Let It Die dropped onto the PlayStation 4 in December 2016 with a grim reaper on a skateboard, a free price tag, and a tower that runs from the bottom of the ocean to somewhere past the clouds. Grasshopper Manufacture built it. GungHo Online Entertainment published it. It is a hack-and-slash game with roguelike bones, played from the third person, and it wants you dead often enough that death becomes a resource.
That last idea is the one that stuck.
Trailer, via GungHo.
A Spire Rises Out of South Western Tokyo
The setup is pure pulp. In 2026, a tectonic disturbance tears the world apart. South Western Tokyo splits off into the ocean and becomes an island swallowed by deep fog. Seismic activity keeps grinding away until a spire pushes up through the island and keeps going, a tower-like structure that pierces the clouds. Mysteries wait inside for anyone brave enough to approach.
You approach. Repeatedly.
Above the whole climb sits Uncle Death, a skateboarding grim reaper who supervises the run. He is the game’s host, its mascot, and its tonal anchor. Grasshopper has always liked a grinning death figure, and Uncle Death is the cleanest version of that instinct it has shipped.
Mushrooms, Armor, and the Tower
The loop is blunt. Players fight up a treacherous tower, picking up weapons and armor as they go. They find creatures and mushrooms to eat to stay alive. Eating is not a side mechanic here; it is survival, and the game treats it with the same straight face it treats the combat.
Combat is hyper-violent, as advertised. This is a hack-and-slash first and a roguelike second, which is the right order. The roguelike elements — the runs, the losses, the starting over — exist to give the hacking and slashing a cost. You are not meant to feel powerful for long.
What makes Let It Die more than a grind is what happens when you die.
Death Data Circulates
Upon death, a player’s “death data” is circulated among other players’ games, where it appears as a formidable opponent. That is asynchronous multiplayer, and it is the smartest thing in the game. Your failure does not vanish. It gets handed to a stranger as a monster to fight.
The sharing of death data is one of several asynchronous multiplayer elements in Let It Die, alongside single player and multiplayer modes. It is also the part that gives the free-to-play structure a reason to exist beyond monetization. Other people’s corpses become your difficulty curve.
There is a real cruelty to it. The better you get, the worse you make someone else’s night. The game understands that and leans in.
Free to Play, and What That Costs
Let It Die launched free to play on PlayStation 4 in December 2016, with a Japanese release following in February 2017. A Microsoft Windows version arrived in September 2018. The game carries action, horror, and comedy as its themes, and it earns all three, though the comedy is doing more work than the horror.
It scored 7.7 out of 10 across eight outlets in the IGDB critic aggregate. That number is fair, and it is fair for a specific reason: Let It Die is a game with one excellent idea and a lot of standard ones around it.
The tower is the standard part. Floors blur. Weapon durability nags. The free-to-play economy sits in the background, patient and quiet, and it shapes how much you can do in a session without paying. Grasshopper’s fingerprints are on the tone and the character design; the grind is the cost of admission.
Deathverse, Inferno, and the Shutdown
The afterlife got complicated. A battle royale sequel, Deathverse: Let It Die, was announced in October 2021 and ran a limited-time beta test in May and June 2022 on the PlayStation 5 and Windows. It was developed by Supertrick Games, a studio spun off from Grasshopper Manufacture, the team behind the original.
Then a second sequel. Let It Die: Inferno was announced at the 2025 PlayStation State of Play on September 24, 2025, with a release date of December 3, 2025 for the PlayStation 5 and Windows.
And then the original’s clock ran out. In March 2026, it was announced that Let It Die would shut down its servers in the fall of that year and shift to an offline version accessible through paid DLC.
That sequence matters more than any single review score. A free-to-play game lives or dies on its servers, and Let It Die is being converted into a product you buy to keep. The death data — the mechanic that made it worth talking about — depends on a living population. An offline version cannot circulate your corpse to strangers.
The Verdict on Let It Die
Let It Die earns its 7.7. The combat is loud and competent, Uncle Death is a genuinely good creation, and the asynchronous death data system is the kind of idea that other games should have stolen harder than they did. The tower itself is thinner than the concept wrapped around it.
What the shutdown announcement reveals is the real story. Let It Die was built as a free-to-play service, and its best feature was inseparable from that service. Strip the servers and you keep the hack-and-slash and lose the thing that made it strange. That is not a knock on the game. It is a warning about how these games are built.
If you want to climb the tower while other people’s death data is still climbing with you, the window is closing. After that, Let It Die becomes a single-player hack-and-slash with a good mascot and a missing organ.
KEY FACTS
- Score: 7.7 of 10
- Developer: Grasshopper Manufacture
- Publisher: GungHo Online Entertainment
- Platforms: PlayStation 4, PC (Microsoft Windows)
- PS4 release: December 2016
- Japan release: February 2017
- Windows release: September 2018
- Genres: Hack and slash, beat ’em up
- Themes: Action, horror, comedy
- Modes: Single player, multiplayer
- Sequel: Deathverse: Let It Die, announced October 2021
- Sequel: Let It Die: Inferno, announced September 24, 2025; release December 3, 2025
- Shutdown: Servers close fall 2026; offline version via paid DLC
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