Death Tales is a strange little curiosity hidden away on the PlayStation Store. It’s a game which clearly has a lot of style, but it is also still in open beta. For those who are not familiar, this basically means it’s an early version of the game which they have opened up for public consumption. You can take this as meaning that the developers want to show off their product, or you can also take it as them being too cheap for proper play testers. This review is going to be a little bit different, since this game is not yet actually a finished project. So keep in mind that all of this is subject to being dramatically changed by the time that the game is finished.

Not much of the story is actually present in the beta version currently available. There seem to only be two simple quests with no back story. According to the description available on the PlayStation Store, it’s about Death gathering up souls for some reason or other. One of the two quests available does seem to build upon this: Death has to go and take a sick baby’s soul, but is given the option to take the mother’s life instead. This quest is given to you by a Grim Reaper, who are apparently Death’s bosses or something like that. It is not too well explained, but we’re only getting a little snapshot of a larger picture. The other available quest involves finding a missing hat for an anthropomorphic frog. This one is really weird to me since the mother and child in the other one are clearly realistic humans, but then we have cartoon frogs in the same universe with no explanation given.

Death Tales looks great. The visual element is where this game truly shines. The game has an almost collage-like look, as though someone cut up a bunch of Tim Burton drawings and Victorian illustrations and pasted them together all willy-nilly. This style is great and helps distract from some (though far from all) of the game’s larger faults. Sometimes this leads to strangely clashing things, such as the cartoon frog vs. realistic human problem mentioned above. However, if you liked The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack, you’ll at least love the way this game looks.

There is nothing to note with regard to this game’s audio design. I played through both of the available quests multiple times and literally cannot remember a single thing about the way that anything sounded. Sometimes, sound that works its way into the background works well, showing a coherence between visual and audio design. However, that isn’t really the case here. I don’t feel like the sound was so good that it was part of a larger experience. Instead, it’s just a whole lot of forgettable nothing.

Death Tales is supposed to be some sort of platformer action RPG. What this means is that it’s like if you mixed Super Mario with Bloodborne or Nier. However, that sounds really fun. Death Tales is not very fun at all. The character movement is far too stiff. Death has so much inertia that it drags down the combat immensely. The enemies move so quickly and fluidly, but the player is stuck with a variety of very rigid and ultimately very slow movements. There is actually absolutely zero instruction on how to play the game or what any of Death’s special abilities do. On some screens you get a prompt to press the O button to go back, but that doesn’t actually work. Instead you have to move your cursor over it and press the X button. I feel like that example sums up a lot of the problems with this game.

I don’t want to be too harsh on Death Tales, after all it makes absolutely no claims to being a finished product. Quite the contrary, it opens with a screen saying that everything here is subject to change with a finished product. However, the version of this game currently available is just not very good by any realistic measure. It sure does look good, though.