I’m a massive fan of extraction games, just not the ones that everyone seems to be playing. The general gaming public has been obsessing over Arc Raiders, wincing at the impending launch of Marathon, and hunkering down for their 2000th hour of Escape From Tarkov playtime. Meanwhile, my first exposure to the genre and my favorite game of 2025 was Synduality: Echo of Ada. It’s not a smash hit or a majorly well-known game, but it’s full of enough heart and charm that it had me overlooking and even appreciating it’s flaws for the sake of enjoying the full experience. I’m also a huge, huge fan of the game Let It Die – it’s a world I think of often, and a soundtrack I listen to regularly. So all those qualifiers meant I was dropping everything to excitedly play Let It Die: Inferno as soon as I could, I just wish that excitement was rewarded with a game worth playing.
Let It Die: Inferno is a huge departure from the first game, and an equally experimental shift from the now non-existent second game, Deathverse: Let It Die. The former was an inventive mix of dungeon-exploration, single player Souls-like combat, and Metal Gear Solid V’s asynchronous base raids. You never directly battled people, but still felt their presence. Let It Die: Inferno is a different beast. Instead of climbing a tower of Babylon, you’re descending into an endless pit in search of treasures. While combat is the same as the original game, your goal now is to race a timer to explore your randomised drop point, gather goods, and find a randomly positioned escape rocket or die trying and lose everything.
At first, I was in love with this genre blend. A melee focused extraction shooter meant that I was always on edge in an exciting way – every encounter requires me to get head-on with my enemy and face them directly, constantly risking my death if I mess up a single attack input. Some cracks in the foundation appeared pretty quickly. Your map is almost indecipherable thanks to how dense with winding paths and verticality each map is, frequently frustrating me when I was tight on time and trying to locate an exit. As I got further into the game and moved beyond the starting areas, the cracks grew wider. Difficulty ramps up almost arbitrarily between sections of the map, as well as types of enemies. In the starting area, monsters are pretty easy to deal with while humanoid NPCs are just kind of engaging. Move into the second area, though, and all of a sudden those same human NPCs can shred through you in almost one hit.
When you die, you lose everything you were carrying as well as your currently equipped body – one of several archetypes that you can level up across successful runs to unlock special enhancements and abilities for. Annoyingly, you’re locked into one body at a time and can’t swap until your current one dies, even if you’ve paid for the more premium editions of the game that give you multiple body types to choose from at the start.
Even more frustrating, though, is that your slow and steady progression through the game ultimately won’t matter. For some reason, Let It Die: Inferno has built a server wipe into its seasonal structure, just as the extraction shooter genre is coming to favour making these optional. When the next season of the game begins, every players progress in the game will be fully reset. Not just items, gear, and body levels, but even story and mission progression will be reset. Server wipes in extraction shooters stemmed from the regular meta resets from Esc
can help in maintaining consistency of experience, especially for games going through early access updates, but more broadly in the extraction shooter for maintaining power balance between players. In Let It Die: Inferno, these wipes seem designed as a way to encourage repeated play, but all it makes me want to do is stop playing before I’ve even gotten all that invested.
Another element of Let It Die: Inferno is PvP. Like other extraction games, you can run into other players during your run and either peacefully let them be or engage them in battle. In other games of the genre, the reason to fight another player is to steal their items upon victory. In this game, though, players are tuned to have incredibly low carrying capacity, which means players are rarely carrying a large amount of items on them at all. As a result, the risk of PvP far outweighs the reward, so the rare times I did come across other players in-game, they spammed crouches and hops to signal non-combativeness and I happily obliged and went in the other direction. It’s my only other option, after all – unlike most games in the genre, there’s no way to directly cooperate or buddy up with encountered players if you aren’t planning on fighting them.
I would have likely given up on this game a lot sooner if it weren’t for the incredible, jaw-droppingly beautiful art and visuals. The world that Let It Die: Inferno creates is truly magical, and taps into so much of the same wild spark that made Suda51’s vision for the original game so strong and unforgettable. The dungeons you explore are always a strange hybrid of specifically Japanese interiors ripped out and slapped down onto overgrown, outdoor marshes and mazes. The result is a beautifully alien experience where a path through a dark cave will lead into the basement of a Japanese arcade, or a door covered in bloody thorns and fire will suddenly lead you to an abandoned festival ground full of food stalls and discarded toys.
It’s a shame, though, that this same creativity and flair isn’t reflected in the games music. One of the things that the original Let It Die is best known for is it’s soundtrack – which was iconic for featuring over 100 different songs from various underground Japanese punk and rock bands that were all titled some variation of “Let It Die.” The blend of Japanese rock and grim dungeon exploration was incredible, and that killer contrast is missing entirely from Let It Die: Inferno. In my time playing the game I only noticed a couple of ambient background tracks, and the ones that specifically played during missions were grating, inconsistent, busy, and annoying.
According to the developers, Let It Die: Inferno used generative AI for several elements in the game, and one example they gave was that there is AI-generated music in the game. Go figure. The other disclosed areas of AI use include some parts of the background signboard textures, Records images, InfoCast videos, and even some voices.
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