Until We Die is one of those games in the Kingdom/Neverliria/The Bonfire mold. You know the type—side-scrolling games that force you to juggle resources and NPCs to ward off nightly monster attacks. I’ve struggled mightily to find even a glimmer of enjoyment here, though; most of these games are initially frustrating but fun as you piece together how to succeed, but Until We Die starts out frustrating and never stops, only doling out crucial tutorials about how basic mechanics work after hours and hours of failures.
If I had to describe the gameplay, I’d struggle to do better than “making spreadsheets.” That’s not an exaggeration; every night seems to spawn the same opponents in the same arrangement and require focusing your units on whichever side is under the most attack. This requires mitigating the nightly attack of one side by spending time slowly shuffling to either the left or right side, clearing out monster eggs during the safe daytime phase. However, doing that means that you aren’t spending time building up your resources, and if you focus too much on monster egg clearing or resource gathering, you’re doomed to fail. The only option for success is to piece together a spreadsheet detailing when to do which actions.
[Hey. Taking damage results in much of the screen flashing red, so be aware of that if you play any of the embedded videos. There’s no option to turn it off. There’s not even VSync. Abandon all hope.]
I survived until night 7 pretty easily on my first day with Until We Die but have never made it past this giant difficulty spike. I’d estimate that this takes somewhere in the ballpark of 20-40 minutes to reach, and it culminates in a giant wave of monsters from the left side who overwhelm your defenses, destroy every NPC and structure they encounter, and either kill you or destroy your generator. Either way, it’s game over.
In a normal game, the discovery that engineers can unlock the ability to build better walls would be the moment where you have enough information to push past this point. Nope—the monsters destroyed two upgraded walls when I tried that. NPCs are no help whatsoever when it comes to defense. According to the store page, “Humans are reluctant to take the initiative, and those lazy bastards don’t want to do anything on their own.” That may be the understatement of the year; they’ll defend walls that they’re assigned to (using Until We Die‘s incredibly clumsy method of assigning NPCs to tasks), but they’ll otherwise stand around and happily get murdered if you don’t direct them to fight incoming enemies.
This intersects unpleasantly with the way Until We Die refuses to explain anything to you about how its gameplay systems work. For example, upgrading a wall? Yeah, that causes it to become a background object, evidently, meaning that the NPCs assigned to it will no longer fight enemies. They’ll move around slightly but mainly do so to line up and allow enemies to slaughter them more efficiently. Thanks, game.
“Just destroy monster eggs,” you might say, “so that there are fewer monsters to fight on day 7.” That might be possible if not for two major what-the-hells that make no sense whatsoever. First, you can only personally shoot and thus destroy certain types of monster eggs. Your bullets whiz past other types, forcing you to bring along shovel-wielding NPCs to destroy those. Second, some of these background eggs that you can’t interact with can randomly transform and start launching explosives, wiping out 75% of your units in a matter of seconds before night 7 (or simply finish you off for a quick game over).
Normally, I’d back up my saves to speed the process along and avoid having to replay giant sections of the game every time Until We Die screwed me over with some random middle finger like that, but as I discovered when I saved and quit out of the game on day 7, saves don’t currently work. You have to beat all 28 days in a single run, which means hours upon hours of slowly chipping away at a game that feels awful to play. The main character’s movement speed is glacial, his running stamina runs out so quickly that he’s a poster child for COPD, and there’s always only one way of succeeding. Experimentation isn’t an option. You’re discouraged from finding creative approaches to problems. There’s only the spreadsheet.
I might try to get back into this when/if saves are fixed, but right now I genuinely hate Until We Die. And I’ve read that later gameplay involves fighting mutant dogs. After several years, I’ve come to view asking the player to kill dogs as an indie-specific red flag. No one with a good idea and coherent vision walks up to the table and proposes something as randomly evil as killing dogs as part of their first idea.
I don’t want to play Until We Die anymore first appeared on Killa Penguin
