Pray for Death is a 2D Fighting game released exclusively for the PC and Mac in 1996. It features ten mystical fighters ranging from the eldritch god known as Cthulhu to some guy that is totally not Bruce Lee. Death itself is holding this little tournament as he one day finds himself incredibly bored with his job as well as his cat Horace. He seeks the mightiest of warriors for this little game of his, offering them a chance of rebirth if they should win. Many of the people he contacted such as Dracula flat out refused and in the end, he finally settled with the ten that didn’t rudely ignore his scheming.
This title is meant to be very much tongue in cheek, though that fact can be easily missed if you didn’t read the entertaining manual. In the game itself, it is oddly serious with the only humor coming from Death if you manage to reach him by plowing through every other character in the Story Mode. If you manage that he will give you cheat codes and tips as to how to pull off those Mortal Kombat inspired ‘deadly moves’ once you defeat a foe. Before starting a fight, you may want to go into the options menu to rebind the keys to something more comfortable. The second player uses up many of the keys for the right side of the keyboard and you can not override them. Rebinding his keys to something you’ll never reach is suggested as this gives you more freedom to set your own.
I’m afraid you are in for a bit of work if you were hoping to use a gamepad. Pray For Death has this bizarre issue in where your movement keys go crazy once you plug in a controller and it becomes a challenge to simply select something from a menu, not to mention actually being able to fight. If you are insistent about using a gamepad, go into the ‘dosboxpray’ config file, change joysticktype=auto to joysticktype=none, then finally use a program to map your set keys onto whatever buttons you want. It is a lot less complex than it sounds, though is still an extra step to go through. Such is the nature of the beast at times when trying to run old software on new hardware. Luckily, aside from that, it ran perfectly fine on Windows 10 and I encountered no further issues.
With all that tech speak out of the way, let’s move on to the game itself. You have the option of choosing one of many difficulty modes ranging from the noob friendly ‘Dead’ setting to the punch a hole through your monitor ‘Entity’. If you want to see the ending of your character once you finish story mode, then you will need to at least pick Zombie difficulty or be faced with a screen plainly telling you to up the challenge before being able to see it. Story mode will be where the meat of the game is, and contrary to its name, there is absolutely no plot until the very end of it. If you want to learn about the characters do so from the main menu or manual. It is a simple arcade styled ladder match against every fighter in the game, plus Death himself and his sub-boss Pain.
You have a quick and a hard punch, as well as a quick & hard kick in this four-button fighter. Each character has a different fighting style and do feel unique from one another, so you may get clobbered while adjusting to a new one. It is heavily focused on landing big combos or freeing yourself from the receiving end with a breaker. You can get by with ranged attacks and quick jabs on lower difficulties, but that won’t cut it when you up the ante to a higher one. Another thing to keep in mind is the energy meter under your health bar. Getting hit depletes it and the emptier it is, the more of a chance you will be stunned, which is just as deadly as it sounds. It is best to go on the defensive at times and catch a quick breather, instead of trying to button mash your way to success.
There is a lovably cheesy narrator that gets super hyped when someone gets combo’d or uppercutted straight up into the stratosphere. I’m not sure if the voice actor behind him was going for a serious performance, but one thing I can say is that he had me grinning even when I’m the one that just got beaten with a sick combo. Now before you go out and buy it thinking it sounds similar to another well-known combo-based fighter, know that while that may be true, this is considerably worse. The controls are much more sluggish and there is just something to it that feels wrong, probably the slightly overly drawn out animations of the 3D character models. Don’t get me wrong it is not terrible, it is perfectly functional, though there is a reason you probably never heard of this game.
For the time, the graphics were pretty decent, though as you no doubt noticed by now, has not aged well. Particularly the characters themselves since the 3D of this era rarely looks halfway appealing today. The environments have fared better, aside from the ones were they overused the color red, to the point that it loses a ton of detail due to it. Music, on the other hand, is darn catchy indeed. Other than the story mode, you also have Tag Team. It essentially replaces your continue credits with two or more chosen characters after one of them falls. So if you have a team of three you only have three tries to defeat the entire roster. Not only that, but your health does not refill between matches anymore. It is very fun and I probably spent as much time with it as I did the story mode.
Your final single-player mode is unlocked after you finished Story a few times and allows you to play as Death himself. There is also a cheat code to play as the sub-boss Pain, which is awesome as he was the fighter with the most interesting character design in my opinion. That brings the total fighters up to a full dozen. Other modes include three variations against another human foe, if you can find someone to play this with you. There is another set of three tournament modes that is designed for multiple human players, but you can also play by yourself. Final League being the most interesting among them. You do not only fight to try to defeat an enemy, you also try to keep your moves varied in order to score up more points. This keeps things from becoming spamming matches and even if you win every round, you can still lose the overall tournament if all you do is low kick then back away.
Pray for Death is an odd title. It is too good to be bad and too bad to be good. It is simply mediocre if I’m being perfectly honest, yet it still has a certain charm to it. There is no shortage of fighting games on the PC, and while one exclusively for computers is still nearly unheard of outside of Mugen & other fan games, I still wouldn’t recommend going out of your way to get it for the current full asking price. The people this would most appeal to are those with nostalgia for it or those that like to preserve gaming history. If you have a DOS capable PC or simply like to collect big boxed game, then it is well worth knowing that the cover art for this features a girl dressed in S&M garbs backhanding Shovel Knight. If that isn’t worth putting on a pedestal, I don’t know what is.
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