DEADBOLT Reviews

COLD. WHERE ARE YOU?

it's a video is all i know

VERY GOOD

A Great Break from Mahjong Soul.

Extremely atmospheric sidescrolling stealth action game. It’s pretty damn hard, each level is a good balance between a puzzle and a pure skill check and it’s super satisfying to develop a route and just start working your way through like the well trained reaper hitman you are. The vibes are phenomenal, with a supernatural urban setting, and with you sneaking around outside nightclubs, apartments, and warehouses chock full of undead, and naturally Chris Christodoulou’s PHENOMENAL ost work enhances it all elevenfold. Criminally underrated game, you should play it!

Great music, cool art style, fun satisfying gameplay, and a super creative weird universe

Having revisited this game recently, I'd say it passed the test of time to become one of Steam's hidden gems. Equally rewarding and punishing combat. Nice symbolic flavour story. Many ways to approach a mission. Wide variety of missions with special gimmicks, especially near the end. The only downside, I'd say, is that the game doesn't play into its own multi-approach style more. If you finish the campaign, you don't even get enough money to unlock everything. I've had the most fun when I cheated and unlocked all of the weapons and then tried to challenge myself by completing missions with various weapon combinations. I'm still hoping for a second entry into a series, expanding on weapons, enemy types and levels. Pick this game up!

A tight sidescrolling... brawler? With fun levels and KILLER music. You play Death, seeking out a hit list of undead gangs with a handful of weapons, a magic trick or two, and the element of surprise as your only advantages against gun-toting zombies, vampires, and skeletons. Story's not bad either, especially once you hit the end.

Quite enjoyable, a very decent game. However, maybe get it during a sale, as it is extremely short if you are not the type to obsess over it. As so many other reviews point out, [i]Deadbolt[/i] is something of a mix of other games like Hot Line [i]Miami[/i] and [i]Gun Point[/i]. You are a reaper and your jobs always involve infiltrating places and killing the undead who lurk there. To this end, the game features rather involved mechanics that one can discover somewhat naturally over the course of the game. For instance, you can switch off lights, but enemies might flip them back on. But you can also shoot most lights and thus gain the benefits of darkness more permanently for certain areas. Sound can be used in many ways, such as using timers on objects or knocking on doors to lure enemies to places or you could simply use a loud weapon and fire it in a room you immediately vacate for similar effects. Some weapons are silent, others can be heard if you are close to doors while others even pierce through ceilings and doors. It took me a while to figure these out as there is no tutorial, but once I did, I rather enjoyed it. The variety allows a somewhat open-ended approach to “solving” levels. This brings us to the story. What are we even solving these levels, raiding these locations for? Turns out that there is a great conspiracy related to various gangs (factions? Species?) of undead afoot and we are in way too deep. It is certainly an interesting choice, having each variety of undead be representative of different things, with the whole plot going from drug abuse and trade to human trafficking. Yet at the same time, we get brief insights into those factions and what motivates them. It is not very complex, but certainly compelling enough. Ultimately, everyone suffers in “This Place”, Limbo or wherever the game is set and the antagonists come across as somewhat sympathetic the more you keep at it. Add an atmospheric soundtrack to it and you are golden. However, all that glitters is not gold. For starters, while the gameplay is enjoyable, I found the gameplay loop somewhat frustrating in a bad way at times where it seemed that because of the AI behaving in unexpected ways, I had to redo the entire level. Again. And again. And again. Then later levels sometimes had checkpoints for the later part, yet if I died there, I was left with whatever I had in hand when I entered the map. It was not exactly fun to do an endgame mission with only a knife. The levels (and the game overall) are short and varied enough that it does not become too much of a problem, but sometimes I was left wondering what I did wrong. This is certainly not helped by the funky balance. Souls are difficult to come by and weapons are very expensive, so I imagine one can make mistakes very easily. Two of the weapon choices (Revenant and Death&Taxes) overshadowed the other options rather significantly as well, one a strong, loud gun that penetrates walls, the other offering lots of ammo and decent damage. I rarely saw a point in other options, and the extraordinarily expensive scythe was certainly cool, but often too limiting for the later missions, so buying that one felt rather bad, too. Finally, there is the story being tied to RNG. I mentioned how you gain insight into the factions’ motivations, which is through tapes you can collect in the levels. Unfortunately, these drop at random (supposedly 5%) from specific enemy types, amongst them some bosses. So I found myself going through the game again, checking who drops what and killing a boss repeatedly only for no drop to ever happen. At which point I decided to simply read the missing parts on a wiki and call it day. Having them as fixed drops would have been no problem at all and probably enriched the narrative, yet as it is, I was rather just annoyed by it. As I am currently not particularly keen on speedrunning or achievement hunting that was a rather poor way to end it.

Deadbolt is as equally cool as it is short, and I don't think I'd change a single thing about it. And if I did, I could make my own level, I guess. Amazing soundtrack that comes with a pretty darn good game