11-bit’s latest offering Death Howl is a sorrowful open-world deck builder set in the Norse Stone Age

Three-person Danish team The Outer Zone and Frostpunk creators 11-bit studios have announced Death Howl, a very grim, soul-like deck-building game set in a “Nordic Stone Age-inspired” open world consisting of biomes with names like the “Forest” of the Howlers Shadows.” Lots of howling around these parts.

You play a mother, Ro, whose son was taken away by the Grim Reaper, or whatever they had instead of the Grim Reaper at the time – this was before scythes were invented, I guess? And the cards? Either way, as you search for Ro’s son, you’ll engage in grid-based and turn-based battles against the usual cauldron of the unspeakable, including disembodied raven heads and what appear to be a giant pair of subterranean lungs. Here’s the trailer.

“Each land you visit offers unique deck types and mechanics, enriching and deepening the strategic layer,” reads the press release. “Players can further enhance their decks with Shamanic Totems, ensuring they are best prepared for upcoming deadly encounters.” What’s more, “each region not only unlocks the previously mentioned new cards to craft, but also uncovers pieces of Ro’s history, steeped in themes of love and loss, and uncovers forgotten knowledge of this mysterious, spiritual world.”

I really like the raw, gaunt and slightly rotten pixel art of the game. It looks as if someone had put a chisel to the seam of the obsidian and discovered a layer of organic matter underneath – pinkish bones, greenish flesh. The cards are pleasantly macabre. For example, “Take the skin.” Eh! There’s another one that has an arrow drawn going through someone’s leg – hopefully the owner of that leg survived and is now enjoying a second career as a ranger in Skyrim.

I’m less convinced by the game’s self-serious narrative direction, which reminds me of Hellblade at its most flashy. “The loss of a loved one is a universal phenomenon – an inevitable part of the human experience,” howls director, artist and screenwriter Malte Burup in a press release. “We believe our approach to narrative, enhanced by engaging storytelling and a fresh approach to the deckbuilding genre by combining it with soul-level exploration, will appeal to gamers of all kinds.”

I’m always in favor of a good universal theme, but foregrounding your conclusions so brazenly seems false, and a certain amount of clunky melodrama seems inevitable when your tale of woe is literally called The Howl of Death. The talk of grappling with mortality is a bit unsettling compared to Steam’s paint-by-numbers spectacle of “building a soul-like deck in an open world.” I wonder if I’ll have the same feelings about this game that Alice B (RPS in peace) felt about Gris and her massive, sobbing statues.

Still, all of this may be more of a marketing problem than a game problem – and it clearly “resonates” with me to some extent, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this. Death Howl will be released later in 2025, with the demo arriving on Steam on Monday, January 20.