Lords of the Fallen Preview – Shining a lantern on this rebooted Souls-like

thesixthaxis.com:

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),