Deathless. Tales of Old Rus Review: Challenging Deckbuilder With Flaws

Deathless. Tales of Old Rus is a roguelike deckbuilder that makes you plan your moves in advance. Not just in the battles themselves, but the overall strategy you are going to use for a run. Every character you play has strengths and weaknesses, with several approaches you can use. Battles have unique scenarios and different rewards, forcing you to adapt your strategies or take certain risks.

Battling in a 2D turn-based setting creates interesting strategic opportunities. Four characters brings lots of variety due to their strengths and weaknesses. Experimenting with cards and trying new things is genuinely fun. However, there are bugs in the game that interfere with your experience. The characters also don’t have good balance, making it painful to progress. This is a great roguelike deckbuilder, but it has its share of flaws.

Deathless. Tales of Old Rus is available on PC for USD 24.99.

Varvara is your first character who teaches you the basics.

Story – Heading to the Southern Mountains

Deathless. Tales of Old Rus follows four characters following different adventures. While they are powerful individuals who have a good heart, they all embark on the same mission by accident. It’s a pattern similar to Octopath Traveler where everyone’s journey coincidentally intersects. Even though that happens, every character still gets their time to shine. It’s not a team effort but each character approaching their quest by themselves.

Every character has a quest line that must be completed over several playthroughs. Through each battle, the characters learn that something more nefarious is at work. They make their way to the end of their story, fighting a climatic battle against a powerful individual. After that, everyone else completes their stories and you face the final boss at the Southern Mountains. Thanks to the gameplay, it’s fun to fight and see the stories through to the end.

Sometimes your story objective doesn’t appear and you must wait.

However, there are two problems with the stories. First, the stories themselves aren’t strong and exist mostly as excuse plots. Second, advancing the stories is not often something you can control. The stories show the motivation for the characters to continue but there are rarely any stakes. While you understand why the characters go on their quest, it often boils down to the same thing. Someone’s in trouble and it escalates. That’s where the second problem appears.

Progression – Getting Lucky

Progressing the story in Deathless. Tales of Old Rus doesn’t sound hard. You have objectives to complete and every objective brings you closer to the conclusion. Unfortunately, there are two problems with this. First is that the objectives don’t tell you much other than “complete X objective”. This isn’t wrong but reaching the end of the character’s playthrough doesn’t progress the objective. You must actually seek out the objective and hope you choose the right path.

You apparently know most of the backstory since it isn’t elaborated on.

For example, some objectives have you fight a specific type of boss. However, there’s a good chance that boss won’t appear during your run at all. The enemies you fight on a path and the bosses you encounter are randomly chosen, meaning you might never see the next objective. Thankfully, there aren’t that many bosses to choose from that prevent you from progressing. However, not progressing due to chance can be frustrating.

You wonder if you did something wrong or missed something along the way regarding the objective. In some cases, you may pass up the objective by accident. But in other cases, your objective never appeared during your run and it wasn’t your fault. That block is frustrating even if it is part of the roguelike experience. Having your progression up to chance should be a gameplay issue, not because of random story objectives. Your game can also be disrupted by bugs, freezing the game or preventing you from choosing an option. That forces you to restart, ruining a good run.

Gameplay – Roguelike Tactics

Deathless. Tales of Old Rus’s gameplay takes place in two parts. First is deciding the path you want to take, along with the rewards and risks that come with it. Second is actually fighting in combat using the cards that you obtain. It feels difficult at first because you don’t know what to expect and your options are limited. But as you play through routes more than once, you come up with strategies.

You must plan for every card to bring down tough enemies.

Each of the four characters has their own speciality that affects the cards they obtain. Utilising that character’s speciality can take various forms and you see which cards are the most effective. Sometimes you discover your own unique take or stick with the playstyle recommended by the game. It’s fun to discover new possibilities and defeat enemies with your new plans.

The gameplay is genuinely entertaining just like Crush the Industry but there are some flaws. Balance is one example as there are clearly cards that are better than others. Even some characters have playstyles that are not great given the speed of combat. While having everyone and every card on the same playing field doesn’t make sense, some cards are a big liability. Editing your deck by removing cards is difficult, forcibly locking you into strategies.

You must choose which cards become more powerful.

Balance – Not Fully Thought Out

Fighting with different characters is fun but Dobrynya Nikitich stands out. He’s a defensive character in contrast to the other three who are more offensive. Dobrynya’s strategy is to defend against enemy attacks while building his strength, then attacking with empowered strength. It’s a deliberately slow playstyle that encourages defense over offense. However, this backfires on you with certain enemies who can occasionally boost their damage.

There are ways to speed this up, but Dobrynya’s early game is considerably slower than the others. If you aren’t lucky, you end up scrapping several runs due to unwinnable situations. This doesn’t mean that Dobrynya can never win, but he needs significantly more work to achieve victory. Alyosha has a downplayed version of this problem; he can’t repeatedly use his spells too often. Since spells are what help him stand out, limiting that makes him less effective.

Dobrynya is probably the worst character out of the four.

There are also bosses that actively discourage certain playstyles, like Varvara’s final boss. Using any attack card increases their damage forcing you to get lucky with cards. While being creative and testing strategies is part of the process, the balance does discourage you after a while. It’s tough to see your plans fall apart because a boss seems too overpowered or a character struggling to keep up. The same applies to cards that sound impressive but aren’t.

Audio & Visual – Simple Yet Effective

The game keeps a 2D design for its cards and combat. It’s easy to identify the card you are using even if you don’t know its effects yet. You can also clearly tell what the enemies can and can’t do, along with their health. However, it does take some time to learn all the symbols as the tutorial barely glosses over them. Most of your visual education is self-taught but experience eventually solidifies the lesson. However, some bugs can crash the visuals and halt your progress, forcing you to restart the game. In some cases, this ruins your run and you must start again.

All you hear in this game is music and soundtracks. There is no voice acting for better or for worse. You just hear the effects of your cards and any buffs or debuffs. The good news is that the sounds indicate that your effect is working. This doesn’t mean that the effect worked as you intended or that you haven’t made a mistake.

Deathless. Tales of Old Rus was reviewed on Steam with a code provided by the publisher from 1C Game Studios.