Death Crown’s death march to nowhere
Death Crown (CO5MONAUT, 2019) is carried by its presentation. Thin pixel strokes carve medieval landscapes in a flat canvas, harsh character portraits looming over a suspended field of stick-figure warriors waging war in straight lines. The two-tone palette intensifies the world’s oppressive vacuity, each battle carving away more of its features revealing only white canvas underneath. Everything turns to rubble; everything is returned to the earth. It feels both immense and comically constrained, like a doom metal music video rendered on the Apple II.
Playing as Death – a woman wrapped in a plain robe, eyes bandaged over, the spikes of her crown shining like daggers – you embark on a destructive vengeance against the King’s hubris at believing he could cheat death. One by one you destroy his kingdom, tear down monuments, reduce fields to dessert. These skirmishes take the form of hex-grid tower-offense, Death and the King racing to place a combination of the game’s three units (farm/tower/barracks) to overrun the other side. It’s a refreshingly straightforward approach to a strategy game, drawing from board games like Stratego and Risk to collapse the fiddly minutia of the genre into three actions and a similarly sparse UI.
As the percussive soundtrack clangs with industrial indifference, it is easy to get caught up in the urgency of Death’s rage. Battles are brief, a few minutes to victory or defeat with only the occasional cutscene puncturing the march from encounter to encounter. But as Death’s crusade lingers the empty violence and limited scope start to become more prominent. There is no expression to my deployments, no flair to Death’s army or surprises to catch me off guard. Fights are quick enough to hide the limits of my commands and but not quick enough to stop me counting the seconds as I wait for my resources to replenish. I am sprinting through elevator doors, only to find another door immediately on the other side.
As battles expand, small frustrations with the presentation morph into larger design flaws. As units populate the field the isometric line art shifts into a murky pixel mess, obscuring information and creating ant-colony cascades that are impossible to parse. The clarity that made early levels so striking backfires into chaotic scenes wherein friend and enemy are indiscernible under the black ink and I can no longer tell who is fighting who. It’s not thematic, merely incidental, the effect of striving for balance by equivalence.
The most unfortunate miss is how inconsequential it is that Death is here at all. To take such a universally significant character, render her so unapologetically cool, and then reduce her to a carbon copy of the King’s army makes them both that much less remarkable. Death is merely an opposing force, a faction divorced from symbolism, interchangeable with the demon queen and Conan-esq warrior that succeed her in the other campaigns.
When I think of Death personified it is not as a sweeping army but a quiet, terrifying inevitability. For example, Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) casts Death as a soft-spoken trickster, a fan of chess and gambles who follows a knight returning from a pointless crusade, mocking his persistence even as around him people succumb to disease and paranoia. Death is both individual and omniscient, and it is that inescapable dread that gives Death such a compelling and darkly comical presence.
Death Crown is not striving for dense religious introspection or even an examination of what it means to perceive death as human, but it fails to give her even enough significance to warrant title placement. Whether mundane or incredible, death has a presence that inherently draws interpretation. Yet as with Death Crown’s presentation, strategy, and progression, here Death is all flat aesthetics washed away at the first frustration.
Death Crown’s simplicity is its draw and its curse, illuminating both fatiguing elements of the strategy genre but also how that reduction has created a game in search of itself. Like The Seventh Seal’s knight, I want to upend the board and forgo this tedious game of attrition, and just as Death dutifully reseats the chess pieces, Death Crown returns with another battle, another field to raze, again and again until I am exhausted for good.
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