Dark Deity is a game that has a ton of potential, but I think it was poorly executed on.

The gameplay is similar to FF Tactics. As a fan of the genre, I found the gameplay overall pretty fun. However, the issue with this game is that the flaws simply make it not fun to play. One of the most glaring issues is that the game often just tells you the wrong damage numbers. For example, in the battle preview, it will say you will deal X damage and the enemy will deal Y damage. Then once you get into the battle, it is a totally different damage number and can be a different amount of attacks. This made planning for battle extremely annoying, and I cannot understand why a game genre that hinges on planning would have something like this. Additionally, the menu is pretty lacking, and the game lacks some basic features that I'd expect from games like these. Well maybe the story can make up for it right? Well unfortunately, the story is also extremely dry and underwhelming, often becoming an uninteresting text dump.

Overall, this is a game with potential absolutely ruined by poor execution. I would recommend staying away from Dark Deity.

For Fire Emblem fans who look fondly at the gba era of FE, it's clear that DD takes a lot of inspiration from those games. I thought they had the right idea, but execution left a lot to be desired. A lot. It has a lot of charm in that respect, but unfortunately I think that's all this game has to offer, charm. I bought this game pretty close to initial release at a small discount to support passionate indie devs who have a vision, and still feel kind of burned on this one. If anything I'm impressed I finished a full playthrough with the lack of polish this game has. My personal opinion is that this game is not worth more than $7USD to a paying customer. I would go as far as saying that a free code should be bundled to anyone who buys DD2, because DD1 feels like a proof of concept love letter game masquerading as a $25 full fledged indie game. You could play the second game with no knowledge of the first and be fine plotwise, it's worth it for the improvements alone. If anything, the devs should have taken a page from Fire Emblem, not using sequential names and giving Dark Deity 2 a more unique name with no 2 treatment.


I've always been more of a gameplay forward fan, moreso than story, but the story doesn't particularly leave me with any attachment, I think if story is a really important aspect then this is an easy skip. Brooke and Iris were maybe the only characters who felt flushed out everyone else felt pretty generic, some even pointlessly strung along into the plot for the sake of recruitment. The cast could have definitely been thinned a bit considering the game is centered around not needing to be ironmanned at base. I absolutely hate gag characters and especially dumb muscle heads who make barking noises, Benji is absolutely the worst of the worst.


Unfortunately I don't think the gameplay holds up that much better. Deity mode was pretty easy for me, veteran FE/SRPG players could go straight into blind Deity and have very few restarts, but if you lose a unit on stats that don't matter then you could keep going (probably one of the few neutral/positives I have about the game). Many maps were glorified weaving corridor rout maps and daresay uninspiring in terms of design. The chapter 5 teleporters were poorly thought out, forcing players to leave units on an island to fight for their lives waiting for support. Many gimmicks felt forced and existing for the sake of including a gimmick somewhere. I can only describe it as pure optimism poor execution. Less is more, and simplifying scope for the sake of making a polished experience even if it was simple can go a long way. (IE Redemption Reapers has severely less unit customization vs. DD1 but I think RR delivers on their execution much better, albeit with way more industry experience and charging double the price so the comparison should favor RR).


By far the worst aspect of the game is just how little polish this game has in 2025, almost 3.5 years after its initial release. Initially I tried playing DD1 close to launch but I quit to wait for polish after seeing achievements were broken, and many people were still reporting dozens of issues daily. After playing DD2 for a few hours, I genuinely think the devs took the money they made from this game knowing it was not good and immediately went to making DD2, which feels a bit poor taste.

• I crashed several times throughout my playthrough just trying to look at enemy stats. There's not even a way to consistently reproduce the issue as I'd reboot, stat check the same enemy and it's just work.
  
• Every time I opened the game I had to undo then redo full screen mode because it would never remember full screen mode settings
  
• The game is entirely unplayable on Steam Deck, booting up a campaign map just disables all steam inputs, not even remapping to keyboard inputs would fix it. Sometimes I would press random buttons and it would somehow work, other times the game was just soft-locked and I'd force close it and just not care to play anymore that day
  
• Recruiting a new character and immediately forcing you to choose their class path with no knowledge outside of their growths, personal skill, potentially even experience with the class is jarring and unintuitive. You might even ruin a character choosing the wrong class on a blind run
  
• Too many weapon types with no system to refund resources with a cost. I think the idea of simplying weapons by making mt, crit, acc, balanced trees was a good idea, but its too easy to massively waste resources trying to patch a characters weaknesses
  
• Many character stat boxes would clip outside of the map, and with so many maps having really strange min/max zoom settings, I was frequently frustrated that battle data was being obfuscated from me
  
• Action and menu buttons were frequently overlapped over one another, one of the later maps, chapter 27 the top teleport couldn't even be used because every other button layered over it was registered rather than the teleporter
  
• UIUX was a mess, when distributing stat boosters, leveling up weapons I had to constantly take screenshots of character stats and hold them off on a 2nd monitor just to see what I needed to use on what character because while you can access character info from any other menu, trying to go back 1 level doesn't take you to the previous menu screen, but all the back to the base menu making the uiux navigation one of the worst executions I've seen in any game ever

It's very apparent that this was a first try was a rough one, a really really really rough one. But I held off to make a review until I at least started DD2, because I saw a lot more feedback that many issues were addressed in the sequel. I can at least say the worst issues and gripes I had are relatively gone with a few personal caveats (neither game has particularly pleasing ui to me). But I will acknowledge that the sequel is better, and if you are willing to try any game from Sword & Axe, skip this one and just go to DD2.

I was hoping for a more compelling narrative; the sheer number of characters with unengaging storylines made it difficult to connect. While the gameplay is solid, and the character sprites and animations are well-done, the overall gameplay experience is significantly detracted from by numerous minor bugs. Frustrating issues include units becoming unselectable, displaying incorrect damage values, or failing to execute movement or attack commands. Furthermore, the menus are cumbersome, and the inconsistent back navigation across different in-game menus is irritating.
I hope the sequel has addressed these flaws and offers a superior experience.