Deathstate: Abyssal Edition

Really cool setting with fun gameplay

This is like the much more difficult predecessor of the auto-battler/shooter genre that exploded with Vampire Survivor. If you want a bit of a challenge...or a lot of challenge because its super hard on hard lol but definitely reasonable on normal. Check it out, it'snot bad for full price, even better if you catch it on sale

8.5/10

Very good game !

i love shoving foreign organs into every orifice

i thought this was a perfect video game well before anyone even imagined vampire survivors, and i still do.

Deathstate is kind of a mix between bullet hell and roguelike, and holds the balance well. Runs are short with enough variety to keep it interesting. There are a lot of unlocks (both items and characters) and feels a little opaque sometimes given how much the game hints at secrets, but is still worth the asking price.

Sampled this game for an hour on my "Indie Tryouts" Day - what a banger. It's an unholy eldritch combination of bullet heaven and hell - as a viewer put it "Bullet Purgatory". Throw in some wild roguelike "Binding of Isaac"-style relics and upgrades and it's well worth a look. Cool to uncover an old hidden indie gem.

A lot of the other reviews have talked about the elements it draws from roguelikes and twin stick shooters, but I want to give the 2022 perspective of how it compares to Vampire Survivors.

I hadn't put a lot of time into this when I first bought it, but I circled back around to it during lockdown, and I appreciate it a lot more now. I'm a big fan of Vampire Survivors, and I more appreciate the design and power ramp in Deathstate compared to VS. While I don't think I lost a run of VS after try #3 or 4, every run of Deathstate requires me to focus on my position and abilities and approach.

One thing that works pretty well is the damage to HP balance. While you can get behind on the damage curve, it never feels impossible to win. Whereas in VS, things ramp up in such a way that your input almost doesn't matter if your stats aren't up to par. If you use all the elements at your disposal (usually an artifact and organ in every level, the merchant, plus desecration altars), gameplay remains pretty brisk.

Overall, with lockdown depression, I came to really appreciate Vampire Survivors one-stick gameplay, and with that perspective I find Deathstate a lot of fun as a halfway point between VS and full on bullet hell games. It's def worth a try if you like Vampire Survivors, or bullet hells, or have pandemic depression 😅

SUMMARY: A must-buy single-stick roguelike shooter adventure with plenty of unlockables and challenge. Fight Lovecraftian monsters in a dream world, try to find the way to the right endings, and have fun!

I got Deathstate in 2022, years after release. I played it for hours, if you want any idea how good it is.

In Deathstate you play one of many people/beings trapped in an in-between dreamworld by a mysterious professor's experience. You pick someone to play and voyage into various dimensions, battling monsters with psychic powers and magic, and hopefully doing the right things to escape. Yes, there's actually a plot.

The game delivers everything you'd want in a single-stick roguelike shooter adventure - items, enemies, boss fights, lore, all sorts of equipment. At the same time it's precise in its design, with clear gameplay, easy controls, and an adventure you can often play in 30 minutes.

However, let's look at the elements.

CHARACTERS: You start with one character, and unlock others as you progress. This gives you different ways to play, and of course various endings to unlock.

GAMEPLAY: Literally move and you shoot automatically. A lot of your time will be dodging and activating various relics, abilites, and potions.

ENEMIES: Enemies are cute 16-bit lovecraftian monsters. Many are simple, but enough have unique abilities to keep you on your toes.

LEVELS: Pretty standard proceural block-based dungeons. The colors and extras are nice, adding a vibrancy to them. There's also various treasures and devices you can find.

BOSSES: Bosses are pretty interesting, though you'll develop strategies for them over time. The designs are great.

LEVELING: You level characters by finding organs from champions and boss monsters. These are randomized, and will affect your gameplay choices.

EQUIPMENT: This is very precise. You have one special ability (which might change), one artifact (triggered), one weapon (modifies your attacks), one grimoire (which adds attacks or modifes yours), and one potion to carry. You have options, but also you never have to manage a complex inventory.

