Death's Gambit: Afterlife

Most games that launch badly stay bad. They get patched into stability, quietly discounted, and left to rot in a bundle. Death’s Gambit: Afterlife did something rarer: it came back and argued its case.

The 2018 original, from White Rabbit and published by Serenity Forge, arrived with the unmistakable posture of a 2D Dark Souls — deliberate stamina combat, cryptic lore, a hub of broken NPCs, death as a mechanic rather than a punishment. It landed with a shrug. The bones were interesting; the flesh was thin. Years later, the Afterlife update shipped new levels, new bosses, dozens of weapons, and a set of mechanical overhauls that touched nearly every system — and it went out free to everyone who already owned the game. That decision is the single most important fact about this release, and it reframes everything else. Serenity Forge didn’t sell a director’s cut. They rebuilt the product and handed it to the people who’d already been burned.

The pitch: you play Sorun, a soldier conscripted into Death’s service and dispatched to the ruined kingdom of Siradon to hunt immortal guardians and cut off whatever’s feeding their endless life. Structurally it’s a Metroidvania — a large, interconnected map, traversal-gated, shortcut-laced — draped over an action-RPG with multiple classes, a sprawling talent tree, and genuine multi-classing.

Its market position is awkward and honest. It is not Hollow Knight, which is a better-feeling game. It is not Blasphemous, which is a more coherent one. It’s the sprawling, systems-heavy, slightly janky alternative for players who want build variety more than they want polish. At $10.99, that’s a defensible trade — and its strong critical reception suggests many agree, even if the feel keeps it from the top tier.

• A deep boss roster with optional Heroic Mode: Every major encounter has a harder second version that rewrites attack patterns rather than inflating health bars. This is the game’s best idea, and it’s designed with real craft — Heroic fights change the conversation, not the math.
• Multiple classes and true multi-classing: Soldier, assassin, blood knight, acolyte and company aren’t skins. The sprawling talent tree lets you blend them, and the design supports a parry-heavy blood knight or a ranged acolyte hybrid without punishing you for the heresy.
• Weapon-specific movesets across a wide armory: Scythes, bows, longswords, halberds — each with distinct reach, recovery and rhythm. Swapping weapons is closer to changing character than changing stats.
• A hand-drawn pixel art world and an expansive orchestral score: The game’s most universally praised elements, and deservedly so.
• Multiple endings, crafting, and New Game+ difficulty brackets: Choice-driven conclusions and tiered NG+ give the completionist a real runway.

The gameplay loop

The core rhythm is familiar: enter a hostile screen, read the enemy, spend stamina carefully, bank your progress at a checkpoint, die, lose ground, return. Sorun’s kit — dodge, parry, weapon arts, a healing resource tied to the Death’s-servant fiction — is deep enough that mastery is a real destination, not a difficulty slider.

Where Afterlife separates itself is build expression. Most 2D Souls-likes give you a weapon and a handful of charms. This one gives you a class, a talent tree with a daunting number of nodes, and permission to cross-pollinate. Committing to a scythe-swinging soldier and then grafting assassin mobility onto it produces a character that plays measurably differently, not one that does marginally more damage. For a certain kind of player — the one who opens a spreadsheet before opening the game — that’s the whole appeal, and it’s the strongest argument for buying this over its better-feeling competition.

Where it fights you

And then there’s the feel. Every serious criticism of this game converges on the same place, and it’s the one place a combat-driven action platformer cannot afford to be soft: the moment-to-moment physics.

Jumps are floaty. Not stylized-floaty, the way Hollow Knight commits to a specific arc you learn to trust — floaty in the sense that your landing point is negotiable. Hitboxes are inconsistent, with attacks that visually connect and don’t, and enemy strikes that land from angles your eyes didn’t agree to. Worst of all are the attack recovery windows, where Sorun stays locked in animation past the point where instinct says the exchange is over. In a game built on parry timing, that’s not “demanding.” That’s a broken contract.

