Grasshopper Manufacture’s free-to-play hack-and-slash adventure Let It Die is coming to Steam this fall. Publisher GungHo Online Entertainment America released it for PlayStation 4 at the end of 2016, and Grasshopper has spent the last year updating it on that platform. It surpassed 4 million downloads on PlayStation 4, and now it is getting a chance to win over PC audiences.
While bigger games like Fallout 76 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 are skipping Steam, developers like Grasshopper are still embracing Valve’s PC gaming service because it has a huge audience that is willing to try new games. And the success of Monster Hunter: World on Steam shows that Japanese games can have a huge following on Steam as well. Let It Die makes money through microtransactions, like letting you pay to save one of your characters who just died, and it should benefit from launching on a platform that millions of people already use to make in-game purchases.
Let It Die is a strange and stylish role-playing action game that stars a skeleton named Uncle Death. In an arcade (or maybe a PC cafe now) in postapocalyptic Tokyo, Uncle Death gives you advice about how to guide characters through a digital roguelike world. On each one of those runs, characters start with nothing but their underwear and must fight to get stronger to survive the harsh environments, enemies (called haters), and other players.
Grasshopper built Let It Die with a focus on asynchronous multiplayer from the beginning. If your character dies, it turns into a hater for other people to find and fight. You can also collect haters throughout the world and then send them to invade your friends’ games, and others can do the same to you. So this encourages you to build defenses for your base.
GungHo and Grasshopper are planning to show off the PC version of Let It Die at the PAX West fan convention in Seattle at the end of this month. Fans can go hands on at that event. It should launch sometime soon after that.
Now, the only question is whether Uncle Death rocks AMD or Nvidia in his rig.