UNLOCKABLES: LOTS of unlockables. You'll unlock more items, secrets, treasures, and more in most games sessions. It makes the game very fun to play as you're usually rewarded.

ENDINGS: There's also endings, secrets, and videos to unlock as well.

In short, Deathstate is a must buy if you like roguelike shooters. Its just a lot of fun with plenty to do.

It’s hard to find good Lovecraftian games, despite the popularity of cosmic horror. All too often a title will seize on the monsters or the twists of eldritch horror without capturing the despair and madness of the unknowable. But then there are magical exceptions like Deathstate, games that purposefully eschew the despair and madness and use the monsters and twists to make a completely awesome shoot-em-up. The cosmic horror elements really just serve as a jumping-off point for an entire universe of planar strongholds, enchanted blades, powerful tomes, and thousands of soul-sucking monsters to blast.

Good Professor Elinberg claimed to be on the verge of a monumental discovery in astral projection, but no one took him seriously until he up and vanished. A motley crew of scholars, drifters, and stranger beings have taken up residence in his previous residence to follow his trail into the unknown. By entering the Deathstate (roll credits), these explorers can enter realms of madness, populated by impossible beings guarding secrets of cosmic portend. Armed with enchanted weapons and artifacts, you will guide them to the final destination of the Professor and the terrible discoveries he has made.

In other words, you need to magic your way through fifteen levels of dimensional hellscapes to reach the thing the Prof sought. Each level is a vast maze of walls, channels, pits, and statuary separating you from the exit portal. Also standing in your way are several hundred enemies, everything from skeletons to star children to succubi to sarcophagi. You’ll need sustained fire from your magical arsenal to bring them down but can augment your spellcasting with weapons, grimoires, artifacts, potions, and organs dug from the entrails of the cosmic horrors themselves. Most of those can be found in chests or bought from strange mummified merchants to be swapped around but the organs do indeed come from dead enemies and are permanent additions (and stat boosts) to your increasingly confounding biology.

The actual combat is one of the most unique aspects of Deathstate. It purports to be a single-stick shooter, which means all you need to worry about is moving. Your magic auto-targets nearby enemies using its own priority system that is somehow plenty smart enough to never get you killed. I’m not sure why exactly it works so well because I think it’s just targeting whatever’s closest, but in dozens of runs I’ve never once felt like I was cheated out of life. It helps that your upgrades can turn your pew-pew magic into death beams, gouts of flame, homing missiles, or flying psychic battleaxes as well, and while there may be moments where you feel you’re not killing fast enough they pass very, very quickly.

Deathstate smartly gives you literal hordes of monsters to melt with your fantastic cosmic powers, and your high rate of fire means you’ll chew through most of them like candy. That’s not to say they’re not a threat, of course. There are more than enough vicious creatures to make your life hell even as you mow them down. Your foes generally fire off tons of slow-moving shots, making this one very much a bullet hell game where you can fortunately focus more on dodging than aiming. You have a dash move that makes you very briefly immune to attack that you’ll need to cut through denser patterns, and you might also find some trinkets or other items that can negate attacks from time to time.

Levels are assembled in sets of four under a specific map type, and maps are paired so every time you run through the game you’ve got a 50/50 chance of doing the last one over again or traveling to the alternate one. This helps keep runs fresh, as enemies are unique to their map and the two maps in a pairing often play completely differently. Once you beat the game you’ll find shrines to desecrate that raise the overall difficulty of the game, generally making more enemy shots appear and fewer pickups drop. While the base game isn’t too challenging the different desecration levels ramp up quickly, leaving you plenty of room to improve your dodging and magicking.

