When it comes to indie games, there are simply experiences of every kind, ranging from more elaborate to more simplistic, and everything in between. What’s terrific is that when the right idea meets with the proper implementation, just about any concept has the potential to be a winner, and simplicity doesn’t immediately make a game less compelling when done right. The challenge is in finding ways to minimize the feeling of repetition, or at least incentivizing people to want to continue to push past it, and there’s no question that requires some real skill to pull off.

Death Kid absolutely trends towards being simple, featuring gameplay that is almost like a basic beat-em-up, with you grinding and trying to defeat a variety of enemies while protecting some gems. I wouldn’t say that at the start you’re pretty incapable, but no matter how hard you may try, your skills out of the gate won’t get you terribly far. Especially as you’re first trying to also get used to the various enemy types and what tactics you should use to most efficiently defeat them. Thankfully, with each run you ultimately fail to complete you’ll slowly begin to accumulate new skills that will help greatly in making your character last longer, a cycle that’s familiar and hardly exclusive to this title.

There are some problems that make themselves known though, and that keep it from being as compelling to continue with against some of its brethren. The first is that the grind here feels particularly slow. Yes, you’ll begin to gain new abilities, and they are helpful, but compared to the average they do feel a little slow coming, at least in terms of the impact they have on your survivability. Yes, more challenging roguelikes or other games in this vein do often require some grinding before you’ll fully hit your stride, but here the effort feels more sluggish, not helped by the fact that overall your abilities feel lackluster in general. I also found the method of differentiating your normal combo from one with a more powerful third hit to be a mess as implemented. The need to try to move around and feel out the slight pause before your third press of the same button, rather than simply using more than one button for different combos, seems like an unnecessary barrier to success, and in general the timing didn’t stop feeling quite finicky in its implementation.

What that leaves you with is a pretty concentrated challenge, where you’ll need to come to understand the enemies on each level and how best to deal with them. There are absolutely tactics with each that improve your chances of success, but at the same time run after run on the same levels ends up making you feel the grind more than usual. Where you’d normally have the stage layouts and enemies you deal with vary procedurally between runs, here you’re just facing precisely the same challenge each time, and that takes a toll on your level of interest after a while. There’s some rewarding play here, if you don’t mind the challenge and are determined to overcome it, but there are also more exciting and varied games in this general vein out there, making this easy to push down on the list.