Lords of the Fallen sounds like Bloodborne, Elden Ring, and Demon's Souls put through a horrifying blender

gamesradar.com:

I've been reading up on a lot of recent comments from Lords of the Fallen developer HexWorks, specifically creative director Cezar Vortosu, and I'm increasingly convinced that the devs have basically chucked almost every FromSoftware game into a blender of their own macabre design.

The bulk of the original game, which never made much of a splash when it launched in 2014, has seemingly been stripped away by the reboot's new developer, and what sounds like a truly monstrous creation was grafted onto the bones with help from modern Soulslikes. I'm not complaining; Lords of the Fallen needed a reboot rather than a sequel. Soulslikes are iterative by nature, but they're iterating on stuff that I and a lot of people like, and HexWorks' take is shaping up to be one of the more interesting games of 2023.

Speaking with DigitalTrends (opens in new tab), Virtosu compared the game's semi-open setting to the instanced layout of Demon's Souls. Lords of the Fallen turns you loose in a world with five main dungeons, indicated by red beacons that neatly mirror the archstones in the first true Souls game. You can technically tackle these dungeons in any order, though there is an "optimal" path. I'm reminded of the time I first booted up Dark Souls only to misguidedly run straight into the Catacombs, get my ass handed to me by over-leveled skeletons, and deduce that 'man, they aren't playing around with this game.' 

Likewise, there's a bit of Demon's Souls in the way Lords of the Fallen handles death. When you die, you respawn in the Umbral realm which mirrors the living realm. I gather that Umbral enemies are nastier than the already sickening horrors infesting the living realm, so it isn't easy to fight your way out or make your way to