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On July 16, 2026, Klukva Games and Spaghetti Cat released their turn-based strategy roguelike game Dead Weight to the world. This game promises a unique roguelike experience focused on flying to islands and managing your resources as you fight against goblin pirates as four playable heroes and receive powers from terrifying gods based on how many enemies you defeated during your previous playthroughs. So is this game worth playing, or should players find a different eldritch god to worship? Let’s dissect the game piece by piece and make the decision for ourselves.
Exploration
Dead Weight immediately begins with an interesting gameplay premise: the player is presented with a world of clouds to fly through in their airship, seeking islands that contain either events or enemies.
Flying to any of these islands will take fuel, which can either be regained by winning a fight, getting lucky with an event, or manually refueling via fuel barrels that you can buy in the game’s starter town. Fuel is the biggest resource that the player will be managing in Dead Weight, as running out of it can easily result in a dead run, especially within your first few playthroughs as you must encounter two gas station islands before you can even buy fuel barrels.
Of course, running out of fuel isn’t the only thing the player will have to worry about while sailing the cloud sea, as you must also manage your exhaustion. Attempting to visit more than ten islands in a row without resting either at the tavern or via an event island can also end your run. Or worse yet, if you don’t stave off potential madness, then you’ll see tentacle monsters appear in battle and make things much more difficult for you.
I find the concept of Dead Weight’s islands and the resource management involved with reaching them to be interesting, but it doesn’t take long before the player has seen all the game’s traversal has to offer. So let’s spend some time speaking about the main focus of Dead Weight: the game’s combat.
Combat
Combat in Dead Weight takes the form of turn-based SRPG battles where the player needs to pay attention to their positioning and make sure they’re in range to attack enemies during their turn.
Each turn, the player will be able to take two actions with each of their characters. However, no action other than moving can be made more than a single time per turn (and some special actions take multiple turns to recharge). Every character has a default attack action available to them, but by equipping various weapons that you can obtain during your run, the player can learn new attacks.
Personally, my favorite method of dealing with enemies is using the push action to launch them off of the current island. It doesn’t matter if a foe has a ridiculous amount of health that would take a long time to chop down normally, as gravity is equal to all. A push off the ledge is an insta-kill to any enemy and is always satisfying to pull off.
The biggest threat to the player won’t be the enemies you face, but rather your lack of health. At the start of a Dead Weight run, you’ll have only three hits worth of HP. Screw up and get hurt three times, and it’s game over. While there are ways to increase your HP, such as armor, you’re still going to feel like a glass cannon no matter what.
Thankfully, it isn’t too hard to avoid damage in this game. At the end of their turns, enemies will indicate where they’ll attack next turn via red squares on the ground. If the player is wise and careful enough to spend one or both of their two actions per turn moving to a safe tile, you’ll be able to easily avoid taking damage.
If you do end up dying, though, then that will be the end of your run. This game is a roguelike at heart, so any death will result in all islands (except for the town you start in) being shuffled around and all equipment/money you had on your person vanishing alongside your levels and upgrades.
Thankfully, you won’t have to start your next run completely from scratch, as you’ll be given favors from the gods based on how many enemies you’ve killed in all of your failed runs. These favors can be exchanged for buffs such as starting your runs at a higher level or upgrading your ship so it uses less fuel when flying around.
Repetition
Battles can be quite slow at the beginning of a Dead Weight run, as you will begin with only a single character in your party. With three out of the game’s four heroes, this will be you’ll only be doing one damage per turn most turns and need to spend quite a while fighting to take down even a few goblins.
Additional party members can be hired from the tavern, but you’ll need to grind for the gold to do that and potentially risk quite a bit of fuel to go back to town and get them. Combine that with how most of these additional party members have only 1 HP, and you’ll be taking quite a risk any time you try to recruit someone.
Friendly fire is on full display in this title, both for your party and the enemies you’ll be fighting. While one would imagine this would be frustrating, it is actually a godsend, as more often than not enemies will take themselves out and drastically decrease the number of turns that you’ll be hopping around their attacks as you chip away at their health.
Unfortunately, Dead Weight’s combat system is a bit of a one-trick pony. Once you have gotten used to the simple loop of attacking enemies and then moving to the safest tile, you’ll have essentially mastered the game and won’t be dying any time soon.
The game will attempt to spice things up with a few interesting boss fights that can keep the player on their toes with unpredictable attack patterns that could potentially trap you if you rush to a ledge, but as long as the player is careful, they’ll be able to go through most of the game without taking damage at all.
Most of the bad situations I got into in this game were caused either by a minor lapse of judgement (such as staying too close to an enemy who can counter when attacking) or because I was trapped in a corner without any way to move. These being the only two ways I was ever in danger, while most battles ended up being a monotonous repeat of the same few actions I could perform each turn, made battles in this game a dull slog after the first few attempts.
Visuals and Technical Issues
Visually, Dead Weight is a passable game. The sprite work and visuals of the map always make it clear where you can stand and which parts of the stage can be used as obstacles to push enemies into. The sprites of the party you can hire are probably the weakest element, as they easily blend into the group of enemies you’ll be fighting, often resulting in horrible mistakes, but the hero you started as is always easily identifiable.
The best-looking parts of the game are the various pieces of artwork that appear during the game’s event islands. The artists for this game have a good feel for sprite work, portraits, and environmental details.
Sadly, outside of the event art and the occasional good-looking boss, there wasn’t much in Dead Weight that wowed me visually, but I wouldn’t say that the game looks bad by any metric.
I also faced several technical issues during my playthrough; in particular, I experienced multiple game crashes. Thankfully, these crashes didn’t result in lost progress as the game autosaves every time you enter a battle, but it was undeniably frustrating to reach the end of a boss battle only to have the game window close and need to start the fight over from scratch.
Closing Thoughts
Overall, while I found Dead Weight to be an overall passable game with a few interesting gameplay concepts, its combat and gameplay loop would quickly get tedious and made the process of repeating a run after I died much more of a chore than it needed to be as a result. For those reasons, this is a game that I struggle to recommend to others.
Dead Weight
Bottom Line
Dead Weight is a game with an interesting concept with unique ideas to spice up the rogue-like genre, unfortunately the game is a one-trick pony which becomes extremely repetitive once the player has gotten a handle on its battle system. With the only roadblocks the player faces being things out of their control like poor island rng or bad luck with enemy spawns, it's hard to find enjoyment with this game beyond the first few runs, making this a difficult game to recommend to others.
