Annihilated review

Annihilated’s opening minutes introduce an adventuring party where everything’s gone wrong. The Warrior’s soul has been stuffed into a little doll, the Mage can no longer cast spells, and the Priest has abandoned his old faith for the suspicious Great One. Meanwhile, the Hero can respond with only a “yes” or “no.” You discover the team playing cards in a cursed dungeon, which seems like a strangely casual response, even in a fairy tale-world gone wrong. As the Soldier, the surviving member of a rescue expedition, you can take only one of them along. Developer Death Kumiai builds its role-playing game around this wonderfully quirky premise, giving each potential companion a separate storyline.

The writers deliver a cast that’s as interesting as the combat. The Warrior rather likes being cute, which complicates the assumed goal of getting that old body back. There’s resentment about a life spent being groomed for combat, alongside with some unresolved history with the dungeon’s Villainess, a former fiancée. Similarly, the Mage struggles to understand herself after losing the talent that defined her, even encouraging you to choose someone else. The Hero makes a smart first companion, with sturdy stats and an ability to recover quickly from death. Your choice determines both the conversations and the business of surviving them.

I Love Rashomon in Games

These characters play with familiar archetypes while standing in sharp contrast to a world where adventurers meet gruesome ends. Cheering on these troubled cast is easy, and their predicaments make them all easy to root for. Recovery might mean reclaiming an old identity, but it might also mean admitting that identity was making someone miserable. That question gives the script more to work with than another hunt for the old, evil demon king. The four routes also provide different perspectives on the party’s collapse, with decisions steering relationships toward multiple endings.

Progress centers on selecting a route across branching nodes that contain fights, treasure, random events, and places to rest. Sections culminate in encounters that push the plot forward, although the road between the revelations can become a bit too familiar. Curiously, Annihilated makes you work for some of its information. Upcoming enemies appear as silhouettes, so experience gradually turns an indistinct outline into a useful warning. Learning which opponents you can handle makes choosing a path feel more strategic, even when the map itself follows a pretty familiar roguelite structure.

Life With a Generous Return Policy

Failure is surprisingly forgiving. Losing sends you back to the beginning of the current floor, with opportunities to redistribute some of the Soldier’s stats and spend stored Curse on equipment for another attempt. Rest stops also provide saving opportunities, letting you reload rather than face a more irritating setback. Anyone expecting severe roguelite penalties may find this too generous. But if you mainly want to discover what happened to these people, the checkpoints keep a bad fight from wiping out an evening’s progress.

There’s some cleverness to combat as well. Your equipment appears as cards, but there’s no conventional deck to shuffle or draw from: everything you’re carrying is available in your hand. Many items have limited uses and disappear when exhausted. Ordinarily, that would encourage the familiar RPG habit of saving everything useful for a potential emergency. Here, an item’s final use is its strongest, so wearing out your equipment becomes part of the plan. Keeping a nearly broken weapon ready for an approaching boss becomes a key strategy.

A Reason to Save Near-Broken Weapons

The final-use bonus can mean extra damage, stronger healing, or another useful effect. Better still, staggering an enemy and landing a weapon’s final use can trigger a Fatal Strike, instantly killing the target and taking its equipment. Enemy equipment rewards aren’t random, which gives you something to plan around. Sometimes use a valuable weapon to acquire a replacement is worthwhile; at other times you’re better off keeping it. Broken items also generate Curse, which pays for extra healing at rest stops, upgrades, and equipment for subsequent attempts.

You can choose how attacks resolve, too. One mode uses stat-based probabilities, while the other adds real-time timing to the turn-based structure, recalling the Mario RPGs. Here, you tap or click as a moving indicator reaches the appropriate zone. Weapons vary in their timing, and upgrades can make successful hits easier. With several enemies present, lining up an attack can let you strike multiple targets. The most rewarding opening may also be the hardest to hit, while the probability mode offers an alternative for anyone who finds timed inputs stressful.

This Dungeon Needs Another Editing Pass

Yes, combat can run short of surprises. Using your strongest weapon, saving its final charge for trouble, and occasionally adding a heal or buff can get your through much of the game. If you you’re not into deep experimentation, the equipment system offers some satisfying decisions without becoming a thorny puzzle. But despite the generous checkpointing, the latter part of an adventure will escalate the difficulty and might cause a bit of frustration. Large groups of foes are another problem, with overlapping text and indicators making busy fights harder to read.

Yet, the presentation deserves praise for giving this miserable place a lot of personality. Expressive, hand-drawn characters and manga-like story sequences sell the uneasy mixture of affection, absurdity, and a bit of cruelty. Unfortunately, the English localization doesn’t always do them justice. Awkward phrasing and typos can disrupt conversations, while lengthy explanations sometimes continue for too long. Specifically, I find the Soldier’s inner monologue a bit too obvious.

Worth Bringing Back to the Surface

Annihilated is an easy recommendation for players drawn to damaged characters and unconventional RPGs. Fans of the tragically overlooked Shadow Hearts series may recognize something appealing in the combination of timed attacks, macabre fantasy, and quirky humor. Sure, Annihilated’s translation and some story pacing need work, and its battles may become routine before you’ve exhausted the stories. But that said, learning what broke these heroes is a much stronger incentive than a nominal stat upgrade. Once those silhouettes become familiar and the rhythm of combat clicks, getting someone safely to the surface starts to feel important.

Annihilated was played on PC with review code provided by the publisher