LET IT DIE: INFERNO

My first few runs in LET IT DIE: INFERNO felt genuinely exciting, and I say that as someone who bounced off the original twice before it clicked. The core pitch is ambitious: take the melee-heavy Souls-inflected combat of the 2016 cult hit, drop it inside a randomised extraction shooter structure, and send players descending into the Hell Gate rather than climbing the Tower of Barbs. On paper that is a good mutation. In practice, the three genres involved have fundamentally conflicting DNA, and Inferno spends most of its runtime making that tension visible in the worst ways. The combat itself is the clearest carry-over from the first game. You fight with long animation locks after attacks and dodges, counters and guard breaks forming a loose rock-paper-scissors rhythm against enemies. Weapon variety is legitimately the highlight here: arm busters styled after classic Mega Man cannons, oversized swords, haunted portraits, and area-of-effect pistons that create shockwaves sit alongside more conventional blunt and bladed options. Character classes (or Bodies, in the game's terminology) shape your playstyle meaningfully, though some archetypes are locked to higher purchase tiers. When a fight clicks, there is a real satisfaction to the spacing game. The problem is that the extraction structure punishes you for engaging too long with any of it. Each run is time-limited, and once the clock runs down, escape pods spawn at random points on the level. Finding them requires crouching to activate a radar that only shows a general direction indicator, and those pods can sit on entirely inaccessible elevations. A run you spent fifteen minutes building can collapse because a pod spawned on the wrong side of a wall. The difficulty scaling compounds this. Early zones feel manageable. Move a couple of depths deeper into the Hell Gate and the game begins swapping in hard-tier enemies that kill you in two or three hits while barely taking damage in return. Permanent upgrades exist through Uncle Death, but the grind required to make them feel meaningful is steep, and the whole system gets wiped at the end of each roughly three-month season anyway. Story progress, Raider Rank, inventory, masteries: all of it resets. Only microtransaction-backed purchases and certain edition bonuses survive. Season 2 did add a proper Solo PvE mode and a Duo co-op mode, and the developer has tuned enemy behaviour and weapon balance across updates, so the game at launch was rougher than what exists now. That is worth noting. But the structural tension at the centre of the loop has not been patched away. There is also the AI content controversy that followed launch. The game uses AI-generated voicework and ambient audio, which landed badly with fans of the original who valued its curated underground soundtrack and mixed-media character work. Some reviewers and community members treated this as a dealbreaker. Others found it a minor distraction. It is worth knowing before you buy, because the original's atmosphere was a significant part of its identity, and that particular flavour is missing here. The visual style retains some of the over-the-top post-apocalyptic Tokyo energy, though the distinct cel-shading of the Grasshopper Manufacture era is gone, replaced by something muddier and less distinctive. Steam user sentiment sits at roughly mixed overall, trending more negative in recent months. If you loved the original and you are specifically drawn to the extraction-shooter side of things, Hell Gate Threshold (the PvE-only zone added post-launch) gives you a lower-pressure way to explore the systems without getting ambushed by other players. The world and its absurd enemy designs, including a crab-cheeseburger hybrid that is somehow one of the harder creatures to hit due to hitbox placement, carry enough of the franchise's offbeat personality to make occasional runs feel worthwhile. But the seasonal wipe structure, the genre friction, and the tiered content gating make this a harder sell than it should be for anyone approaching it fresh.

Alex · Scout Team

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