Welcome To Early Access

Dark Rebirth is the first step in fully transforming Deadhaus Sonata. Our goal is to create a modern-era Legacy of Kain-like game focused on story, exploration, and visceral combat. It has elements of classic ARPGs, but also entirely new ones. With clear minds and hearts, we are building a game designed by gamers for gamers—a game that’s focused on what made classic games stand the test of time. Why? Because that’s what the industry needs right now.

Dark Rebirth gives players a taste of the bloody journey ahead. Every visual remaster, massive performance enhancement, and expansion serves a distinct purpose: creating a true foundation for Deadhaus Sonata. Alongside freshly forged weaponry, upgraded armor, and deep progression mechanics, these upgrades pave the way far beyond Dark Rebirth. We are crafting a vaster, deeply immersive realm that’s rich with secrets, raw action, and engaging systems that keep you hungering (and hunting) for more. This artistic overhaul defines our grim identity, while our optimization pass unlocks the headroom needed to relentlessly scale as needed. Though many features remain in early development, every single mechanic is engineered for our long-term vision. We have a long road before us, but we couldn’t be more thrilled to traverse this dark nightmare together. This is just the beginning!

Overall, Dark Rebirth focuses on the following areas:

• Visuals
• Performance
• Gameplay
• New content

Visually, we aimed to make a grimdark playground that constantly changes and looks like a painting regardless of the season, weather, or time of day.

A game can look good, but it won’t feel good without a solid framerate. No one likes a slideshow in games, and performance optimization was critical to moving Dark Rebirth forward. From our internal tests, the game should run 2–4x faster than before  and we are committed to improve things with your constructive feedback!

In terms of gameplay, Dark Rebirth focuses on fun and engagement in a dark fantasy world. We made a huge number of changes to the gameplay mechanics, making the first-hour experience as compelling and enjoyable as possible. Remember, you are not a hero. Starting as a fledgling vampire, you will be unstoppable as your powers grow, ripping and tearing through legions of enemies. So explore, discover, and gorge like the monster you are!

The Charnel Vale has been reborn. It’s now about 5x larger and full of mysteries to explore. We have added an armor upgrade system, 40+ new weapons, plus an updated Inscription system for endless customization. This is a mighty first step in moving the game towards our original vision. 

Notes:
Catacombs: Hopefully, you didn’t love this area because we’re sending it to the afterlife. Full transparency: This section didn’t live up to our expectations, so we are completely removing it and replacing it with a more handcrafted experience that players will love.

• Co-op: This has been temporarily disabled until we can fully test it with all the content changes. It will be enabled again shortly.
• Cosmetics: The cosmetics have been temporarily disabled. The new armor system changes everything, so we’re overhauling the current one.
• Roadmap: In the days after release, we will reveal what’s coming next: Dark Rebirth: Part 2 and The Rise of the Blood Moon. Stay tuned!

Dark Rebirth is just one bloody chapter into a relentless, constantly growing world, and we can’t wait to complete our vision. For now, our goal is gaining supporters and growing the team so Deadhaus Sonata can be a gamer’s dark dream. When we launched into Early Access, we had only one engineer; now we have two. Our small team is busy maximizing every limited resource at our disposal.

We built Dark Rebirth with our community’s help, and we cannot thank you enough for your undying support. If you’ve already purchased Deadhaus Sonata, thank you so much for being a true believer in our dark crusade. If you’re on the fence or hearing about us for the first time, we encourage you to take up arms with us and fuel a type of game that has been lost in the modern era—one that breathes new, lasting life into a stale genre.

Thank you!

The Deadhaus Sonata Team

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New Features:

