Medieval spaceships battle with swords and axes in this action RPG

pcgamer.com:

What if medieval knights skipped the industrial revolution and the modern era and jumped right into the space age? Their spaceships might look like the knights themselves: heavily armored and wielding swords, axes, and maces, slashing and bashing each other in crunchy melee combat. But in space.

That's the concept behind roguelike action RPG Fabular: Once Upon a Spacetime, coming to Steam Early Access later this year. In the announcement trailer above, you can see traditional spaceship weapons like lasers and turrets, but mostly we're talking about physics based, medieval-style combat in a 2D space arena. Ships can dual-wield longswords, hatchets, spears, and curved daggers, hacking and smashing each other as they spin and swivel in zero gravity until someone explodes in a shower of smoke and pixels. It kind of reminds me of real-life battlebots, but a thousand times cooler.

One of the many fun-looking weapons is a chained bastilla bolt, which can be fired into an enemy ship. That ship can then be dragged toward your own and battered with melee attacks, or you can yank one ship into another so they both detonate in dazzling twin fireballs.

What event led to all this frenzied medieval spaceship combat? Well, there was theft of galactic proportions:

«The Void Lords have stolen the sun,» the game's Steam store page says, crafting one of the best sentences I've ever read. «Your brothers have vanished into deep space. The king grows old and fragile, searching for a better future in the endless streams of prophecy. As the last remaining royal, the fate of the kingdom rests on your shoulders—and on your blade.»

As you navigate the FTL-like procedural star map and engage in battle, you earn upgrades for your ship, increasing its