The real draw here though are the dozen playable characters and hundreds of unlockable items and enemies to find in your journeys. For a game with straight-forward levels and challenges Deathstate hides a surprising number of secrets, some I’m still struggling to uncover nearly a dozen hours in. The clean pixel art is perfectly fitting and the chiptune soundtrack is superb, drawing on inspiration like old DOOM midi classics to provide an ominous, understated backdrop to the chaos. If anything the simple mechanics can start to lull you into too great a comfort, only for the roguelike difficulty to come slap you back down. It’s ultimately a chill game and a terribly fun one at that, especially since you can play it exactly how you want. Even those unsure of the roguelike genre would be well-served by giving this one a try.



Did you enjoy this review? I certainly hope so, and I certainly hope you'll check out more of them at https://goldplatedgames.com/ or on my curation page!

This is one of my favorite games of all time.

Positives:
-The Atmosphere and background is fantastic. It makes you feel like there is a huge story, waiting to be uncovered.
-Item descriptions are cryptic (In a good way), and allude to a larger world.
-Items and organs are unique, with their own flavor and uses.
-Utterly unforgiving. Despite the auto aim feature, the game is a wonderful bullet hell and roguelike.
-Enemies are flavorful, and each one is different.
-Secrets. I have beaten this game, and I still have not seen every item, or fought every enemy. Another feature is the complex and strange ways to unlock certain things to access areas. You may stumble upon them by accident, or you may search for them, it doesn't matter.
-Awesome soundtrack. Seriously.

Negatives:
-Needs more levels. With 7 levels that can be unlocked normally (with one that can only be accessed in very certain circumstances, I want to explore more.
-The automatic firing actually adds a little bit of frustrating difficulty. The autoaim makes focusing on deadlier enemies very hard.

Final notes: This game is great, and I wish there were novels describing some of the worlds and creatures.

A twin-stick shooter with only one stick. The game aims and fires for you, which works really well, actually. You just worry about dodging and using your specials. Reminds me of a bullet hell rendition of Dungeons of Dredmor (one of my favorite actual roguelikes), minus the humor. Great amount of variety in enemies, items, and environments. Lots of progression between runs through unlocks.

I wasn't a huge fan of the art initially, but it has grown on me. There are some interesting 3D (I guess?) effects that run on top of the pixel graphics, and it's all very smooth.

Each run is a good length for a single session, and the difficulty feels well-balanced. It isn't impossibly difficult, but is far from trivial. If you're lucky, you can end up massively overpowered by the final boss, but that's fun, too.

Deathstate isn't a bad game by any means, but it's boring, and that's the worst thing to say about a bullet-hell inspired rogue-like with lovecraft thrown in. All normal attacks are handled automatically by the game; leaving you to move, dodge and use any special abilities. The majority of your time is going to be moving slowly around levels waiting for enemies to die. This becomes worse when fighting bullet sponge elites and bosses.

I managed to beat the game on my third try, and I haven't felt the desire to go back for another full run despite unlocking new items and areas. Maybe if there were more advanced mechanics built around dodging or doing something else it wouldn't feel so repetitive. There is a harder mode that makes enemies shoot bullets on death, but that's just going to slow down the proceedings further.

There's a lot to love with this game but also a lot to hate with most of it just being the way the game was designed, and yet I'm still going to recommend it. I'll try to keep it simple this time around.

Pros:
Great Pixel art and oldschool computer game styled music.

Enemies are distinct letting you learn and remember what they do on sight.

Extensive lore, one of those games were EVERYTHING has a name and some lore attatched to it (thought the character info screen tends to break needing you to double click a few time to get the info to pop)

Upgrades clearly define what they do, save for relics, and tend to make you feel immediatly more powerful as long as you like the style of weapon.

If you ever get bored of your chosen character there's a chance to find an item that lets actually swap your "class" like you would any other equipable, changing stats and your Q button power at the same time.

Cons:
By far the biggest and the thing the game is designed around is the auto targeting system. You cannot control your own attacks except for the two special attacks you can get while playing. This means unless you get a relic specifically made for crowd control you're stuck hoping the autotargeting system attacks what you see to be the biggest threat first. It also means most enemies will get a chance to unleash a salvo at you first because their range of agression is much bigger than yours combine that with enemies that can stealth or teleport as well and sometimes it has a hard time keeping up.

