The Deadly Path Review — Meat for the Bone God

The Deadly Path is a resource-management strategy survival game with an overtly gothic aesthetic. The game is all about building and maintaining your dark cult, feeding the insatiable appetite of your god, and defending your underground lair from attacks from the surface. Though it took me a minute to really get invested in the game, I soon found something I was utterly obsessed with—as long as I wasn’t dealing with the occasional bug.

The Deadly Path has a pretty straightforward roguelite puzzle gameplay loop. Based on a tiled grid, you excavate outwards to discover different types of tiles, which are procedurally generated, making no run exactly the same. Based on a set of modifiers selected before each run, such as which god you are worshipping and which character you play as (the gods serving as their own set of challenges, each one having a handful of levels to complete, and the player’s character choice being a direct buff to your run). You must develop and pay tribute at certain intervals while also avoiding invasion from the surface. If your keep is destroyed or you miss tribute too many times, the game ends.

Resources are collected using a pretty basic rock-paper-scissors style system where certain production buildings require upkeep from another resource. Bones are used for construction, and their production buildings require meat for upkeep. Meat, used for unit upkeep and excavating cave tiles, can itself require bones for upkeep. Gold, knowledge, and blood are other resources present in the game.. Each production building is run or defended by a minion, with basic skeletons being all you have at first, until you begin to produce bigger, better, and stronger minions through specialized tiles.

Your end goal is usually to fulfill several objectives and then build some sort of monument before time runs out. If it does, you fail, regardless of how good your resource production is.

The Deadly Path is, in essence, a city-building game, which sort of makes me wish the game had gone for something similar with its visual presentation. That being said, the more playing-board/puzzle-grid layout works for what the game is going for, and the art on each tile and minion card is phenomenal, absolutely fitting the game’s nightmarish cultist vibe.

Something the game could use is a way to track your income. While upkeep is prominently displayed on the UI, the only way to keep track of your income is by paying attention to your tiles. Since some buildings eventually destroy the tile (reducing it to another tile type), this means you can often find yourself running out of production of one type without even noticing it. One might argue that this is part of the strategy, but I think a way to track income would have been useful without making the game too much easier.

Overall, I really like a lot of what the gameplay has to offer. If I could make one criticism about the mechanical side of things, it would be that the game can be less than ideal about presenting information regarding its mechanics and resources. The tutorial is fine, but it’s still going to take you a few games to fully understand the relationships between each resource, the demands needed for victory, and what leads to a game over.

Though the game is in its full release, a few issues do seem to have slipped past the developers and were present in my playthrough. One bug I encountered during my playthrough of The Deadly Path was when, after restarting one of my failed runs, I loaded into a smaller version of the play map, with what usually were my Era Beacons instead being blacked-out cards. Being unable to excavate any tiles, I was forced to restart, after which I strangely got an achievement for being in that segment.

The Deadly Path is an excellent puzzle game, featuring a genuinely engaging gameplay loop presented through some pretty awesome horror themes and artwork.

When you consider everything this game has to offer, the bugs included (though I imagine those will be gone with time), it’s a bit of a shocker to realize that The Deadly Path is only a $13 game. I don’t think I have to tell you that is one hell of a deal—probably something the developers intended—and that if you’re even remotely interested in the game, it’s worth giving a try at that price.

Though there are a few changes I would make to the game, I still enjoyed my time with The Deadly Path, a game that is as fun and challenging as it is unique. The horror angle and excellent art make for a great backdrop for a genuinely interesting puzzle game, and besides a couple of bugs, my experience with the game was entertaining and intellectually stimulating.

The Deadly Path was reviewed on the PC. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! The Deadly Path is available on Steam.