Annihilated Review - A Twisted Story Driven Roguelite RPG?

Does Annihilated annihilate the competition?

How do you classify a game that’s billed as a choice-driven, turn based, deck-building, rogue-lite JRPG? That sounds like a lot, right? Welp, buster, that’s because it is. Now, I’m a man of many tastes. I love narrative-driven adventures just as much as side scrolling action platformers. Genre reimagining puzzle games like Blue Prince and Outer Wilds share a place in my heart with some of the industry’s biggest open world games. Give me all the souls-likes, and all the rogue-likes, and hell, if 2026’s Esoteric Ebb and Zero Parades (for dead spies) are any indication, give me all those upcoming Disco-likes as well.

So, you’d think developer Death Kumiai’s (koo-me-eye) Annihilated, the choice-driven, turn

based, deck-building, rogue-lite JRPG in question would check all of my boxes. But just

because you can stuff a game with with every genre doesn’t mean you should, especially if you fail to deliver on what makes those genres fun and engaging. What’s the old saying? A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one? That is to say, do everything you’re trying to do pretty well and you’ll end up with a good product. Annihilated, unfortunately, is neither master, nor jack, of any of its chosen trades. From the dull story and glacial pacing, to the repetitive combat and underwhelming visuals, Annihilated is a game that tries to do too much, succeeds at very little, and leaves me wondering who this was actually made for.

The game kicks off interestingly enough: your character, known plainly as Soldier, stumbles

upon a hero’s annihilated party deep within a cursed dungeon. Your goal is to bring them back to the surface. The caveat is you can only take one of them, and each one is afflicted with their own unique curse. The Hero can only respond in “yes” and “no,” the Mage has lost their ability to use magic, the Warrior has been turned into a doll, and now lacks the strength they once boasted, and the Priest has seemingly given themself to a demonic god, who may or may not be the source of the curse.

Regardless of whom you choose, you’ll navigate the dungeon by making dialogue choices and engaging with deck building combat encounters. There’s also the occasional narrative roulette wheel, a stat-based mini game that often rewards you with new weapons and experience, but can also result in death if you’re not careful, or are insufficiently leveled. Ultimately, the route is yours to choose, as is the type of relationship you build with your chosen dungeon buddy. 

The game tackles themes of isolation, rejection, grief, pride, and identity, and is much darker and morbid tonally than one might expect. Annihilated also did a good job of subverting a few of my own expectations, as there were some generally unnerving character moments.

But that’s all they were—just moments. The story of Annihilated is the most frustrating part of the game for me. When it’s at its best, it’s hinting at something sinister developing beneath the surface. Interactions with the Priest character, in particular, can be some of the game’s most intriguing, but these instances are fleeting, and quickly wash away in a sea of cryptic dialogue that fails to drive the story forward in any meaningful way. Annihilated somehow finds a way to be both convoluted and generally boring at the same time, reading like an angst filled diary that’s more stream of consciousness than narrative structure. The characters have their moments, often when they’re coming to terms with own flaws and vulnerabilities, but, for the most part, they feel largely inauthentic, and read as though they’re cut from the same cloth, as opposed to having their own unique voices.

Have you ever tried having a conversation with yourself? It’s boring, and you look weird doing it. So, knock it off. But that’s what the conversations in Annihilated feel like. Out of fear of spoilers, I can’t go much deeper into the specifics about the larger issues I have with the story, but I’m hard pressed to imagine any differences in the choices I made or the character quest lines I chose could’ve pulled the nose up on this plane. On a technical note: I found numerous spelling and translation errors, and I wonder if more detailed proofreading and localization would’ve helped flesh out the story and character development.

As far as gameplay, each character has their own unique route that culminates in multiple endgame scenarios based on the choices you’ve made throughout your run. I spent roughly 12 hours on my first run, twice as long as the projected 6 hours given on Steam, and I reached the end with the Hero as my travel companion. For a game that purports itself as rogue-lite, I was baffled when it prompted me with the option to “retry” when I died. In fact, retrying is the only option, unless you decide to give up and abandon your save. 

There’s no meta-progression, nor does your run affect the overall story with the other 3 characters. So, the idea that this is a rogue-lite with a gameplay loop and a wider narrative arc to keep coming back to is a complete misclassification. The replayability lies in whether or not you want to do 6-12 hours of roughly the same combat all over again.

And that combat, frankly, can actually be pretty fun. I struggle, as with most things in this game, to call it a true deck builder. Sure, you can build a deck, but there aren’t really any combos or synergies that come into play the same way they do in games like Slay the Spire or Death Howl. It’s actually pretty mashy for most of the game, and I found myself just pushing the card with the biggest damage number until the encounter was over. Changing characters never really affected this strategy either. Each character has their own strengths and weaknesses that lend itself to diverse runs with different styles of gameplay. But no matter which character I chose, I always found the path of least resistance to be blasting big damage cards as fast as I could.

