Deathbulge: Battle of the Bands review

British cartoonist Dan Martin built a dedicated following with Deathbulge, a webcomic that’s run since 2012 on intentionally rough illustrations, deadpan humor, and characters who treat the ridiculous as perfectly normal. Battle of the Bands isn’t a direct adaptation of any specific storyline from the comic, but it carries over Martin’s unmistakable art style and comedic sensibility, filling its world with new oddballs alongside Ian, the buff skeleton fisherman who’s one of the few characters to actually cross over from the webcomic. The whole thing plays out across a rollicking 15+ hour adventure.

The premise finds guitarist Faye, bassist Ian, and drummer Briff signing up for the game’s eponymous tournament without reading the fine print. Turns out the contract reveals a dark detail: contestants fight to the death, using music itself as the weapon. It’s a setup with a lot of room to be playful, and the script habitually takes advantage of that, skewering greedy industry executives one minute before spoofing music genres the next. True to the comic it’s drawn from, expect outlandish locales, surreal run-ins, and plenty of jokes. There’s more punchline than plot, which feels natural for a game built on a joke-a-day webcomic.

No Doors Were Harmed in the Making of This Game

Thankfully, the humor hits more than it misses. Martin’s comic thrives on awkward conversations, visual punchlines, and escalating nonsense rather than memes or internet references. One running gag has Faye violently kicking open every door she encounters, regardless of what’s behind it. Seeing doors go flying into NPCs’ homes, and the total indifference everyone shows to the damage, never really stops being funny.

Elsewhere, conversations veer into complete absurdity before snapping back on topic as if nothing unusual just happened. That commitment to treating the bizarre as normal gives Deathbulge a tone closer to Adventure Time than the crudeness of South Park. The catch is you need to be on board with nonsensical humor to get much out of it. I showed Battle of the Bands to one of my buddies, and behind his polite smile was obvious disdain for this kind of wit. It’s not for everyone.

Real-Time Battles for the Rhythmically Challenged

Fortunately, combat is less divisive. At first glance, battles look like a classic Active Time Battle system, but Deathbulge is constantly fiddling with turn order underneath. Rather than just slapping a poison or buff on a character, status effects called Measure Effects sit directly on segments of that character’s turn gauge. So a combatant might cross a beneficial zone right before acting, or stumble into a damaging effect just before their turn comes up.

Since you can swap your active band member in real time, whether between turns or mid-turn, you’re constantly deciding who should eat the incoming effects and who should cash in on the good ones. It’s a clever twist that turns a familiar RPG battle system into something more tactical than it looks at first.

Busker or Goth, the Choice Is Yours

The class system shows similar flexibility. Nine music-themed jobs dramatically reshape each character’s strengths and change their appearance with custom sprites and portraits. Headbangers trade defense for punishing offense, Show-Offs lean into speed and flashy, high-risk attacks, and other classes lean toward support or status manipulation. The amount of art behind every class change is impressive for a pair of small development team,s and it means experimenting with builds pays off in more than just better numbers.

Two Towns, Seven Dungeons

Outside of combat, exploration invites you to poke around Battle of the Bands’ corners. The game’s two towns and seven dungeons hide treasures and side quests, and the game rarely spells out exactly where to go next. That lack of hand-holding is clearly by design: developers Five Houses and Deathbulge want you to wander, and oddball characters and jokes reward your curiosity accordingly.

Thankfully, the game’s shortcomings are relatively minor. Sure, difficulty can spike hard when new mechanics are introduced. But typically, that’s the game nudging you toward some class experimentation or a different approach to timeline management. If you’re expecting elaborate character arcs, Battle of the Bands might not live up to your expectations. The focus here is comedy, not complexity, for better or worse.

Rocking in This Weird World

While Deathbulge‘s visuals match the look of the source material, Leslie Wai and Patrick Henaghan’s soundtrack is a bit more ambitious. From up-tempo riffs during boss encounters to melodic tracks that accompany exploration, there’s everything from heavy metal and punk to funk and synth-pop. Best of all, the tracks help draw distinctions between the game’s different areas and factions.

Whether it’s kicking down another innocent person’s front door, experimenting with the timeline-based battles, or stumbling across yet another oddball NPC, Battle of the Bands rewards your curiosity with laughs. Its offbeat humor won’t appeal to everyone, and those seeking a sweeping narrative might feel underwhelmed. But if you’re willing to embrace its eccentricity, Deathbulge is a funny role-playing game backed by combat that’s good enough to keep the jokes from stealing the whole spotlight.

Deathbulge: Battle of the Bands was played on Xbox
Series X with review code provided by the publisher.