Deadhaus Sonata, the newest game by Denis Dyack, which was originally announced all the way back in 2018. For those who are unfamiliar with the name, Denis Dyack is the mind behind games such as Legacy of Kain, Too Human, and Eternal Darkness — some of gaming's most acclaimed series. With Deadhaus Sonata being pitched as a combination of the three, expectations for it were set high, to say the least.
Unfortunately, during its development, the game infamously went through what gamers usually lovingly refer to as "development hell," with several engine changes along the way. With the game having supposedly been in development for over ten years at this point, the title has finally entered Early Access, and we here at Netto's Game Room were given the chance to play it both solo and in multiplayer. And... it has certainly been an experience, to say the very least.
The Story:
Deadhaus Sonata’s story takes place in a world inspired by the likes of H.P. Lovecraft, where a war between two Elder Gods has brought the dead back to life. From here, players explore the world to uncover its history and learn more about what transpired prior to their own awakening. While this sounds interesting in theory and helps set the stage for the game’s final release, the story — especially for a self-proclaimed narrative-driven game — is an incredible mess.
The game opens with an incredibly short text cutscene explaining how mankind has fallen, before simply putting you at the start of the tutorial stage. Afterward, the story is pretty much told at you rather than to you. Some pieces of lore are narrated once you unlock abilities, but most of it is dropped when you physically interact with glowing stones or collect books hidden throughout the environment. Each of these interactions is fully voiced, with countless hours' worth of recordings found in the game, but the way it is handled is very rough, to say the least.
With no subtitles and subpar audio mixing that makes some words difficult to make out, these lore drops become very hard to follow. Rather than drip-feeding its world-building, the game completely relies on you stumbling across everything yourself and hopes you retain all of the information. Audio logs you have collected can be replayed in the hub world, and thankfully, you can change the audio mixing in the menu if needed. However, there are still no options for subtitles, and activating multiple pieces of dialogue will result in the narrator talking over themselves.
Despite the game claiming a strong emphasis on narrative, in its current state, the story seems more tacked on than anything and does not evolve past being a virtual lore book. With no dialogue from your character, an absence of NPCs, no cutscenes besides the three lines of text at the very start, and no real context given to the levels and missions themselves, the story can easily be ignored as you play. And at that point, is it really a narrative-driven experience?
Taking a Look at Early Access:
Deadhaus Sonata has a simple, tried-and-true premise — you start in your hub, pick a mission, fight your way through enemies while gathering items to make yourself stronger, and then complete the main objective to claim your reward before returning to the hub. Rinse and repeat. This formula has been used to great effect in games such as Warframe, Phantasy Star Online, Monster Hunter, Aeruta, and many others. The problem is that, with the exception of that very basic premise, nothing about the game actually works in its current state.
At the very start of the game, right after you are plopped into the tutorial stage, you will notice three functional buttons in the top-left corner of the screen: Esc brings up the settings menu, Tab opens a clock that doesn't seem to do anything at the moment, and 7 shows you where to go using a trail of what we assume to be blood. Get used to these specific keys, because you cannot rebind them in any way.
While one would think the 7 key would be the most important tool — especially given the game's large maps — it is incredibly broken and fails to work most of the time. In the tutorial stage alone, it seems to have zero pathfinding capability, meaning it can and will lead you entirely outside of the map's bounds. On the other hand, while in the procedurally generated dungeon stage, it leads you to the nearest objective regardless of whether you have already completed it.
As we moved on, navigating past flickering trees and broken ground textures, we finally got to experience the combat. It can best be summed up as hitting unresponsive enemies a few times with a weapon that feels weightless, right before being prompted to execute a finisher. The finisher kills enemies instantly, restores your health, and supposedly makes you stronger, but the animations are bizarre, the process takes too long, and enemies can still attack you mid-animation — assuming they decide to stop standing in awkward poses and actually do something about the vampires in front of them.
You can unlock extra skills, referred to as the Tarot's Major Arcana, and equip or empower them using cards from the Minor Arcana dropped by fallen enemies. However, just like everything else in the game, this system is completely broken.
