Deified takes a while to build its best strengths, but the more I dug into it the more I found the experience rewarding. As a turn-based roguelite inspired by meso-American mythology, it may sound strange but the closest reference point is Hades. It has similar progression between runs and focus on chaining boons, and while it lacks for some polish in a few areas the depth it has to offer more than makes up for those faults. Having played about 20 hours, I can’t consider myself well enough versed to give this a full review, but I can easily say that it was worth the time investment and that I see myself diving in for more.
At the outset, Deified is very familiar to other roguelites: you’ll travel along a map with spaces for enemies, healing, upgrades, elites, and finally a boss of the floor. The progression and underlying strategy are what separates this from the pack. Combats are turn-based, with a set of enemies and floor traps to navigate as you fight to keep moving forward. Before the combats, you’ll see a screen something like this:
Your abilities are made up of a set of relics, and each relic has two icons, representing the god they stem from and the type of ability. As you buy more of the same relic, it levels up, increasing its base power. You ALSO add to the overall level of god or ability type. As you accumulate more separate abilities, you’ll unlock boosts to all relics of that type. Tenet, for instance, is a god with that lets you teleport to a previous position and reuse all Tenet abilities. Hard Skin relics give you armor, but at higher levels reflect damage to the attacker.
No two relics share the same combo of god/ability type, so you’ll naturally branch out a bit even while focussing on a specific relic type. Before combats, and many room types, you can reroll the relics for money, hoping to get what you’re looking for. As you do, you accumulate Noise, which alerts enemies to your presence. At low noise you can surprise enemies or flee the battle, (which you won’t want to do, as it robs you of experience and money). This comes with a lot of frustration as you reroll over and over trying to get specific relics that sometimes never come. With upgrades, it's one of the areas that gets better over time.
Between runs you can use accumulated Obol to upgrade your map options, choose from different starting gear, and unlock permanent upgrades. These upgrades are unreasonably expensive, so it’s going to take a long time to make real use of them, but the game is addictive enough that it doesn’t take much convincing to jump back into it.
The early hours don’t leave a great impression: the visuals are nice, but the enemy and environment types are far too repetitive. The more interesting parts of strategy, i.e. which relic types to go for, only become important once you’re level 5 or so, and have enough relics to actually build those boosts. At first, you feel like you’re being penalized for trying to branch out, you can’t build a good character, and you’re facing the same enemies in the same encounters, with an interface that needs some fine tuning.
While the visuals never get the kind of diversity the game really needs, the mechanics definitely do. Climbing the floors lets you come up against some truly strange encounter modifiers, based on the gods whose relics you aren’t using. Some will place your abilities on cooldowns, but others might make traps more deadly.
Some of the minute math behind your abilities doesn’t come into play, but the broad strokes of your abilities make a huge difference in the game and you can quickly start steamrolling encounters, right up until some bad plays kill you off. Each boss has a unique passive that needs to be countered. One takes no direct damage, but heals all allies every round and reducing its health commensurately. Another only takes direct damage while stunned.
The story is…there? In my time I’ve come across very little in the way of substantive narrative or themes. The game ran without technical issues on Steam Deck and PC. It's not optimized for the Deck, requiring you to configure controller support on your own, but the options for changing text size helped a lot. Finding information like status effects is a little bit of a pain, but all of the information is there.
Deified is light on story and its presentation needs a few tweaks, but the underlying game is a rare treat in its genre. As a fan of turn-based games, I found myself consistently impressed once I got past an early slog and made some important unlocks. At $14.99 right now on Steam, it’s very worth paying attention to.
