Why Harebrained Schemes expects you to die a lot in dungeon crawler Necropolis

Harebrained Schemes has teamed up with Bandai Namco Entertainment America to publish dungeon-crawler Necropolis this summer. It’s a minimalist game with a breezy tone, but it is astonishingly difficult to play because it has permadeath. If you die, you start over.

We talked about this with Mitch Gitelman, the president of Seattle-based Harebrained Schemes, after a play session with the console version. Gitelman admitted that it isn’t so nice to be so cruel to gamers by tossing them into impossible situations in a game with permadeath. On the other hand, he said that players who are trying the game keep coming back because they want to make it a little bit further. It’s a notion popularized by Dark Souls, a maddeningly difficult series where you only get one life. It’s got an endless maze, like the old dungeon-crawler Rogue from 1980.