Few games have made me as stressed as The Deadly Path. Watching a field of timers ticking down, trying to count how much bone, meat and gold I can gather before incurring my god’s wrath left me feeling exhilarated, tense and, if I managed to see it through, victorious.
Owlskip Games’s rogue-like management simulator sees you as the Penitent, a mortal assigned to the miserable fate of serving the horrific Dread Pantheon, gods attempting to rebuild their fallen empires. You’re charged with deciding what structures to build and where to assign minions on a procedurally generated board of tiles. As the game progresses, you’ll also need to defend your base from raiders and complete tasks assigned by your god within a limited number of cycles.
This is an extremely difficult task, with each god adding their own twist to the gameplay. While the first god, Roiaan the Blightcaster, starts you off with more resources and ensures no raiders will spawn, later gods become significantly more challenging. Take, for example, The Maw, whose increased minion spawn rate means you have a significantly higher demand for meat, with a population that quickly grows unsustainable. The minor variations to gameplay each god provides keep things fairly interesting, even when the tasks they assign remain similar.
Tapping into its rogue-like influence, each run in The Deadly Path is unique, with a randomised layout of tiles you need to uncover. As you expose more of the board and gather more resources, you also gain experience points that eventually allow you to unlock more buildings from a random selection.
This randomness is where the difficulty can go from a fun challenge, to a frustrating mess. Since available resources are randomly generated, there were times I would lose a run through sheer bad luck, uncovering plenty of gold and bone when what I really needed was meat. Luckily this tended to happen in the early game, before a run had really taken off, but it could make it hard to maintain the ‘one more run’ mentality the best rogue-likes thrive on.
Fortunately, there are ways to circumvent some of the random elements. Each run, you are joined by a Custodian, an ally that can provide bonuses ranging from giving you more time to complete certain tasks to swapping the resources needed to unlock new tiles. Since most Custodians are unlocked via achievements, they made for a good incentive in doing repeated runs even on gods I’d already completed. However, I did encounter some technical issues – there were times I made sure to complete the given unlock condition but they just… didn’t unlock. When I repeated the same thing in a later run, things worked fine. I’m hoping it’s just a minor issue that can be patched out, but effectively losing a half hour game to a bug did leave me feeling a tad annoyed.
After each run, whether it succeeds or fails, you also gain currency that can then be used to purchase new buildings and unlock Charms. I personally didn’t feel much of a need to purchase buildings – they still need to randomly show up in a run and you need to have the correct tile to build them on, making them more of a gamble than a guaranteed upgrade. Charms, however, proved much more useful, providing consistent bonuses to a run such as increased experience points or extra rewards on level-up.
What also helps keep frustration levels low is The Deadly Path’s excellent character design and soundtrack. There’s a wonderfully macabre sense of humour throughout the game and despite lacking much story the designs of all of the Deities and Custodians are still filled with personality. The music is also the perfect mix of tense and exciting. With layers of toe-tapping synth, the tracks during runs keep the energy up while still maintaining an overall ominous vibe. There were some issues with music not playing correctly, and the songs don’t always seamlessly loop making for some awkward pauses but the tracks themselves are great.
There’s a very specific thrill in conquering a game that constantly prods and pokes at you, kicking you when you’re down and laughing all the meanwhile. The Deadly Path is especially great for people looking to face that challenge. Much like the Dread Pantheon themselves, the game has little mind for forgiveness or mercy at both its best and its worst.
The Deadly Path is available on Steam now!