One skill, which allows you to bite an enemy to drain their health, put me into a floating state where I couldn't attack, but pressing the jump key allowed me to fly around. Worse yet, it wouldn't let me come back down. As I kept pressing jump, I realized there was no ceiling to my flight; I just kept ascending until I could see the entire map below me, leaving my teammate Ben completely alone on the ground.
Putting that game-breaking but hilarious bug aside, most other skills drastically tanked the performance. The game would technically still display a refresh rate of 60 frames per second, but the visual stutter made it feel like it was running at 10 frames per second. The abilities might be strong, but they render the experience unplayable, despite both of us playing co-op on high-end PCs.
To top it all off, just as we were about to finish the tutorial, the game simply wouldn't let us leave. We tried completing it the normal way, but after loading for a few seconds, a message appeared stating the server had redirected us back to the map. We tried interacting with a stone that was supposed to teleport us back to the hub, only to get the exact same result.
After Ben's jump command mysteriously disabled and re-enabled itself several times, we decided to see what lay past the gate at the end of the tutorial, which lacked any invisible walls to stop us. What we found was a fully modeled mountain you can climb, decorated with trees, requiring about two to three minutes of traveling that players were never meant to see. At the peak was nothing but the edge of the map looking out into a blank abyss. With no other options, we threw ourselves off the edge, which reset us back to the beginning of the tutorial. Remarkably, only after this trip to the void did the pause menu finally allow us to quit back to the hub. Prior to this, we had restarted the game multiple times to no avail; only our leap into the abyss allowed us to advance.
Upon arriving at the hub, you can equip and upgrade your skills, review the audio logs you've managed to find, strengthen your weapons, and buy skins at the cash shop. And yes, there is a fully functional cash shop in this barely working game, as it is planned to be a free-to-play title upon full release. The hub's design isn't anything special either, and even the game itself encourages you to just keep playing rather than taking time to explore, but one interesting element is the feats upgrade system.
Deadhaus Sonata is designed so that a player's character evolves and changes based on their actions rather than just finding specific loot, but the reality is that this functions as a makeshift achievement system. You hit specific milestones while playing and receive a reward for it — nothing more. It isn't a bad system by any means, and you can even save custom loadouts for different builds, but when the rest of the game is generic and barely functions on a surface level, there isn't much to get excited about.
Moving out of the hub, it didn't take long to encounter an even weirder glitch than before: whoever didn't select the mission had their camera completely lock up. When I hosted and picked the mission, it ran fine for me while Ben's camera broke, and vice versa. When the glitch triggered, the non-hosting player had to hold down the right mouse button just to look around... which also happens to be the key bound to use a skill. As a result, we were constantly spamming skills just to turn around, and only a full restart of the game would temporarily fix the issue.
Ultimately, after spending hours with the title and attempting to clear as many missions as possible, we simply gave up. No matter what content lies further in, nothing could make the game a worthwhile experience after enduring these trials. We are well aware that this is an Early Access title meant to help fund ongoing development, but in its current state, it feels much closer to a rough alpha build or a basic proof of concept.
Should you play it?
I cannot even begin to act as if Deadhaus Sonata is worth considering in good faith. It is broken and completely riddled to the brim with bugs, glitches, and baffling design decisions all throughout. Even the game's main menu, before anything else loads, had GPU temperatures spiking around 90°C for some unexplained reason.
If you want to play it for the story, it is honestly barely there, and you never feel like you are taking part in it. If you want to play it for the gameplay, it is uninspired at the best of times and flat-out broken at the worst.
With its touted relation to the Legacy of Kain series, I was ready to fall in love with it right from the get-go, but there is simply nothing to be found here. The only thing it has going for it is the fact that, even when playing with friends, it doesn't actually become any more fun. That is, at the very least, an achievement in and of itself, and one can't help but laugh at all the ways the game breaks along the way.
While the developers have stated Deadhaus Sonata will be shaped by community feedback, it is going to be a long road.
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