alive through all this, you'll still probably lose them in the "Tokyo Death Metro" PvP feature, which sounds cool on paper but which I found infuriating in practice. Essentially, other players in groups organized by region can invade your base when you're offline and run off with your stashed goods and, yes, playable fighters.
As its title implies, Let It Die doesn't want you to get attached to anything.
That's a ton of opportunities for loss, which naturally invites a ton of opportunities to spend money in a free-to-play game. Somehow, miraculously, it took me well over a dozen hours before I found this started to ruin the fun. Let It Die practically shovels Death Metal at you just for logging in, making it easy to trade it in for gold (AKA "kill coins"), extra storage space, "free" elevator rides, or for those precious immediate revivals, which can mean all the difference in a boss fight. At the higher levels of the tower, though, death comes often, partly because of the huge numbers of players who leave their high-level "haters" wandering the samey halls with crazily effective machetes, likely because they have no money to revive them. Sometimes you'll even find these high level haters wandering the newbie-focused lower floors of the tower. So then you die again, and the cycle continues. If you're like me, eventually you'll reach a point where you just walk away and, well...let it die.
Let It Die has numerous rough edges, but it manages to entertain through the sheer force of its weird personality and its varied, if clumsy combat. The controls are often clunky and there's rarely a meaningful sense of attachment to characters or gear, but its characterizations and settings often manage to keep the pain of the poorer stuff down to a minimum, at least for a while.