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Ahead of Penny Blood’s anticipated Spring 2025 launch, we have Penny Blood: Hellbound, which is a roguelike side story focusing on the enemy Hellhounders faction. Though something of a grind, it serves as a fairly fun way to get to know the world and characters of Penny Blood before the main game comes out.
The plot of Penny Blood: Hellbound focuses on Clara, an amnesiac girl with a natural affinity for Malice. After she encounters the Hellhounders, some mysterious mages appear and toss them into the inter-dimensional prison, Mictlan. They can’t die in Mictlan, nor can they escape. Nonetheless, they decide to try and break out of it together, which requires defeating the magi who trapped them in it in the first place. On the way, they meet other villains who invite themselves to the Hellhounders’ ranks. These villains can help you out in various ways in the Hellhounders’ hide-out.
The game itself is fairly standard. Each character starts with a very combo, though you can pick up new skills in each run, as well as permanently enhance attributes and weapons in the hide-out. It starts out pretty easy. But as you progress through each map, the game throws more and more monsters at you until it is virtually impossible to defeat the final boss (the magi) at the end of the grid. I’m sure that it’s possible to do so if you are very patient or very good at roguelikes. However, since you can collect currency after each run to level up your character, it feels like the developers intended for the player to die continuously so that they can power up their characters after each defeat.
This is fine, of course. I do not particularly mind the grind. There is a sense of accomplishment in both collecting the enhancements, as well as in seeing how you improve as you become accustomed to how the game handles. The gameplay loop is fun, and the grids and battles are pretty short. So even if you die, the feeling of losing progress is not as bad as in games such as Cult of the Lamb or Hades. I have to admit that I played this after I started the Zenless Zone Zero beta and so the cooldown on the dodge in Hellbound kept messing me up. Saving the dodge for emergencies and maintaining distance even with melee characters took me way too long to get used to. This is crucial though, since your character can only really take two to five good, clean hits before they die.
Dodging is not the only way to move around in the game. A gameplay element unique to Penny Blood: Hellbound is bloodsurfing. Now, I actually could not bloodsurf for quite a bit of my time in the closed beta but that’s entirely my fault. I equipped an item that would offer me a stat boost in exchange for my ability to do so. Killing enemies will make them splatter blood everywhere, and you can use this blood to boost your movement speed. You can also get an enhancement to make them explode, which greatly helps with covering more real estate. It adds a sense of speed to the game, as well as helps you to budget your dodge, and makes the action quite thrilling.
In my opinion, the best part of the game isn’t really in the actual roguelike aspect. It’s in the writing! The characters and encyclopedia entries in Penny Blood: Hellbound are really fun to read about. They’re very reminiscent of Shadow Hearts, though I personally think that the heavy focus on how the magi created the various monsters in Mictlan makes for less interesting lore. I liked the bestiary of Shadow Hearts a lot more because it added a lot of flavor to the low fantasy setting. Meanwhile, Hellbound’s feels much too self-contained. It’s nice to see the characters interacting so much with each other, especially since the Shadow Hearts series lacked a lot of inter-party conversations and dynamics. I’m hoping that this focus on the characters will continue in the main Penny Blood game.
Despite its status as a side game, it can take quite a bit of time to beat Penny Blood: Hellbound, especially if you want to unlock everything. It’s very easy to pick up and does not require too much investment, especially since dying in a round will still give you currency rather than forcing you to lose everything. Even I, as someone who does not particularly enjoy roguelikes, found myself sinking hours and hours into Hellbound without ever losing my patience to the point that I wanted to quit. Now I’m hoping that there will be some sort of dungeon crawl post-game content in the main Penny Blood game.
It is important to note that I played the most basic build of the closed beta, which had four playable characters and two areas (which means two bosses). There will be a patch to add voice acting and dynamic music on January 10, 2024. Early access will open up in February 2024, and the online multiplayer version will come out in Spring 2024. Both the February and Spring 2024 updates will also bring in new areas, bosses, NPCs, playable characters, facilities, and enemies. It will be interesting to see how the game improves in those future releases.
Penny Blood: Hellbound will come out on the Windows PC in Summer 2024. Currently, only those who backed Penny Blood have access to the closed beta, and early access will open in February 2024. The main game, Penny Blood, has a projected release window of Spring 2025.