That’s not to say that Annihilated doesn’t have some degree of strategy or diversity in gameplay. There are actually 2 modes of combat: timing-based and probability-based. All attack cards bring up a timing bar, and who you attack on the field is dictated by when and where you stop a sliding cursor along that bar. Stop the cursor on one enemy, attack one enemy. Stop the cursor perfectly between two enemies, attack both enemies. Likewise, if you miss the box completely, you miss the attack. This is the timing-based combat.

The other style, the probability-based combat, throws all that out and says: hey, you go ahead and put that cursor wherever you’d like, but we’re only giving you a certain percentage chance that this attack will land. I personally played on timing-based, and I would say that it’s quite a bit more challenging than probability-based. Not only do you need to remain completely focused on combat at all times, but it also makes landing fatal strikes much more difficult. Fatal strikes, you say? Why yes, after dishing out enough damage, you’ll essentially break an enemy’s posture, allowing you to do what is known as a fatal strike. A fatal strike can essentially kill your enemy in one shot, while also stealing their weapon for yourself. Landing a fatal strike is usually achieved by destroying your own weapon and then using its broken attack to perfectly land your timing cursor on the small, orange fatal strike box.

Nailing a fatal strike is often the difference between ending the fight then and there, or having to go another round. In probability-based combat, this element of challenge is trivialized by the ability to just set your cursor directly on the box, substantially lowering or completely eliminating the difficulty of combat encounters.

Difficulty overall is neither exceptional, nor unbearable. Just a big bag of meh. This isn’t me bragging, but feel free to marvel at my skills all the same: my first death didn’t come until near the end of the game. Did I die a whole bunch after that? You bet, but that’s not the point. The point is that I ran into a massive difficulty spike, one that was a bit of a system shock after numbly plowing through the normal fodder for most of the game. It’s nothing a little “git gud” couldn’t fix, but then combat just became a repetitive dance of alternating between damage negation and high damage cards.

It’s at this point where I learned that the “rouge-lite” elements of Annihilated didn’t actually exist. Death is a means to restock your deck and reallocate your stats, but then you’re free to carry on your merry way. I’m bemoaning the rogue-lite issue a lot, I know, but I’m still just baffled that they laid the groundwork, only to neglect the important connective tissue. Shorter runs and meta-progression across cards, stats, and character story arcs would’ve gone a long way in building that addictive gameplay loop that the best rogue-lites are known for. Instead, it’s just a slog, one that I felt would never end.

The visual style of the game is... it’s just not for me. It never really grabbed my attention, and the characters really lacked enough expressive models to truly convey any sort of emotion. That said, I think overall they accomplished what they were trying to do with the art. There’s a way to use a lighter, brighter, and cuter art style as a sort of foil to elevate and enhance a darker narrative. Games like Pony Island and Cult of the Lamb do this perfectly. It’s shocking when they juxtapose cute animals with visceral carnage. In Annihilated, when one character is impaled by a giant spike, or another stabs a sword through their own head, its impact is amplified because its happening to adorable characters. There’s one particular reveal from a mid-game boss that’s left a lasting image seared into my brain. That said, I just needed more. I needed the characters to show more emotion when talking to each other so they didn’t just become visual noise in the background while I read through blocks of dialogue.

Likewise, the music is just ok. It’s fine. It fits the world, tone, and style of the game; the tempo picks up during combat, it’s melancholic during reflective character moments, but it’s mostly forgettable. There are no memorable boss ballads, nor do I find myself randomly humming the over-world song. Just basic tunes blending into the background.

Performance was pretty good, for the most part. I didn’t experience any game crashing bugs or anything of that nature. There was a little bit of a visual hiccup during the timing-based slider animation, which you can imagine is a little frustrating when you’re trying to hit that fatal strike box, but your mileage may vary. I did have some weird controller issues—like activating the options menu when I was in the middle of a conversation, or struggling to select the correct card from my deck—so, mouse and keyboard is seemingly the preferred method.

Annihilated is an unfortunate result of pouring every ingredient into a pot and hoping the final dish turns out well. It desperately tries to be a game that’s the sum of its parts, but that only works if all the parts are functional. The narrative is clunky. The story is unfulfilling. And the characters are bland. There are a few shining moments, especially early on, but they’re so quickly lost in the constant character babble that they’re hardly given a chance to breathe. Billed as a deep, strategic deck builder, Annihilated’s turn-based combat system is fun from time to time, but once the repetition sets in, these encounters become nothing more than big number do big damage. It’s hard to justify ever wanting to go back for another go after completing my initial run, let alone 3 more with each character. What’s even more disappointing is that the game fails to deliver on the rogue-lite label it gave itself. Stronger gameplay loops, deeper story progression, and more engaging art might have guided this one out of its own personal cursed dungeon.

I think Annihilated’s biggest sin, though, is that it’s just boring. I never found myself wanting to get back to it, and when I was playing it, I couldn’t wait to be doing anything else in the world. It’s not unplayable. Hell, in some regards, it can actually be pretty fun. But it is a game that I felt wasted my time, and for that, I must award Annihilated the Broken Lamp.

MEDIOCRE