Backlog Bingo 2025: Death of a Wish

Wow, this one turned out really long, but, tldr, this is a clean 5/5, so I have Thoughts.

Death of a Wish is a 2024...character action game? question mark? from developer melessthanthree, who also made 2018's Lucah: Born of a Dream, to which this is a prequel of sorts.

I did not know this when I backlogged this, having done so entirely on the back of "it got great reviews and I liked Lucah a lot", but this game was primed to be Enigma-of-Amigara-Fault-levels of made for me. (How's that for a cursed compound adjective?) To quote the developer:

Colin: Oh yeah, I’m quite happy with that one. I think a lot of my experience on that one influenced how Death of a Wish is coming out. It’s narratively a lot more straightforward than Lucah was, and I think part of that was just being inspired by Heather Flowers’ style — and how angry and righteous that game was. I wanted to bring that over to Death of a Wish. Certainly also a lot of things happening in the real world, especially in the United States that maybe inspire a similar sort of fervor.

I think Christian as a character in this game is maybe an outlet for a lot of feelings that like-minded people, like the people who are making this game, might be having about how things are going. Especially in regards to legislation around trans identities, women’s bodies, like that sort of thing. So there’s a lot of that sort of righteousness in this game than there was in the first game. It’s a lot more outward facing than inward facing. But using the same sort of mechanical bed that the first game had.

Also I played Sekiro. [Laughs]

As a long-time-repressed queer and trans ex-Christian, I was really expecting to get messed up here. Also, this game directly borrows a mechanic from Dragon Quarter, a game that only I seem to truly love. The very first sentence of the game is, roughly, "Enter the name of something you would die for." So, yeah, I was...very primed to like this. It's interesting to me even before I know if I think it's good.

Fortunately, this game fucks.

It's difficult to talk about Lucah and its sequel without addressing the art style as the elephant in the room of sorts, because it looks like this:

I described this, affectionately, as "like playing a MySpace page", and it's honestly stunning that this game manages to be a readable CAG with this art style. Most attacks, either incoming or outgoing, look like they're scratched directly into the monitor, and this is at its most obvious in a late-game section in which you have a bunch of extra party members and the visual noise becomes so messy that it's legitimately impossible for me to parse. (I suspect that this is just the developer going for good ludonarrative reso- dragged off stage)

As alluded to in the dev quipping "Also I played Sekiro", the game's main new mechanic from Lucah is a parry that's just a flat riff on the Mikiri Counter: you parry attacks by dashing into them, so if your timing is off, you're just dashed directly into danger. Enemies deal absurd damage, so you're generally only allowed a couple such mistakes, but you're given several items per checkpoint called Rewinds that start fights over, so you can restart fights at least a few times fishing for good attempts. (There is one unfortunate note here: popping a rewind does not clear projectiles, so it's very possible to rewind to the start of a fight and get hit on frame one by something that was lingering from your previous attempt. This is annoying but mostly just forces you to be a tiny bit conscious about using them.) The item that actually heals you, however, is extremely limited and unrecoverable: it grows on trees that take time to produce new healing items, so actually using one in a fight is a decent commitment.

I mentioned earlier that this apes a mechanic from Dragon Quarter, so, yeah: Dragon Quarter has a meter which very slowly increases as you walk around, by 0.01% every ten steps, I believe? Using any attack as a dragon costs at least 1%, up to 3% for the really good stuff. There's no way to reduce it across a 10-12 hour game, and hitting 100% is an instant game over, so if you burn too much power too early you will, at best, be unable to access that power late-game and, at worst, will have softlocked yourself because there's no mathematical way to finish the game fast enough to avoid capping this meter. People hate this mechanic, but I adore it because...it's so WEIRD, who puts a time-and-resource-based PERMADEATH meter into a fairly long RPG, making you meter your power usage across a game that you don't know the actual length of when you start. What the actual fuck, Capcom?

This is also present in Death of a Wish: every second you're in a fight ticks up the "corruption meter", getting hit ticks it up a bit more, dying adds 5% to it. (This probably gets more or less punishing on other difficulties, I went "default settings for everything" personally.) Being a CAG, though, there is a way to reduce it: get good ranks in fights by doing them well. Doing a fight perfectly (or close enough) reduces this meter by 3%. It will generally hover around 0 for a while if you're playing the game well, so it never actually feels like a threat until you get to a boss that absolutely trashes you repeatedly and then you have to claw back some points off of the permadeath meter by playing really well for a bit. (n.b. that in Death of a Wish, it's not actually permadeath, but it does kick you to the beginning of a chapter, which can still be twenty or more minutes of lost progress if you die to a chapter boss) This makes the entire game extremely tense in a way that I love. Amusingly, the only time I hit 100% during the game was during my successful attempt at the final boss. So the game gave me the good ending and its associated achievement and then immediately killed me and gave me the bad ending and its associated achievement. This bug was apparently found in playtesting but it was funny enough that the dev left it in.

Narratively, the game's hard to unpack, and it's mostly fairly surreal, though "a kid named Christian is trying to burn down the cult he was born into by assassinating all of its leaders" is the broad framing. The game kinda Goes Places narratively, complete with "there's an entire 15 minute visual novel section in the middle of a chapter", and it is certainly A Lot, being a traumatized queer revenge story in the shape of an action game. (It is heavily implied that every named character on the side of the protaganist is queer, going so far as to have one boss address the group with censored slurs) and his love interest is explicitly they/them, which would normally just be "oh we're allowing you to be playersexual" but not in a game like this.)

So, yeah, I...sat down to write a few words about this game and just Kept Going. This was a clean 5/5 for me; if you don't mind playing very twitchy action games and want one that is messy and weird and just pure vibes, please give this a shot, you do not have to have played Lucah first. Really glad to have played this as early as I did!