You only have to poke the thin membrane between dimensions, and the skin of our reality snaps back, revealing a twisted sister realm. In one, you’re successful, rich, and loved by everyone. In the other, you’re getting mixed reviews on Steam and have a middling Metacritic score.
The first Lords of the Fallen was one of the original Soulslikes, the genre that rose from FromSoftware’s brutal game series. There were flashes of potential, but it still felt like an imitation next to the likes of Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls.
CI Games is back nearly a decade later to give it another go. It’s the same name, but a much different game, and, more importantly, another shot at living up to the genre greats.
The first substantial change CI shows off is character customization. The original Lords of the Fallen forces you to play as a specific character with a pre-chosen moveset, you can create your own now: big, small, quick, powerful, skinny, hench – whatever you want. You have quite a few options and archetypes to choose from, including one who starts out looking like they were ripped from the streets of Bloodborne’s Yarnham, which was a particular favorite.
The RPG‘s hands-off demo started in the tutorial section, with the game director talking through what we see as another developer plays. The first thing that stands out is how stunning new Lords o the Fallen is, in grimy, filthy kind of way at least. The art team clearly worked hard to bring the visuals up to modern standards, and it even at its worst, it goes far beyond FromSoftware’s previous works on a technical level.
The developers seem aware of this as well since the game features a button just for bringing out your lantern amd highlighting the beautiful lighting work illuminating the heavy, gothic architecture surrounding you.
As with a lot of other things in Lords of the Fallen, however, there’s more to the lantern than meets the eye.
As the contrived intro hinted at, Lords of the Fallen is set in a world where two dimensions exist in parallel. The lantern offers you a glimpse at that other world.
Each world not only has its own topography, which gets used in clever environmental puzzles, but they also have unique enemies and dangers. Raising the lantern places you between the two worlds. In one section, the player explores a scaffold on the side of a cliff. Lighting the area reveals that the entire structure is built on just one small part of a long-dead titan. “You can climb that,” the person playing the demo says.
Enemies can even pull you into the other world, which where you’re trapped if you to die there. However, you only lose your resources if you die in the dark dank of the other dimension.
Your character slowly loses their grip on reality while exploring the alternate world. Enemies descend on you as your madness grows, and you’re faced with illusions and other obstacles. If you reach an anchor before it’s too late, you can safely escape to the real world with all your experience and loot intact.
The team even lets you customize anchors and drop them anywhere in the world. They only last for a limited period, but you can create your own checkpoints in the more difficult areas. When you reach New Game+, these customizable anchors are the only ones that exist, so if you don’t place any checkpoints, you have no way back.
This might sound offputting, and even more so considering the world is five times bigger than the first game’s, but the team has done an exceptional job of creating interconnected levels. The team used the debug camera and flew us through the environments, showing off just how impressive the design is. It’s strongly reminiscent of the first Dark Souls, with areas looping back around and reemerging in unexpected locations. At one point, the camera zoomed up the inside of a huge church tower, revealing yet another area high above where the character stood.
“So the world is semi-open, which means from every level, you can go in two directions, and every three levels loop back into each other,” game director Cezar Virtosu explained. “Our areas are hard to be defined by levels because some of them are vast, and some of them are small, but it is supremely interconnected.”
It also borrows that FromSoftware habit of letting you piece together how the people of this world lived by using environmental cues. Lords of the Fallen’s two dimensions aren’t just a series of spaces. They’re a place where people lived and worked, where they ate and shat, where they held their religious artifacts or prayed together, or where they studied the stars and looked into the secrets of the cosmos.
Duality is the game’s main theme. It’s reflected in the literal dual realities, but also elsewhere in the worlds and characters.. One boss is actually two characters – conjoined twins who hate each other because one dominates the other. The second phase of the fight sees the less dominant twin take over and unleash his untapped power. The boss moves like a contortionist, twisting and flailing, making them hard to read, and looking nightmarish while doing it.
“We wanted bosses to shock you, and we wanted body horror, because we wanted you to ask, ‘what is the nature of this world?’” Vitosu said. “Why is it skeweing things the way it is? Obviously, the nature of it – it’s a huge part of the narrative, and why we’re so keen on having the player piece everything together. Now for this boss, as unbelievable as it sounds, it was mocapped by a gentleman called Troy James, who fits in a box.”
You can also explore this vast world with another player in co-op, if you’re so inclined. A system that grants co-op players access to certain goodies, including full sets of armor, for reaching certain milestones together, gives you some nice incentives to bring a friend along as well, and. the combat difficulty will be scaled up to account for another warrior.
Combat has been completely reimagined from the original, too. It retains the original’s methodical nature, but you have quite a few more tools at your disposal. At one point in the demo, the player rips an enemy’s soul from their now-empty shell, pulling it just over a ledge and forcing their body to chase after their essence, which causes them to fall off the platform and to their death.
“We wanted to nail that elusive Soulslike combat,” Virtosu says. “There is a lot of knowledge that we found out along the way, but we want it to land perfectly to address all the feedback that the previous game had.”
The first major change is the way parrying works. You’ll parry if you tap the block command as the enemy hits, but if you miss the timing, you just block instead. As long as you’re thinking defensively in fights, you can try for those reversals without worrying about taking heavy damage for poorly judged timing. You can also just dodge and avoid blocking entirely.
Then there’s the magic, which is the most impressive thing about combat here. You can map magic to a quick radial however you like to create your own spell combos. Magic in Lords of the Fallen is fast and violent, akin to melee combat or gun kata from the 2002 movie Equilibrium. There’s no massive wind-up with a catalyst – it’s all spins and pirouettes, with fire and crackling energy firing from the player’s hands. You can even get in close and fire them off, mixing spellcasting with sword strikes, the animations fluidly blending from one attack to the next. If you want to lean right into it, later spells allow you to call in biblical meteor showers and annihilate entire groups of enemies.
“We wanted to achieve that Jedi fantasy, where you swing the sword and do a little force push and you continue with the sword,” Virtosu says.
From what we’ve seen so far, the team appears to be nailing it. The world is intriguing and darkly beautiful, the combat is fast without losing the methodical nature inherent in the genre, and the dual worlds system is implemented in a way that rivals Soul Reaver. We’ve taken a peek into an alternate dimension where Lords of the Fallen could be something special, and we can’t wait to find out.
Written by Kirk McKeand on behalf of GLHF
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