Die Young

Die Young was reviewed on a PS4

Die Young is an adventure survival game with a heavy focus on exploration and parkour. In fact, most of your time in the game is spent exploring its picturesque Mediterranean island. The game’s greatest asset is its parkour elements and the perfectly designed locations, even if they do suffer from a few navigational issues.

Awkward Pacing

The game’s female protagonist, Daphne, can slide and climb her way around any obstacle. It’s unfortunate though that more often than not, her obstacle is a locked door. Coming across a new location is usually the same. You’re looking around for the door, you try to open it, and the dreaded “You need a key” message pops up. Which makes you frustrated and then you go do your exploring elsewhere. Suddenly you come across a dirt patch on the ground, but oh wait; you need a shovel to dig it.

Progression is constantly blocked by annoying backtracking and item fetching that serve as nothing but unnecessary padding. If the pacing was handled a bit better, and if these constant restrictions on progression were a bit more limited, Die Young would’ve been a much better paced experience.

Let me tell you how my first few hours of Die Young were like. I came across a certain gate, but its key is on the other side of the map inside a dog’s kennel. To get it though, you’ll have to poison the dog, but you need a recipe to craft the poison.

To craft the poison, you need the pharmacy tools, which you’ll find inside of a huge maze-like manor. You get my point. This sequence of events describe my whole experience with Die Young. but despite all of that, I still was hooked on the game from start to finish.

Exploration In Every Sense Of The Word

Die Young starts by giving you a list of landmarks to look for and find on your own, with no guide whatsoever. It’s easy to get lost and lose track of what you have to do next, especially in the first few hours, which were my least favorite parts of the game.

The open landscapes of the first chunk of the map left me a bit lost, as its landmarks were simply a few bland abandoned houses that were separated by the large open spaces of green fields. I spent a lot of time wandering around aimlessly, simply trying to figure out how to proceed.

I didn’t encounter this problem in the other parts of the island though, as they were much better defined, and had landmarks that are more memorable.

Just Like The Classics

If you’re a fan of the old Tomb Raider games or of games like Death Stranding and Dying Light, then you’ll enjoy Die Young’s ambiguity in its navigation. The game doesn’t tell you where to go next or what to do. A large green circle on the map is all the guidance you’ll get.

This made my whole experience with the game annoying but extremely satisfying. This sense of satisfaction came from the fact that I had to memorize the layouts of each new area. Each of Die Young’s locations felt more menacing to tackle than the dangerous cultists roaming the island.

One particular area was one of the most realistically designed environmental location I’ve ever seen in my gaming career. It perfectly mixed the verticality of its high ledges with the vagueness of its twists and turns.

Die Young left me a bit conflicted. I had felt the same way I did when I first played Dark Souls. I loved it because it had gave me this sense of fulfilment, but I also hated that I wasted so much time trying to overcome its challenges. One thing I’m certain of though, is that I spent many long uninterrupted sessions with it despite my grievances.

Exploration is enhanced by the gory imagery of disemboweled and decapitated corpses of the poor tourists who dared visit this mysterious island. There’s plenty of blood and separated limbs to come across in Die Young, so it’s definitely not a game for the squeamish.

The Island Is Beautiful

The island is beautiful and realistic, but the interiors of some of the early locations felt a bit drab. The island is as hostile as it is picturesque. It’s filled with lunatic cultists that are hell-bent on murdering you. You can arm yourself with a variety of melee weapons such as wrenches, knives and crowbars, but it’s better if you just keep yourself out of harm’s way.

When starting out, you don’t have much space in your inventory. You’ll be forced to limit yourself to carrying only a handful of weapons and health items. This forces you to go into hiding when encountering any tougher enemies. However, once you upgrade your backpack, you’ll be able to spam use as much health items as you want, making most fights a walk in the park.

This gives a nice feeling of progression to the game and prevents it from being too repetitive. The final boss fight for example is brutal even with a fully upgraded character. The combat isn’t anything to write home about though. Hitting your foes lacks any impact and some of the enemies spam you with constant un-blockable attacks. Though combat isn’t the main focus of Die Young.

The Animations

The traversal animations are fluid enough, especially when you’re climbing one of the many towers or small mountains of the game while the synth music blasts in the background. At times, the sense of gaining momentum and jumping from one platform to the other while being a step away from falling to certain death was exhilarating to say the least.

There is one issue that I had with the animations though. The hands don’t properly connect to the holds when climbing at times. The game also uses the same animation for climbing the holds as it does for climbing the ladders, which felt a bit sloppy on the developers’ behalf. This lack of attention to detail really hurts the overall presentation of the game, and so does the messy UI.

You’ll find notes written by the inhabitants of the island scattered all over the map, but they’re at times downright intelligible as the font’s too small and there’s no way to magnify it whatsoever. I literally had to get up from my chair and stand in front of the TV just so I can read them.

Once you’re able to read them though, you’ll uncover the dark twisted history of the island and its inhabitants. There’s some compelling lore in Die Young, but it always felt that the majority of the developers love was poured into the second and third acts of the game. The story was clichéd and filled with the typical horror tropes. It was mostly straightforward, but it still piqued my curiosity at times.

Overall,

I tried my best to describe Die Young without comparing it to other games, especially the AAA titles, but that proved hard to do. Simply because it’s clear that Die Young takes quite an inspiration from games like Dying Light and Far Cry 3, but that doesn’t mean it’s a derivative experience. It felt like a fresh new idea because it took some of the elements that made those games a blast to play, and mixed them all together.

There’s no denying that Die Young has its share of flaws, but it’s hard not to look past them simply because of its excellent exploration elements, its parkour mechanics and its persistence in leaving the player to figure things out for himself. The backtracking and the fetch quests hurts the overall experience, and I hope that they would be less prominent if a sequel was made.

Die Young gives you more than enough bang for your buck, as it’s a lengthy open world experience with plenty of interesting locations to explore and enemies to kill.

If you like our content and would like to support us, please consider donating to us by clicking here.

Special thanks go to Superindie.games for providing us with a review code.

Check out more of our reviews, feel free to also follow us on Instagram.