Combat is so routine in video games that it often doesn’t feel like conflict at all. It’s just something you do to move the simulation forward—a driving chore devoid of drama, meaning, or lasting emotion beyond a vague desire to see what’s behind whatever it is you’re trying to kill. In Death Of A Wish, combat has substance: it’s a form of redemptive self-expression. The game’s combats are a way of validating and valuing yourself in the face of a world that thinks you’re a deviant, a world whose poison you carry within you.
At one point in this brilliant action game, you meet a trainer character who tells you that fighting is more than just survival—it’s survival with grace and style. “If you fight with beauty and courage, you can push back the darkness,” they tell you. The game’s protagonist, a tortured Cloud Strifey youth named Christian, suffers from the Corruption, which approaches 100% each time you die, and which will cost you progress if it reaches the max level.
Death Of A Wish is a challenging experience, though prone to the Secret Best Soulslike tactic of running past non-boss enemies (the game restricts you with crimson energy diamonds during critical story battles). If you’re anything like me, you’ll likely fill your Corruption meter well before you’re halfway through the 5-10 hour story. But fight carefully and thoughtfully—avoiding damage, mixing up skills, building combos, and finishing enemies quickly—and you’ll subtract a fair percentage from your Corruption meter.
Christian’s revenge story against the murderous, theocratic Sanctum has elements of autobiography, and the Corruption system feels like a memoir of advice from an older queer person to a struggling younger one, about self-love through self-control. Fight beautifully, and you won’t just survive – you’ll be stunning. You’ll be you.
Death Of A Wish began life as a DLC expansion for 2018’s Lucah: Born Of A Dream. Like that game, it’s a brutal, gorgeous experiment that takes fascinating forms—there’s a section that plays like a squad-based RPG, for example. But overall, it’s an extravagant, technical hack-and-slash that owes obvious debts to Bayonetta, not to mention its anarchic, anime-style depictions of angels and demons.
Like Bayonetta, the game lets you combine weapons or fighting styles, called Arias, to create pliant sets of primary and secondary attacks that can be further developed with modifiers like Prayer Cards, which, for example, augment damage dealt to an enemy guard or extend Arias’ range. You also get the floating Familiar, similar to the drones in Nier: Automata, which performs ranged attacks like laser beams and gusts of wind. Add to that combos performed by delaying or holding commands, and a dodge that becomes a parry when directed at an attacking opponent, and you have the foundation of an engaging arena brawl. But as with Lucah, what really ties it all together is the visual direction.
Perhaps the greatest compliment I can pay creator melessthanthree is that I share my personal understanding of video game visuals from before and after I encountered his work. I’ve tried to describe it in different ways in different pieces; now it reminds me of the scratchboards I drew on in elementary school—silky black squares that hide rainbows you can scratch out and see with a wobbly metal tip.
Like Lucah, Death Of A Wish takes place in a midnight realm where objects, terrain, and creatures appear as writhing scratches and swirls of color that hover on the edge of incomprehensibility. Straight lines and tidy boundaries do not exist: everything is restless and perpetually leaking into everything else. There are places that resemble real places – tent cities and crowded streets, rickety docks and highways – but this is a powerfully abstract setting where all traces of naturalism float untouched in a dreamy purgatorial darkness. And then there is the spectacle of battle, with attacks creating serrated whips of energy that snake through the scenery into a soundscape of shouts and crackles.
It’s absolutely gorgeous. It may also sound woefully inappropriate for a fighting game where you’re often required to parry multiple enemies in rapid succession while dodging projectiles, but the other great thing about Death Of A Wish is how readable it becomes. Enemies may be moving lumps of fire and gold, but they have a distinct, observable and audible wind-up that lets you dance through the encounter, provided you don’t give in to the temptation to take them down.
When it gets confusing, it’s often because you’ve overdone it, rushing into a crowd instead of finding a position where you can focus on a single target. I’ve come away from most defeats feeling like I could have won if I’d been a little less hasty. Parrying is relatively simple, since it’s on the same button as dodging, and it’s crucial when fighting bosses in a game with multiple phases: it’s the fastest way to break an opponent’s guard and open them up for critical strikes. In terms of how combat unfolds in Lucah, it’s a more aggressive game, with no stamina limits to hinder your moves.
Perhaps because the game began life as a DLC expansion, Death Of A Wish is also a more hearty work of storytelling than Lucah – it all revolves around exacting revenge on Sanctum and its handful of bosses, though the plot naturally thickens as your killing spree grows. Christian’s quest takes you through several regions, each one punctuated by fungal outcrops of crucifixes where you can rest and upgrade, and progression generally involves searching for a keycard and some very fine puzzle-solving.
The writing and narrative presentation are breathtaking and raw in their approach to heartache and trauma, though somewhat softened by the employ of various non-verbal speech effects for each character’s dialogue. Often, the game resorts to bald white font on a black screen, screaming its pain at the player. This is not a game you should play if you feel vulnerable – the game’s cutscenes are full of garish religious iconography, and there are expressions of bigotry and physical harm. But there are also moments of fun and camaraderie, and the ugliness is never gratuitous. This is an all-encompassing wounded world, where some parts need to be cut out and others need to be healed.
As you might expect from an expansion that’s been promoted to full game status, Death Of A Wish didn’t blow me away as much as Lucah, but it’s still one of the best action games I’ve played – easily on par with the blockbuster Platinum projects it draws inspiration from. For all its grimness, it’s the kind of experience that reinvigorates your critical faculties, cutting through the fog of diminishing returns and leaving you newly curious about video games in general.
