Sometimes it’s best to simply start over and try again, taking all the experience and knowledge from a first attempt and feeding it into a better second effort. Lords of the Fallen is a multi-faceted example of exactly this. The original game’s developers went off to create a different Souls-like series, while publisher CI Games held onto this IP, restarting development multiple times before founding new developer Hexworks in 2020. Despite this being Hexworks’ first game, it feels like a well-rounded and considered effort at a thoroughly modern Souls-like.
Lords of the Fallen still has some ties back to the world and setting of the 2014 original, but this is really a full reboot with no need to have played the first game. The opening cutscene sets the scene with an almost Lord of the Rings or Zelda-like quality to the way that good triumphed over the evil of Adyr a millennium ago, only for evil’s corrupting influence being able to burst back through. Now it’s time for a new hero to step forward, or more accurately, to be chosen by a magical lantern, and to fight back against evil once more.
As a Souls-like, there’s plenty of the usual sub-genre tropes to be found within Lords of the Fallen. You have a semi-open world of interconnecting regions and pathways, there’s Vestiges that are this game’s bonfire equivalents, and you earn Vigour from defeating enemies, which you either spend at Vestiges or drop and have to try and reclaim when you fall in combat.
And you will fall in combat, with an exacting difficulty and a stamina bar that rapidly drains so you need to carefully balance attack, defence and counter-attack. As always, it comes to a head with the game’s numerous boss battles (and what Hexworks deems to be mid-bosses), which will dish out masses of damage with sweeping attacks and broad areas of effect, if you’re ever foolish enough to get hit or over-extend yourself in attack, and feature evolving attack patterns as you gradually whittle away at their health bars. You’ll be kicking yourself for misreading the visual cues and timing, getting yourself trapped in a corner, and other lapses in judgement that lead to your death.
So far, so Souls-like, but that’s not to say that Lords of the Fallen doesn’t have anything to say or add to this style of action RPG.
Lords of the Fallen’s most intriguing new gameplay element is the Umbral plane, a purgatorial land of the dead that exists behind every part of the living plane of Axiom, that you can and will need to step into at various times to navigate the world. At times there will be an impervious barrier in the Umbral realm that you cannot pass in the living, at other times bodies of water exist in the living world that aren’t there in the dead, and enemies that you face could have buffs and support from Umbral parasites.
You’ve got three ways to reach into this world, pretty much whenever you like. A magical glowing lantern is given to you at the very start of the game, letting you shine a light on the world around you that reveals the desaturated land of Umbral that surrounds you. This allows you to search for clues that you need to progress, to understand what alternative or unblocked paths there are in the environment, and to try to spot what’s making the weird sounds that are haunting you (it’s sometimes quite unsettling to hear creaky groaning from another realm).
Should you need to, the lantern can let you step through an Umbral Rift and step fully into this parallel world, where you can only emerge by finding a Vestige as a gateway back to Axiom. The third option (and what is actually happening when you use an Umbral Rift), is to die.
You actually have two lives in Lords of the Fallen, before you’re sent packing back to the last Vestige you visited. If you die in Axiom, then you’re immediately brought back to life in Umbral and can continue your fight or journey through the game. It’s a fascinating blend of safety net during boss fights, and risk/reward mechanic, where you’ll have the ability to explore a little more freely, find hidden paths and treasures that require the Lantern to reach or activate, but also face growing challenges, as the longer you spend in Umbral will see more spectral enemies hunting you down.
It’s particularly interesting in battle, when considering the Umbral Parasites that will often shield enemies from the beyond. You can reveal and kill these parasites from Axiom using the Lantern’s Siphon ability, but that’s tricky when it’s hiding behind a boss that you’re facing off against and have to get round behind them while also avoiding attacks. But remember, you actually have two lives here, and in some ways things get easier as you fall for the first time, now able to see and directly attack those parasites, but without the safety net of being in the land of the living.
One thing we weren’t able to really explore was how the magic attacks in this game works, choosing to play as the barbarian-like Warwolf class through the opening hours of the game that we got to sample. However, Lords of the Fallen tries to put more abilities at your finger tips, cycling through on the D-pad to tap into Rhogar, Radiant and Umbral magic types. You’ll be putting away your ranged weapon and the lantern to use them, but will then have access to four spell slots that you should be able to chain together much more fluidly than in other Souls-likes.
Similarly, we weren’t able to explore the game in co-op, which is more contiguous in this game as you can share an adventure fully with another player instead of having to constantly summon buddies to your game after each death. The closest we got to this was in being able to ask NPCs for aid prior to the main boss fights, these characters drawing a lot of the boss attention more easily opening their flanks to your attack – though I personally found them completely throwing off my timing when trying to evade sweeping AoE attacks.
A couple of months out from launch, Lords of the Fallen is a really promising new Souls-like that does more than just retread the subgenre’s now very familiar tropes. With a clutch of deeply ingrained new ideas, like the twinned Axiom and Umbral planes, there’s plenty of reasons to be excited to pick up the lantern in October.
