Deadhaus Sonata Steam Review: Disturbingly Delicious Gothic Action RPG!

You are dropped straight into a dark, gritty Gothic world where your existence as a powerful vampire feels atmospheric and deeply unsettling right from the starting line. The world of Malorum doesn’t hand-hold you; instead, it wraps you in an ominous, blood-soaked environment that begs to be explored as you hunt down human meat bags. It is a gripping, uncompromised artistic direction that hooks you instantly, promising a deep narrative crusade fueled by supernatural abilities and ancient dark lore.

QUICK NAV: [Specs] [Gameplay] [Performance] [Settings]

Deadhaus Sonata Steam Review

• Developer: Apocalypse Studios
• Publisher: Apocalypse Studios
• Official Website: Deadhaus Sonata Official Site
• Store Link: Steam Product Page
• Visual Style: Dark, gritty Gothic graphics.
• Download Size: 9.03GB download size.
• Achievements: There are no Steam achievements as of yet.
• Voice Work: Excellent voice work featured across the board.

Deadhaus Sonata Steam Review

This is an action-adventure gameplay experience where you play as a vampire and collect Tarot cards to unlock new powers and abilities. You cannot go in water, but can run around in the sun. The developers have created a world I want to explore. I want to see everything. It’s just fascinating as they weave this dark vampiric theme through a Gothic world, but it’s just not great to control and is a slow starter. You play from a third-person view, and you have 360-degree camera control in the massive open 3D game world. Your home base is indeed massive with multiple floors, and more becomes available as you progress. From there, you get these cool flyovers and in-game cutscenes that are well presented and voiced. When choosing a region on the world map, you then choose a location, and each of them will show any missions you have in that area. Currently, there are three regions planned for the game, with only one being accessible at the time of writing. You can track everything through the journal, which is a collection of all your missions completed, ongoing, or not yet discovered. Locations and points of interest are awesome and beg to be explored. Outside does allow a fair degree of exploration, but indoors, it’s a bit more confined. Invisible walls and random stopping are your only enemies here. Along the way, tutorial pop-ups appear as you play, but the tutorials and button prompts do not go far enough and for so many of the games’ menus, options, and mechanics, you are left having to figure it out for yourself.

The combat itself is straight-up hack and slash until you start getting abilities, and that’s fine, but no block or parry, or even dodges, exist, so it’s a frustrating introduction to combat. Lock on helps with the hack-and-slash nature of the combat, but again, the controls are fiddly. The thing is, the combat is nothing special, but the animations of it and the sheer veracity and force with which you kill people are disturbingly delicious. Finishers are when you get an enemy low and into a stance, doing a finisher gives you some blood (health) back. There is also a mechanic called Overblood, where when at full blood, gaining any more will then quicken your ability to cool down. Tarot cards literally fall out of enemies and can be auto-equipped if a slot is empty. You can get major and minor tarot cards, which dictate what you can and cannot equip and which are passive, etc. Load out can be configured within your home, and it involves dragging and dropping found and unlocked tarot cards and assigning them to buttons. You can have up to three loadouts. There is so much lore and story, but the way you get given it is just bombardment and half of it you miss as you’re either fighting or doing a puzzle. Collectable chronicles can be found and give you loads of lore and backstory. They are voiced and used at the chronicles altar in your home, but be wary, as you can click many things and trigger many voice-overs that will indeed all play at once. Areas have these little pillars you interact with, and you get a voiced description of the area you are in. There is also a cool gimmick where enemies can put their weapons into a fire pit and do more damage to you, but you can find the pit and extinguish it to stop them from using it. You cannot pause the game at any time, so be prepared for that. When you die, you go back to your home, which is rather annoying and is a real mood killer. Man, just when I think I’ve seen it all, the game will throw up something new, or I get this new power that is a game-changer. It’s that sort of game. Platinum is the in-game currency for buying cosmetics for your character, such as voices, weapon skins, legs, hands, cloak, shoulders, and armour. There are some cheap options, and it is a pain to edit the cloak-like colours and different symbols.

Deadhaus Sonata Steam Review: Performance & Fidelity

• Graphics Setup: Benchmark test for performance and setup of your graphics. It doesn’t run a rolling demo or anything; it just does it all in the background and takes a few minutes.
• Early Access Quirks: Being early access, there are a lot of little missteps and glitches, like biting animations missing the enemy, or running along, and a small stone stops you dead, or the AI’s pathfinding, which is bad.
• Enemy Behaviour: I always have one guy who thinks he’s Rambo or the Terminator, and another one who just keeps running away; all he’s missing is the Benny Hill tune.

Settings, Customisation & Control Details

• Graphics Options: Resolution, graphics quality, screen mode, upscaler (DLSS/native unreal/off), v-sync, enable loading screen, ray tracing toggle, motion blur strength, hi res mode, field of view slider, brightness slider, and mega lights toggle.
• Controller Support: Controller support is not yet official; you could probably muddle one together.
• Control Limitations: Sensitivity sliders for both axis are all you get for control setup, so no invert axis or the ability to remap buttons. The controls are very clunky and awkward, and not being able to remap doesn’t help.
• Character Stats: A full stats screen can be found.

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