Beast, out in early access today, is Baldur's Gate 3 meets Diablo 4 via Unreal Engine 5
If you're weary of Baldur's Gate 3's whimsy, or you've finished gnawing the bones of Diablo 4 and are hungry for more of that sweet, sweet grimdark, you might like to check out Beast from Polish developer False Prophet, which goes into Steam early access today. It's a turn-based tactics RPG with a Gothic historical setting, an extremely late-noughties insanity mechanic, a heavy metal soundtrack, plagues, heresy, dynastic feuding, and a protagonist with a dramatic eye scar and possibly non-metaphorical "inner demons". Amongst other things, it looks like you can run people over with a horse-drawn carriage. M-Rated enough for you, edgelords? Here's the trailer.
The game casts you as Anton Sabbados, a former slave of the Ottoman Empire who returns to his Carpathian homelands to find that everything and everybody is filthy with disease and/or on fire. He must carry out One Last Job on behalf of weirdo Prophet-King Lurius, but the King's brat of a son Prince Nicolai has other ideas. Ack, these princes, always making a fuss when all you want to do is raze a few villages to the ground.
The game features a grid-less battle system and a skill-and-perks progression system in which you will, amongst other things, decide whether to "exercise" or "exorcise" the aforesaid inner demons. You can unleash Anton's pent-up madness for short-term gain, or restrain it so as to leave a bit less wrack and ruin in your wake - I face much the same dilemma everyday at 9am, before I've had my coffee. These decisions will also shape the opinions and fates of companion characters. They're calling this a "moral choice" system but they also describe the setting as a balance of "evil" or "less evil", so I wouldn't expect a Happy Ending, exactly.
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