Can a Deck-Builder be a Souls-like?

It’s obvious that naming your deck-builder a souls-like is going to garner more interest, but I don’t think it’s misleading. After spending an hour with Death Howl, it captures the essence of a souls-like with all of the necessary elements. Although it doesn’t come in the traditional third person form factor that we are used to, Death Howl is deserving of the title.

How can a deck-builder be classified as a souls-like? To truly to understand why, I think we need to first figure out what makes a souls-like and what are the essential qualities and gameplay mechanics needed.

CAPTURING THE ESSENCE

When the term souls-like comes to mind you think of dark and oppressive worlds that are full of death and decay, an isolated protagonist facing tremendous odds as they journey forwards on their quest as they face horrific and ungodly creatures.

In terms of mechanics, there’s the combat that requires more brains than brawn with timing and patience. A bonfire system to restore health and enemies to respawn. There are souls that can be lost, but also play an integral role in the ability to upgrade the protagonist, allowing you to even the odds.

Death Howl tweaks a few things to fit these into deck-builder. Instead of using souls to augment your strength or intellect, you craft new cards from many different categories. You could also argue that in place of stamina in battle, Death Howl gives you action points in battle to use your wits and decide when to attack and when to defend as patience and timing is a crucial element of the genre.

WHAT IS DEATH HOWL?

In Death Howl, you play as a mother who, after a ritual has been transported to the spirit realm in a desperate search of her recently deceased son. Exploration takes place from an almost iso-metric perspective with Diablo style controls as you click where you want to move, but the combat takes place on a grid with a turn based system that requires a tactical approach.

Death Howl wastes very little time and instantly provides the player with a rich atmospheric world. The art style has a gorgeous minimalist approach, the score is haunting, the gameplay is challenging and the UI is intuitive.

The one downside is that I tried to play Death Howl on the Steam Deck, which works, but requires use of the touch pad in place of a mouse. Connecting Steam Deck to a keyboard and mouse provided a much more seamless experience, but fully optimizing Death Howl for Steam Deck should be a high priority for the studio as having the ability to play deck-builders in handheld mode is almost an essential requirement.

Combining the terms deck-building and souls-like seems like a stretch, but after playing Death Howl, it makes perfect sense and feels wholly unique. The demo does an incredible job of establishing the universe, gives a feel for the majority of the mechanics and teases what lies ahead in your journey, including the many biomes that await and with optimized Steam Deck controls, I look forward to more of this journey through the spirit realm. The best way to summarize Death Howl is to leave you with the words of the director of this three person team

“the loss of a loved one is universal, an inevitable part of the human experince. We’ve introduced a fresh take on the deck builder genre, combining it with souls-like exploration and adding compelling lore to leave a lasting impact”