I was munching crisps while watching a showcase of upcoming games from THQ Nordic last week, letting the likes of a new Spongebob Squarepants game and the Gothic Remake wash over me like barely flavoured fizzy water, when Fatekeeper showed up. I straightened up, just a little. It is a fancy looking first-person RPG made with all the hyper detail and vivid lighting you might expect of a game developed in Unreal Engine 5. It is also conjuring a game worth conjuring: the heavy hitting fantasy brawlabout Dark Messiah Of Might And Magic. As I watched the below trailer, I became more and more cautiously hopeful. Looks slick, but where’s the kick?
It’s being made by Paraglacial, a small THQ-owned studio made up of a few former Spellforce developers. And it isn’t the first game to try capture the magical bootfoolery of Dark Messiah. A fantasy sword swinger called Hellraid was cancelled by Techland some years ago, and it was while discussing that piteous loss that the studio began to plot their own take on first-person sword-slamming.
“We thought that this is a type of game that you don’t see that often,” said creative director Raphael Lubke during the showcase. “You have these huge awesome open world titles like Skyrim, but you barely ever see like dedicated, more linear story-driven games with this nice focus on the combat mechanics of melee in a first-person game.”
That combat does look weighty from what we were shown during a demo. Your two-handed sword is wielded with hefty swings, sometimes donking crankily off enemy shields, sometimes piercing their necks and entering a bottled animation that ends in a swift decapitation. You can take dashing sidesteps and swig health vials. It reminds me of the movement in Chivalry II, if your opponents were snarling singleplayer orc-a-likes in opulent armour, rather than screeching multiplayer knights.
We also get some hints as to other more magical powers you’ll use, aside from the windy push powers and object-hurling telekinesis you can see in the above trailer. “You might be able to freeze a lake, lure enemies onto it, and then melt the ice with the fireball, for example,” said Lubke.
But for now the focus seems to be on getting some chunky hits in with that massive claymore. At one point in the playthrough, the player coated a sword with poison and we watched as the heavy bruiser he was fighting slowly succumbed to the toxins, eventually keeling over. I will admit, even without that pivotal bootheel, there were some very entertaining ragdoll physics, not to mention some lovely vanishing screams as sharp-toothed foes tumbled into the pits below.
And these were some sheer drops. Paraglacial, the studio, is located in the German Alps, and it’s a locale that has partly inspired the high-altitude terrain of the game’s fantasy landscape (if not the ornate temple architecture).
“I always said this dream of founding is team in an area where you normally don’t see game development teams, like remote rural areas like we are in the Alps,” said Lubke. “And we also wanted to transport our love for this environment into the game and create a game world where the landscape, the environment is a part of the story itself. It’s one of the main actors of the game.
“It’s not an open world game, the maps are designed in a not extremely open way, but they allow for a lot of different trajectories. [It’s] not a straight line where you feel like you’re playing on rails. Linear, for us, means control over the narrative and the density of the experience, but it doesn’t mean forcing the player down a shallow path.”
We get a few other glances of the bruiser’s innards. An item screen that looks like a mash-up of the inventory management of Witcher 3 and Dark Souls, for example. And an easy-to-solve puzzle tomb that the developer says won’t be quite so simple in the full game. But otherwise it’s a short but enticing glimpse of some promising battering. Still, I want to see that conspicuously absent kick. After loving the strong booting of Deathloop enough to record an entire video conversation about it with Colm (RPS in peace), I am yearning for another equally powerful pair of shoes.
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