While the original Lords of the Fallen took after Dark Souls, this new 2023 reboot looks like it’s walking close behind the swishing cloak of Bloodborne. The latest trailer, revealed at the PC Gaming Show, shows off a Soulsbourne game polished to a high sheen. It’s certainly captured my interest.
Games journalists get a lot of flack for saying a game is “the next Dark Souls,” and calling yet another game “the new Bloodborne” is getting very old-tricorn-hat at this point. Still, honestly, if you’d shown me this trailer in isolation and told me it was a new Bloodborne sequel from Bluepoint Games, the people who remade Demon’s Souls, I’d believe you.
Confusingly, Lords of the Fallen is a sequel to 2014’s Lords of the Fallen (now called “Lords of the Fallen 2014” on Steam). The original game proved to have good Soulsborne bones, but its world and storytelling didn’t reach the highs of FromSoftware’s games. And, less forgivably, as Tyler called out in his review, some significant bugs on PC let the game down.
For the 2023 reboot, due out on October 13, developer HexWorks looks to be addressing that criticism as the new trailer shows Lords of the Fallen looks to have tight combat and a world dripping in gothic horror. The team has stayed within Lords of the Fallen’s dark fantasy setting, but it’s ratcheted up the gloom. You could cut the atmosphere with a knife, right after you desperately used it to hack at one of the shambling monsters flailing its grotesque limbs at you. After all, just listen to those heavy squelching footsteps as the player walks through a canyon filled with corpses.
This new gameplay trailer, alongside the super stylized trailer featuring music from Iron Maiden released earlier in the year, showcases weighty combat and gruesome bosses that I can only hope are as mechanically tight and complex as the Soulslikes HexWork’s trying to emulate. The weird screeching skeleton egg monster launching itself on top of the player character is a particular treat.