• Upgraded Unreal Engine to 5.7 from 5.5
• Introducing Vyktor Sanguivar and his single-player storyline
• An all-new Dark Rebirth opening sequence
• Complete visual overhaul
  • Deadhaus Sonata now looks more consistently stylized and runs significantly faster
• Massive performance enhancements:
  • Minimum Requirements lowered to RTX 1080 with 4GB of VRAM
• The Charnel Vale has been “remade”— 5x larger with more gameplay and secrets to discover
• Complete relighting pass
• Added better levels of SSAO
• Added Land of the Dead outside of the starting HUB area
• Complete overhaul for the weather system, with a more consistent stylized look with significantly more performance gains
• Celestial gates fully operational, which open according to celestial bodies
• Added Feat and Inscriptions System (ver 0.2)  by achieving feats players can upgrade their equipment
• Vampire visual decay implementation, adding 4 additional versions of the vampire when he is not at 100% health
  •  0 – 19% health—very skeletal
  • 20 – 39% health—very thin
  • 40 – 59% health—thin
  • 60 – 79% health—noticeable degradation
  • 80 – 100% health—current vampire
• Added 3 levels of armor for the vampire
• Added dismemberment mechanic (heads will roll—a community request!)
• Added Photo Mode and assigned it to the “P” key
• New camera system
  • Added Mouse Wheel Camera Distance Control
  • Visual occlusion (make walls invisible when they get in the way of visuals)
  • Camera features like those found in Eternal Darkness (this will become more apparent as we develop the game further)
• Streamlined combat
  • All attack timing made consistent
  • Animations tweaked for:
    • Swords: balanced reach and damage, medium slots (inscriptions)
    • Axes: short reach, high damage, low amount of slots
    • Scythes: short reach, medium damage, medium amount of slots
    • Spears: long reach, slower, lower dps, and widest arcs, highest slots
• Added Walking Mode
• Added Weapon Toggle Mode (Z button)
• New gameplay setups and setups for progression in the Charnel Vale (much more to come!)
• New universal weapon trail system for better visuals and consistency amongst various powerups
• New tarots: discover, experiment, and slaughter your enemies with:
  • The Frost Sovereign
  • The Void
  • The Messenger
  • The Tempest
  • The Alchemist
• Thunderstorms now have lightning strikes doing damage
• Realistic character models replaced with a more unified style of characters. This is still a work in progress:
  • Musketeer
  • Hex Blade
  • Fire Mage
• Added Early Access Disclaimer
  • Added level disclaimer for when levels are to be remade
• Added 40 weapons to the game: swords, axes, scythes, spears (10 of each)
• Added armor system that rests on top of the vampire visible decay. Currently 3 rarity levels: Skavengyr (Green), Huntyre (Blue), and Nightstalkyr (Red). This system is still early with much more to come.
• The blood system is significantly overhauled, including added dismemberment. Some expressed concern that Deadhaus Sonata is too violent, so we added even more levels of blood, so their thoughts moved from concern to certainty
• UI visual adjusted; however, the entire UI will be completely overhauled and everything will be improved and streamlined
• The player now starts with a broken sword. It shall be reforged!
• Added more environmental effects to enemies:
  • Sight reduced in fog
  • Sight reduced at night
  • Archer accuracy reduced in snow, rain, and fog
  • Speed reduced in rain and snow
  • Sight reduced at night
  • Can get hit by lightning in thunderstorms
• Vampire more environmental effects
  • Vampire does less damage during El’Sabayoth’s gaze (daytime)
  • Vampire takes slow damage during the rain
  • Can get hit by lightning in thunderstorms
• Updated the visuals for Font of Putrescence
• Bite tarot removed, with the bite repurposed as a finisher
• Added a blood spurt to finishers
• Add Blur tarot locations everywhere. Explore, discover, and dominate!
• Visuals for celestial gate overhauled
• Hex Blades and Fire Mages mechanics significantly improved

Quality of Life/Balance:

• Focus on balance in the opening moments and first hour of gameplay
• The Bite tarot has been removed, and bite now occurs during finishers (We felt that exsanguinate overall is always better)
• Exsanguinate now gives more blood with reduced damage
• HP meters above enemies are off by default
• Added vampire exiting coffin animation at start of game
• Moved tarot locations
• Reduced vampire jump height by 50%
• Vampires now start with no armor (naked), low health, and a broken sword
• Reduced jog speed by 15%
• Simplified the UI look
• Vampire and enemies now have more weather and season effects
• Skeleton spawn rate for tarots reduced to 33% from 100%. As fast as the game has become, it’s not ready to support hundreds of minions (yet)

Notes:

• Co-op temporarily disabled
• Cosmetics temporarily disabled
• Catacombs to be removed
• Roadmap incoming shortly

Bugs:

• Many more miscellaneous bug fixes

We probably missed a few changes along the way! There’s been a tremendous amount of work put into Dark Rebirth, and we’re excited for you to jump in, explore, and discover everything for yourselves. This is only the beginning, and there’s so much more to come!