I've been playing a lot of Let It Die again lately now that it's out on Steam. Guess I could've just patched up the PS4 original. Ehh! Feels like it performs better on the PC. Anyway.
I dig this game a lot more than the internet and my own common sense say I should. I don't feel like the free-to-play model here is anywhere near as bad as the supposed consensus indicates. There are microtransaction hooks, sure: they're tutorialized exactly once on yer first death and then buried in a menu. No sales ads on startup or any of the usual winks 'n' nods during gameplay. It's not a gacha either, so... no gacha levers to pull, obvs.
Hell, if you play carefully and patiently enough - and as a roguelite-ish hacky-slashy action RPG, that's probably how you should be playing as a habit - chances are you'll accumulate everything you need from quest and login rewards faster than can actually spend it all. Watch and learn enemy patterns and you won't die a lot. Don't die a lot and you won't really spend anything you can't easily (and freely) replace. Simple!
It is a tad drab looking, though; a little more colour would go a long way. But as a SUDA51 joint, the real colour is the characters, the window dressing, the general goofiness. Uncle Death is worth the download alone. You can sprint into running dropkicks that would make Okada proud, sneak up on people and nail 'em with german suplexes, dive from above into sweet hurricanranas. The soundtrack is full of Japanese punk, metal, Akira Yamaoka's creepy chill ambient pieces, and some deep dives into Katamari-ass weirdness. Midbosses are Silent Hill body horror abominations one moment, and then... this guy... the next.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQ4mlfp4TYE
It's got personality, y'know? And personality goes a long way.
It's also a pretty great podcast game. All the best soundtrack stuff plays in your waiting room and not really in the dungeon itself (though you can set individual dungeon tracks to play in the waiting room if you like 'em that much, and vice-versa - there's even a few radio station styled playlists that run though all 250+ songs) and it's a fairly story-light game in general, so you won't be missing any huge hour-long cutscenes full of voicework or anything - though the VA that is here is good to great.
So if you've got a podcast backlog to kill or YouTube/Twitch/Netflix binge to get through on another device or a second monitor, Let It Die is kinda perfect for that. It's not always a brainless pushover, but it's also no Dark Souls by any stretch of the imagination. Most of the time you can safely chill 'n' grind 'n' multitask. I often find myself getting vastly overprepared and raiding other people's waiting rooms (there's a pretty neat asynchronous multiplayer component for that) as I catch up on streams. It's good times.