Deadhaus Sonata Early Access - Is it worth it?

To be honest, I didn’t think Deadhaus Sonata would ever be released in any form. The game was announced in 2018 and has been worked on ever since, but the fates of Silicon Knights and Denis Dyack’s other works led me to believe that the game was destined for abandonment. Surprisingly, here we are. The game has entered Early Access, and I got to sink my teeth into it. It currently promises a few hours of content and just one of the game’s classes, but the question stands: is Deadhaus Sonata worth it in Early Access, or are you better off waiting for it to get some fresh blood along its way?

The game is indeed slated to be free-to-play upon full release (which the devs estimate to be in 18 months, but we’ll see), but playing it in Early Access costs money. It’s not the first game to do this, of course, but it’s a somewhat sketchy move that’s bound to raise some eyebrows. The game starts you out in the tutorial with its vampire class, teaching you how to move, fight, and the basics of its tarot cards. Visually, calling the game rough is an understatement. It’s ugly, the animations are mostly terrible, and the performance is incredibly poor despite this.

As far as I can tell, only one map of a forest village is available, alongside a dungeon. Perhaps I’m doing something wrong, and there’s a way to unlock more, but I did the few available quests I could find. There were two that I saw in the village map; one that tasks you with hunting down three annoying enemies that constantly teleport around, and another that has you protect a statue from mages by killing them before they can destroy it. Then I went into a dungeon (which has multiple levels) and fought a boss before exiting to the surface.

Deadhaus Sonata is indeed pretty poor across the board. The combat is button-mashy and feels skill-free. You’ve got a little dash you’re supposed to use to avoid attacks, but it doesn’t work well (and sometimes doesn’t seem to work at all), and you do find some more skills as you explore. These include the ability to drink blood from your enemies, swing your weapon in a circle, and drink blood from multiple foes at once. The combat feels weightless and comes across like a pure DPS race, which is annoying. Upon depleting a foe’s life, you can execute a very silly finisher to get some health back, in addition to all the blood your skills drain.

The skills seem incredibly unbalanced. For instance, the spin skill hardly does anything and has a longer cooldown than the ranged blood drinking skill, and that one’s so overpowered you can pretty much just use it once and everything around you just kind of dies. I used it on the boss enemy I encountered, and that was pretty much all I had to do. The bite is similarly overpowered, as it drains most of an enemy’s health and has an incredibly short cooldown. Deadhaus Sonata loves to throw groups of enemies at you at once, but you’re so strong that they don’t really matter. I’d be lying if I said there was nothing to enjoy about all of it, though.

I really hope there is indeed more to see here, as I saw all of the above in under an hour. Granted, you can replay it all if you want to get more card drops (which empower your skills) or find more weapons. I found an axe that the game allowed me to dual-wield with my sword, but that was the only actual item I found.

As for whether Deadhaus Sonata is worth it in Early Access, unless I’m mistaken, that’s a very definite no. The game’s as janky as it is ugly, and I simply couldn’t find anything else to do for the most part (and the dungeon was so ridiculously copy-pasted on just a single floor that I can’t imagine running multiple levels of it.) Still, I hope it actually gets finished, as I do like the Legacy of Kain vibes it offers.