Screen efects are distracting, the game constantly has this shadowy border along the screen to add tension and mysticsim to the GREAT Eldritch lore but it can be distracting, not to mention every second level usually distorts the screen in same way with waves of color or shadow to distort the screen. Some enemies ONLY FUNCTION is to distort the screen, using special abilities, distorts your screen via shaking it, GETTING HIT distorts your screen turning into a jumbled red tinted haze of pixels, being close to death distorts the screen and a majority of bad potions? They distort your screen because the devs knew the WORST thing you could do ina bullet hell is to do something to distract the player.

No invincibility frames, and if there are, they only happen DURING the screen ditortion fromgetting hit meaning you can get wombo comboed to death while not being able to see anything because the screen has become angry red bees in a snowstorm from you getting hit in the first place.

Health becomes WAY too scarce. Unless you grabe a health regen power by the end of the game you'll end up with a HUGE health bar with most of it being empty because all increases I've seen come in the form of empty copntainers you need to fill up.

Grid based movement. Your character floats in this game because of their special powers so if you stop you float forwards in movement that's clearly bound to an invisible grid, extra frustrating because I made it to the final boss my second try and not realising that caused me to casually float into one of his bullets when he was on his last legs.
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And yet I have to reccomend this game. Every problem I have with it is a fundamental flaw in the games design but you can just FEEL that this project was an experiment that loves everything that this game is about. If it had Enter the Gungeon controls with WASD and SPACE to dodge and let you aim your shots with the mouse it'd eliminate a good portion of the frustration because in a roguelike game you need to give full control to the player it's a genre MADE for the purpose of putting a player into hard, nigh unwinnable situation and go "Let's see just how far your skill takes you"

Very fun, creative, bullet hell rogue-lite. If it wasn't obvious from the description, you only control the character's movements and dodges while it autofires based on enemy proximity. It's an interesting mixed of lovecraft in space lore, mixed with 80s synth music, visual effects, and cute/gross pixel art. On my first run, I found an item that transformed me from a female graduate student into a being of mangled flesh destroyed by fire that wants revenge on all non-burned life. Then I found another item that let me shoot laser axes. Some of the strategy appears to revolve around weapon select, as different weapons fire with different effects and in different patterns, providing different pros and cons. Also, you unlock different characters who have different special abilities, which require MP. I would recommend this to any fan of rogue-lites and rogue-likes.

Let's get this out of the way: If you're reading reviews it's probably because you saw a game that looked like The Binding of Isaac and were curious if it was good enough to get. It's not the same experience.

You can play Deathstate with one hand (and only slightly more optimally with two.) It's far more about the bullet-hell aspect of play than about adventuring. You automatically fire and automatically target the closest enemy at all times. You control movement, ability usage, and items as you push various humans and monsters through the astral plane to battle various horrors, punctuated by the occasional boss fight. Good, clean, undemanding fun that's ideal for playing while listening to a podcast or something. You'll have to focus to avoid getting shot by the projectiles swarming the screen, but you don't really have to *think*.

And that's a fine recipe for a game. It's not any kind of all-time classic and past the superficial similarities it doesn't really approach the engrossing nature of Isaac. But if you wanna kill some time and shoot some mans, Deathstate is one of the better ways to do it, I think. The only real negative, in my opinion, is that for all the wild variety of items you can find, your run is pretty much always going to come down to whether those items add max HP, mitigate damage, and/or improve the damage you deal. The weird features, the various damage types, the fun gimmicks -- they're neat but they're largely irrelevant against the brute-force advantages of hitting harder and being able to get hit. That's what makes Deathstate more of a chill-out game than a lasting classic.

