The game takes place in a fictionalized version of 16th-century Europe in and around Venice in which Death is a human being chosen by a mysterious group called the Corpus to fulfill the duties of the grim reaper.

When a necromancer abuses the powers to gain immortality and control the world, the last Death's daughter, Scarlett, is tasked with stopping him and rescuing her father.

The story and the ability to make choices that influence it were generally praised but graphics, audio, character design and technical problems were criticized.

Players control its protagonist Scarlett in a third-person 3D world from an over-the-shoulder view with a camera that can be zoomed in three fixed steps.

[citation needed] Attribute points can be used to increase one of four basic attributes that correspond to in-game characteristics, namely "constitution" (health points), "wisdom" (mental energy), "strength" (amount of damage dealt with weapons) and "mental power" (amount of damage dealt with spells).

[6] If she does not have sufficient twilight energy, she will die and players are forced to reload their last manual save-game since Venetica features neither automatic saving nor respawn points.

[9] In typical role-playing game fashion, Venetica offers players the choice of different weapons and armaments as well as potions and items to heal and help the protagonist.

[4] The story of Venetica takes place in a 16th-century styled world in and around Venice where Death is a physical being, who follows the instructions of a group known as Corpus.

The player takes control of Scarlett, Death's daughter, who must cultivate and grow her powers to save her father and the world from the necromancer.

For his plans, he recruited four allies to rule the mortal world as the Undead Five: The Mistress of the Assassin's Guild, Hector of Persia, Princess Chiamaka of Africa and the Doge of Venice.

Tasked by Death to do so, Scarlett travels to Venice to track down the necromancer Sophistos, the last guardian of the Black Grimoire, to learn whether he destroyed the book as instructed.

Scarlett travels to Africa to confront Chiamaka and after defeating her, the curse is lifted and also gives her an essence needed to reach Victor who has sealed himself in the Doge's Palace.

She enters the Palace to find that Victor has magically forced the Doge to reconstruct the Black Grimoire from the Twilight World where it ended up after its prior destruction.

[16] In December 2009, Deck13 released a patch that significantly improved the game's graphics and level of detail as well as its performance and added a number of new features.

[6][7] RPGamer called the setting "stunning" but limited their praise to the scenery, adding that up-close areas and characters look incorrect and that the game is marred with inconsistencies.

[33] GamesRadar+ called the experience of playing the game "dizzying", citing sharp light contrasts, erratic camera and too small subtitles, and opined that the graphics would have been considered terrible even on previous generation consoles like the PlayStation 2 or the GameCube.

[37] In his review for Bit-Tech, Chris Pickering agreed with these criticisms but pointed out that at times, such as the shimmering effect of certain weapons, the graphics are actually quite good.

Some critics lauded the combo system and the useful spells that allow the player to handle larger groups of enemies without the game becoming too easy for it as well as adding some needed variety.

[7][37] Others were less enthusiastic, calling the fight system shallow and repetitive "button-mashing"-only and especially criticized that because of the poor camera movement or getting stuck in the environment, players suffer unpreventable deaths.

[11][37][25] Writing for PC World, Matt Peckham opined that the game forces players to simply keep hitting buttons as enemies can withstand even strong attacks with ease, comparing fights to "chiseling stone that can chisel back" and speculating that the developers increased the enemies' strength in an attempt to draw out engagements.

[10] Reviewers also bemoaned the lack of an autosave feature, forcing players who did not manually save to replay large parts of the game with no way to skip ahead.

[6] Critics also liked the morality system and that players can choose different approaches and make choices on how to proceed, although the lack of long-term impact was noted.