Bottom Line: ustwo's tactics-roguelite about grief is one of the most emotionally honest games in the genre, wrapped around a physics-based dodgeball system that's genuinely clever. The roguelite scaffolding is its weakest limb — but the heart underneath is strong enough to carry it.
The Gameplay Loop
The dodgeball conceit is smarter than it sounds. Traditional tactics games ask you to manage cover, range bands, and action economy. Desta keeps the action economy but replaces hit-percentage dice rolls with deterministic physics. A throw either has a clean line or it doesn't — and if it doesn't, you can manufacture one by bouncing the ball off a wall, a pillar, or the arena's furniture. This does something quietly radical: it removes the XCOM-style "95% miss" resentment entirely. When a shot fails in Desta, it's because you read the geometry wrong, not because the RNG betrayed you.
Catching is the other half of the system, and it's where the design gets genuinely tense. An incoming throw can be caught if a teammate is positioned right, which flips possession and momentum in a single move. The best turns in Desta are little Rube Goldberg sequences — teleport a teammate into a catch lane, intercept, bounce a curved throw around an obstacle, knock out two opponents. When it clicks, it feels closer to a puzzle game wearing tactics clothing, which is very much ustwo's home turf.
The roster system feeds this well. Recruited characters aren't stat variations; they're rule changes. One character bends throws. One teleports. One grants extra actions. Because arenas are small — usually a handful of units per side — a single ability reshapes the whole possibility space. Drafting a team mid-run is the closest the game gets to real build-craft.
Where the Structure Strains
The roguelite wrapper is the honest criticism, and I'll make it plainly: Desta didn't need to be a roguelite. Runs are procedurally structured, and failure sends you back with meta-knowledge and some progression. But the narrative — the actual reason this game exists — is linear and authored. The two impulses fight each other. Replaying early encounters to re-reach a story beat you already understand dilutes exactly the emotional momentum the writing works so hard to build. The 77% Steam score lives in this gap: players who bounced off cite repetition and a few sharp difficulty spikes that force re-runs at precisely the wrong narrative moments.
The counterargument — that repetition mirrors how grief loops, how you rehearse the same conversation in your head night after night — is thematically elegant. I half-buy it. But theme doesn't fully excuse friction, and a more forgiving default difficulty (or a story mode) would have cost the game nothing.
The Writing
What can't be argued with is the script. Desta's non-binary identity is written as a fact of the character, not a plot device — Gayming Mag's 5/5 wasn't charity. The conversations with the dream-versions of Desta's mother, estranged friends, and late father are specific in the way good fiction is specific: awkward pauses, deflections, the sentence you rewrite four times before saying. The voice cast sells all of it. In a genre where narrative is usually connective tissue between battles, Desta inverts the ratio, and it's the right call.