Whoa. You wanna play a game that makes you think of that 80's movie From Beyond? Here you go. Solid and simple, point your dude in a direction and they do the shooting for you. Alot of pick ups and item combinations, just like ol' Binding of Isaac. The retro color scheme and CRT overlay thing make it a real treat to slap your sweaty meat orbs upon, along with a dreamy electronic soundtrack to ride along to. Lovecraftian to almost a fault, while referencing alot of other cool old horror stuffs like The King In Yellow (if you are into reading at all. Whatever the fuck that is).

Its funky fresh, really underrated in my opinion, which coincidently is worth jack shit. Enjoy!

Great, great game. I've put this game on the backburner for as long as I could because I was not sure if it would fit my 'wants' when it comes to these types of games. I read a bunch of negative reviews about how you could only control your movement, as well as the ability to dodge/evade enemy projectiles. That sort of gave me a very doubtful view on the whole set-up of the game. I looked up a couple of let's plays by a few youtubers who have touched upon the game very lightly, but those didn't really help either. So I finally gave in and bought the game, and I can proudly say that I am very pleased with the purchase! The game is challenging, but not to the point where it's unforgiving. It provides the player with room for improvements and fair play, whereas a bunch of other rogue-like titles present you with insta-death followed by a steep learning curve. Definitely worth the pick-up, and absolutely hits the sweet spot when it comes to bullet hell.

Great rogue-like with a ton of variety. The single stick shooting aspect is really fun because you can focus more on avoidance. The sheer amount of content for the price is what really has me impressed. Its nice to see a developer that cares.

A fun, challenging and compelling rogue-shmup that revels in its Lovecraftian inspirations and is recieving a fantastic amount of post-release support from the devs.

The developer of this game added mouse control just for me, and other people like me with physical disabilities.

10/10, would get killed in this game again.

And again.

And again.

And again...

This is such a weird game. The term "single stick" threw me off so hard at first. But let me tell you something; if you play for a while (say, an hour or so) you'll forget you're not in control of the firing. That's because in a way, you are in control. Your positioning relative to priority targets is crucial to your success in this game.

I absolutely love this game. The visuals, the smooth gameplay, the music (dear god the music sounds like it was ripped straight from a Sega Genesis game, i.e. AWESOME), everything about this game was clearly made with so much love. And it gets HARD.

If you can look past the term single stick, this game is a lovingly made roguelite with all the right pieces. There is one downside for me, and that's that there are a few items that are clearly strictly better than other items, but other than that I don't have any complaints. Would highly recommend!

I'm surprised, this is the bullet hell rogue like I didn't know I've always wanted.

I'm surprised, somebody has put pixel art and lovecraftian overtones together so succesfully.

I'm surprised, that somebody has made a roguelike that nobody knew about until release.

This game has been a complete surprise of the best kind, Deathstate comes highly recommended from me.

This game is a really fun mix of bullet hell and roguelike that feels a lot like wandering through a dream. You attack automatically, so everything is all about positioning and enemy management, and this combined with the floating movement just puts you into a really cool state of mind. Combine this with the heavy Lovecraft (and D&D) themes and you get a game that just oozes charm and sweats fun.

I've only played a few runs so far, so I haven't unlocked everything yet.
Pros:

+ great pixel-art
+ challenging enemies
+ different way of fighting ( You attack the nearest enemy automaticly and need to dogde the bullets)
+ many unlocks [Items, weapons, books, etc.]
+ many characters to unlock (Each of them plays differently)
+ many different enemies
+ many different bosses to fight
+different areas to explore. (You'll always need to fight through 4 stages with 3 levels + boss level each)
+ bosses are fair and have unique patterns.
+ champion-enemies with different attacks
+ lovecraftian (might be a con for someone, but I love it)
+ great atmosphere
+ unlocks add new gameplay-mechanics [to example: giant chests, where you need to kill monsters before they open up, which bring massive loot]
+ Rogue-like (perma-death, random levels, etc)
+ customizable key-bindings


Cons:

-Nothing so far.

For 15€, you can't do anything wrong here.