Magic and gunpowder-powered 'souls-lite' Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn is bringing a demo to Steam Next Fest

pcgamer.com:

A new trailer for upcoming gunpowder and magic action RPG Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn has debuted at this year's PC Gaming Show. It shows protagonist Nor and tricky spirit Enki at work dismembering the undead and other servants of the vicious gods with axes, pistols, bombs, and magical spells. The biggest news is that Flintlock launches later this summer and that a demo will be out during the upcoming Steam Next Fest that's running from June 10-14.

The new trailer shows blasted landscapes we're familiar with from previous Flintlock trailers reminiscent of Napoleonic battlefields with trenches, wattle walls, and shell impacts. It also shows some environments we haven't seen too much of yet, like monster-haunted interiors of ancient temples, colorfully vibrant desert river canyons with lush greenery and ancient ruins, and some very lived-in looking towns of whitewashed walls and red tile roofs.

There's also plenty of Flintlock's faster-paced combat on show here. Nor leaps, dives, and practically flies during combat, often finding herself above foes and perfectly placed to rain hell down on them with explosives and pistols. She's shown using a hand mortar to launch grenades into crowds of zombies, or shooting at them with pistols. There are also some pretty neat up-close dueling scenes against armored foes where Nor mixes close-ranged dodges and strikes with distance-gaining moves that end in pistol shots.

Developer A44 games previously made Ashen, a 2018 soulslike that captured some attention for its combination of combat depth with a sparse visual style. We gave it an 85% in our Ashen review—a pretty good place to start from if we look at Flintlock as a continuation of that development legacy.

We've been pretty eagerly watching Flintlock since the summer of 2022, when A44 said it wanted to make a more approachable, cinematic spin on the soulslike genre—it has since started to call it more of a «souls-lite» game that draws from not just the popular souls series but