Lords of the Fallen

Released on 13 October 2023 by Hexworks, published by CI Games, and sharing nothing but a name with the 2014 game by Deck13. This is a complete reimagining, and the one idea it brings of its own is worth the trip.

The lantern is the whole argument for it

You carry a lamp that opens a window into Umbral, the spirit layer sitting underneath the world. Step through and you're in a rotting mirror of the same place — different layout in places, different rules, and considerably more hostile. It solves a problem the genre has had for years, which is what to do with a map once you've memorised it. Here, the route you know is only one of two routes, and the one you don't know is where the optional paths, the treasures and the shortcuts are hiding.

It's also the game's risk system, and this is the part that's been thought through properly. Dying doesn't send you back to a checkpoint — it drops you into Umbral, alive, with a second chance and a worse situation. You don't get your health back, the things that live there have noticed you, and the longer you linger the more of them arrive. Getting out means finding a shrine. That's a far more interesting consequence than the genre's usual walk of shame, and it's the reason this game stands out in a crowded field at all.

Then it starts borrowing

Everything that isn't the lantern is FromSoftware with the serial numbers filed off, and not subtly. The first proper boss after the tutorial is a winged woman who fights in sweeping arcs, sprouts scarlet wings and rains down projectiles — close enough to the most famous encounter in Elden Ring that the resemblance becomes the conversation rather than a detail. The looping world, the bonfire analogues, the item descriptions carrying the plot: it's all present, and it's all competent, and almost none of it is Hexworks' own.

Competent is the fair word, though. The combat works, the world is built with real attention, and if you want more of a thing you like, this delivers it at length. The problem is that the areas where it deviates are the areas where it stumbles, and the deviations are mostly in the direction of being harsher rather than smarter.

Where the cruelty stops being fun

The difficulty here tips from testing into unfair in a few specific places, and the worst offenders are memorable for the wrong reasons. There are moth creatures disguised as item pickups that kill you instantly on contact, tucked behind a sight puzzle obscure enough that one reviewer had to ask the studio for an explanation. There's a threshold past which a hard game becomes a chore, and this one crosses it — the platforming is weak, the atmosphere is oppressively dark to the point of hurting readability, and several encounters are tuned by adding enemies rather than adding depth.

The pulse

Reception split in a way that's genuinely informative rather than noisy. The positive reading — that this is one of the most inventive Soulslikes around, a game that iterates on the formula rather than photocopying it — is honest, because the Umbral mechanic really is that good, and the death-to-the-spirit-world loop is the best version of a second-chance system anyone has built. The negative reading is equally honest: it looks and plays like a FromSoftware game and does almost nothing better, with performance problems and technical roughness on top. Both readings are about the same game. What nobody disputes is that the dual-world idea is the standout and the cruelty is the flaw.

Should you play it

Yes, if you have run out of the games it's imitating and want a long one with a mechanic that genuinely hasn't been done to death. The lantern earns the price on its own, and the world underneath it is more carefully made than the game's reputation suggests.

Skip it if you're already tired of the genre's house style, because you'll spend most of this recognising furniture. And go in warned about the mimic creatures and the darkest stretches, which are the two things most likely to end a session early.