Image: Grasshopper Manufacturer, Supertrick Games & GungHo Online America

After a decade of life as a live-service game, Let It Die–the grimy, gore-soaked dark comedy dungeon crawler from Grasshopper Manufacture and Supertrick Games–died just a few days ago. The servers went offline, and the game closed its doors. In the exact same moment, it fittingly sprang to life again, changed but still largely intact. No longer free-to-play, Let It Die has re-launched as a single-player game with a reasonable price tag. Tweaked, tuned, and re-balanced - this is the kind of thing we want to see more of.

If you've never played Let It Die, it was a trip. Imagine a roguelite dungeon crawler from many of the people behind the No More Heroes games. In fact, it seems to exist on the fringes of that unhinged setting. At the behest of a Finnish skateboarding weeb punk reaper named Uncle Death, you are controlling expendable clone bodies to ascend the Tower of Barbs - a surreal mega-dungeon that erupted out of Tokyo, sewers, city streets, and weirder locations built into its structure and infested with mutants, robots and freaks. It could be real; it could just be a video game within a video game, it could be a Running Man-esque game show. Whatever's going on, it's bizarre and the metatextual weirdness is just part of the fun.

While not the most polished of hack n' slashers, Let It Die had amazing vibes and an aesthetic that could give you Tetanus if you stared at it too long. There was some real punk spirit there, even if the business model drew flak for being very corporate. While the game was absolutely completable without paying money (there were even speedruns doing it in under five hours on a fresh account), it constantly needled the player to cough up cash, including offering revives on the spot for real money, like credit-feeding in an old arcade game, giving it the (largely false) impression that it was pay-to-win.

That is no longer the case now. While some things have been lost in the game's move to becoming a static single-player game (encountering player characters as NPC minibosses, raiding other players for resources, etc), there's been some additions too. The re-launch patch notes are light on details, but they promise new equipment and quests, plus significant rebalancing to make it a breezier, less frustrating experience. Long-term progression upgrades require significantly less grind and are delivered immediately rather than taking time offline to develop.

The only piece of bad news here is that despite the re-launch, Let It Die's amazing soundtrack still cannot be purchased anywhere. The result of Akira Yamaoka (yes, the Silent Hill composer) commissioning a hundred new songs from a hundred of his favorite indie bands, with only one limitation: The song must be called Let It Die. The results are a mesmerizing mix of wild experimentation from bands of all stripes (though mostly Japanese rock groups), all with one thematic throughline - it's a major reason to play the game in the first place.

Let It Die is now available as a £17/$20 retail game. If you had a save file for the old online version, you have until the end of November to transfer it over, or it'll be lost forever. The extraction-style semi-sequel Let It Die: Inferno remains contentious and still full of AI-generated junk, but is still receiving major updates.