The distinction matters more than it sounds. Hardcore games earn their difficulty by being legible — you die, you understand why, you adjust. When the failure is in the input layer rather than the encounter design, the loop stops teaching. The complaint here isn’t that Afterlife is hard. It’s that it’s unfair in a way that isn’t interesting, and those are entirely different problems.

Layer on the soft-locks, assorted bugs, and difficulty spikes that arrive without warning, and you get a game that keeps interrupting its own best moments. Heroic Mode is a genuinely brilliant design idea being delivered through a control scheme that isn’t precise enough to fully honor it.

The story problem

The narrative is atmospheric, moody, and delivered so obliquely that most players will finish without a working model of what happened. There’s a version of environmental storytelling that rewards attention; there’s another that mistakes withholding for depth. Afterlife drifts toward the second. Multiple endings driven by your choices sound compelling until you realize you weren’t given enough context to understand what you were choosing between.

Onboarding and friction

Class selection happens early and matters enormously, with limited information about what any of it means downstream. The talent tree is presented with more density than guidance. Experienced genre players will navigate it fine. Newcomers will make a build they regret and won’t know it for hours. That’s a real onboarding failure in a game that otherwise wants to be welcoming enough to justify its many starting paths.

The pixel art is the least contested thing here, and it should be. Siradon is drawn with a painterly, hand-crafted density that resists the flat, asset-pack sameness plaguing a lot of indie pixel work — layered parallax, ruined architecture with actual history in it, boss sprites large enough to feel like events. Character animation is expressive; the weapon movesets read clearly at a glance, which matters mechanically as much as aesthetically.

The orchestral score is expansive, and it’s the element most likely to outlive the game in your memory. It’s used with restraint in exploration and swings hard in boss encounters.

Technically, the demands are modest. This is a 2D game of limited scope, and it’s light on hardware by design. The persistent concerns aren’t about frames. They’re about bugs, occasional soft-locks, and collision behavior, which is a harder class of problem to forgive because it can cost you a run rather than a few milliseconds. The UI is functional and unfussy, though the talent tree’s information density outpaces its clarity.

One caution flag worth reading honestly: the game’s recent reception has cooled relative to its overall standing — against a modest sample, so don’t over-index on it, but it’s not nothing either.

Steam is the reference version and the right choice if you have a controller. Play it with one. The game is built around analog-free directional input and tight face-button timing, and while keyboard and mouse technically works, it fights the parry windows in a game that already has parry-window problems. Steam also gets you the mod-adjacent ecosystem, cloud saves, and the fastest patch cadence.

Nintendo Switch is the more interesting story. As a 2D title of modest technical demands, it’s well suited to the platform, and the handheld mode suits the structure: level-to-level exploration and boss attempts break cleanly into short sessions, and Death’s-Gambit-on-the-couch is a pleasant way to grind out a Heroic fight. The Joy-Con caveat is real, though. Drift-prone or mushy d-pad input on a game this timing-sensitive is a bad pairing; a Pro Controller closes most of that gap. Both versions include the full Afterlife content. Neither one fixes the floatiness.

Death’s Gambit: Afterlife is the rare game that deserves credit for what its developers did after launch. White Rabbit and Serenity Forge could have shipped a cynical remaster. Instead they rebuilt the thing and gave it away to the people who’d already paid — and the result is a substantially better game with substantially more in it.

But generosity isn’t the same as excellence. The expansion added content, systems, and ambition; it did not fix the fundamental tactility problem at the center of the experience. When a game asks you to parry on a razor-thin window, the physics have to be beyond question, and here they simply aren’t. Expect to spend the early hours adjusting to controls that never fully click, and the reward for that adjustment is great boss design and a build system with more expressive range than most of its better-feeling peers.

That’s the trade. Eleven dollars, a sprawling talent tree, a deep boss roster, and a control scheme you have to forgive. For the right player, that’s a bargain worth making. For most people, there are cleaner games one shelf over — and this one is hard to recommend without reservations.