Death Howlis billed as a Soulslike deckbuilder game, developed by The Outer Zone and published by11 bit studios. In it, players take on the role of a grieving mother as she tries to defy death and revive her son.
Game Rant recently spoke withDeath Howlcreative director Malte Burup, who also worked on the music, art, and writing in the game. We talked about the soulslike elements inDeath Howl, his approach to the art and writing, and how its cards work in a tactical grid-based system.The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Putting the Soul in Death Howl
Q: Can you talk to me a little bit about the idea of combining like soulslike elements with a deckbuilder?
A:The original thought was never to actually combine the Soulslike elements with deck building. It came about from trying to make a deckbuilder that was mixed between tactical combat and open-world exploration, and we had to figure out a way to design the game around that. These Soulslike elements appeared throughout that design. Our testers came back and said that there were some strange Soulslike feelings about this andSoulslike elements in the game design, which we could also see. I’d never played the genre until recently, a few months ago, so it was kind of a thing that just came about. We embraced it and started to look at what that audience likes and tried to cater to that. For example, you harvest these “souls” called Death Howls.
Every time you kill an enemy, you use these Death Howls to craft or create new cards you may use to progress the game. Whenever you heal at Sacred Groves, all enemies respawn, so that’s kind of the source of that.
Q: A core element that fans love about the Soulslike genre is the environmental storytelling. Is that something that’s prominent in Death Howl?
A: That’s something that’s in there, that we also want to include more of, but it’s not as deep as aSoulslike game. The story is more upfront; from the first scene of the game, it’s totally direct. It’s a game of mystery and there’s a lot of atmosphere that people will draw similarities to, but the story is more upfront. It’s more that we’ve tried to hide a lot of small stories and lore in the environment and characters.
Q: You mentioned you did a bit of the writing. What can you tell me about your approach to that mystery and atmosphere purely from a story standpoint?
A:I always like a mystery that is strange and ambiguous, but at the same time, we wanted to tell thisstory that’s inspired by folklore. The plot, presented through folklore, is told very directly, but the mystery and strangeness of it lie in the details because we also wanted it to feel like a mystery. That’s how we tried to approach it, but it has also changed. In the beginning, we were very focused on being ambiguous with nothing in your face, but a lot of people couldn’t connect with it. We tried to put some of the fine points upfront, and instead of it being a twist at the end, it became the very first thing revealed in the game. It changed a lot.
Q: What drew you to the artistic approach you took with Death Howl?
A: There are a lot ofpixel art gamesout there, but I really love pixel art. I love that almost abstract detail where you can make out what you want because you have a certain lack of detail. The brain paints in the details, and I really like that, I’ve always liked that. I wanted to do that with the pixel art, but I also wanted to have a fresh look.
I did this thing by taking the background color and making it the color of the shadows. It’s difficult to describe, but it creates this woodcut feel that everything is printed and flat on purpose, which creates this strange, otherworldly look that I wanted. It helps that it pushes the game into looking a little bit different because there are so many games out there, so we wanted to stick out somehow. That was our approach with the pixel art, the trick of the colors.
Dealing the Cards of Death Howl
Q: And what about the art approach to the cards in the game?
A:We also wanted the cards to have this magical and distinct feel that was different from each other. However, there’s this thing that happens when you draw pixel art on a small scale, like trying to do a small portrait or scene or something, where it has a lot of life to it. There’s a bit more detail in those to describe what is actually happening because, otherwise, it will be too much like icons or something like that. So, we added a little more detail to the illustrations you see throughout the game in the cards. It’s where we break the rule of this background color being like the shadow.
Q: How did you decide what the cards actually do?
A:We are, of course, inspired by otherdeckbuilders like Slay the Spire. We have looked at, yeah, all the deckbuilding games we could and then mixed that with our positioning.
We have this tactical element as well with the grid-based, turn-based positioning that adds another lay on top of that. Some cards could not fit in our game, some cards we had to invent, and of course, we had to make the cards themselves work on their own but also have synergy with other cards. We have this system of four regions in the world where each region sort of restarts your deck. It’s a new class of cards, and we have this mana penalty on old cards when you go into a new region. you may still use them, but they are not as effective. Maybe you used one of them in an awesome combo, but this forces you, as the player, to make new cards and make a new deck with new synergies that work against the new enemies in the region.
Q: What’s the road to release look like for you?
A:We are finishing up the features now, and then it’s just polish and polish and polish until release sometime later this year.
[END]
