The two-and-a-bit hours I spent with Lords of the Fallen revealed a game that has plainly paid a lot of attention to the From Software back catalogue. Many elements of its design, from character movement, controls, art and UI, embody the From style guide. Soulslikes are a dime a dozen these days, but Lords of the Fallen feels like one of only a few actively attempting to reverse-engineer From’s work.
I don’t say this as a criticism. I think there’s value, artistically and materially, in replicating the rigours of a popular work to understand the things that make it tick. You can’t deconstruct something without first understanding how it fits together in the first place. Lords of the Fallen certainly doesn’t feel like it wants to deconstruct the form in any way, though developers HEXWORKS and Defiant Studios might be well placed to do so on a future title.
Rather, Lords of the Fallen uses the familiar trappings of Souls gameplay to quickly bring players up to speed. Then, it starts looking for ways to bring something additive to the genre. It does this with a kind of spirit lantern that, when held aloft, allows the player to peer into a disturbing, ghostly hidden world. This second hidden layer is where the devs appear to be hiding many of their tricks and traps. You can use the lantern to uncover new or hidden pathways or secret enemies that provide a buff to other foes in the same space.
Initially, I wondered if asking the player to use the lantern in combat scenarios might have been a step too far. Soulslike combat is already complicated, reliant as it is on precise timing and controls. Adding another held button to the mix, which would, in turn, add another enemy to the target priority queue, takes a bit of getting used to.
I also found my way into a boss fight against a winged valkyrie type that did not end well for me. Noticing that the game allowed me call in a summon, similar to Elden Ring, I gratefully called for backup. The game gave me a computer-controlled ally that charged directly at the boss the moment the fight started. It was like watching a toddler run head-first into a brick wall. I watched the boss trivially dispatch my friend and then turn its gaze back to me.
Unfortunate. Good for a laugh at the time, but hopefully he’s a bit smarter in the retail version.
Visually, the game is also of a piece with From’s work on the Souls series. I haven’t played enough of it to say whether Lords of the Fallen has mastered the art of monster design the way Miyazaki’s team has, but they all certainly had clear silhouettes that communicated what I was up against well before I arrived on the scene. Even the environment tells From uses to telegraph certain things — the approach of a major fight, for example — are present and accounted for. Climbing up onto a kind of castle battlement, I thought to myself, “This is where From would stick a dragon or something”. Upon reaching the top, I saw something that looked very like a felled and decaying dragon. “Yep, there it is.”
Ultimately, my preview build crashed during my umpteenth attempt to defeat the boss, bringing my session to a close. What I’ve seen of Lords of the Fallen so far is a game that knows and loves Souls to its core, but also knows what it would like to change about them. Whether that will endear it to the notoriously picky Soulsborne elite is a matter for them to decide.
Lords of the Fallen arrives October 14, 2023 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Windows PC.
The author was flown to Sydney to preview the game as a guest of Five Star Games.
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