Lords of the Fallen's biggest achievement is how it rethinks the Souls-like death loop – PREVIEW

You are fighting a boss – a grudge-bearing religious sort, in a graveyard, that’s not a million miles away from Father Gascoigne, if I’m being honest – and you whiff an attack with your zweihander. The penitent one carpes the diem and impales you, skewers you like a pig. You’re down. Dead. Usually, you’d respawn at your bonfire, or shrine, or lantern, or Site of Grace, or whatever flavour of checkpoint you’re using today. But in Lords of the Fallen, the game continues.

You are a revenant, now. A soul unhitched from its flesh, cast into the dark realm – the Umbral. In Lords of the Fallen’s land of Mournstead, there are parallel realms, inter-connected and ever-present. The world of the living (Axiom) and the world of the dead (Umbral) co-exist, and house their own unique pathways, enemies, characters, treasures. To die here isn’t an ending, but a new opportunity.

“There are several layers of uniqueness in our game, right?” smiles Saul Gascon, head of studio and executive producer at Hexworks when I ask why the developer wanted to mess with a sacred part of the Soulslike gameplay loop. “The most obvious one, and the most high-level, is the Umbral. The whole Umbral concept was designed to twist the death loop to make you (as creative director, Cezar Virtosu, always says) ‘play your own death’.

“So, you die and then,” he makes a gesture and a noise, as if he’s being impaled, “you’re not finished. You still have gameplay. Another chance.”

To continue the example laid out above, this means you get to continue fighting the boss that impaled you – you get a rallying cry. In my hands-on demo, I fell to another boss as it had a slither of health remaining, and executed it – decisively – the second I slipped into the Umbral. There was a resting point nearby where I could claw my way back into the land of the living and spend my ‘Souls’, but the path to redemption isn’t always that simple.

As anyone that’s flirted with the essence of death will tell you, there are dangers on the precipice. The longer you spend in this realm, the weaker your connection to life is. Eldritch horrors are drawn to your light, and the longer you stay in Umbral, the greater the threat. But, despite the added challenge that comes from just hanging around in the underworld like the ghoul that you are, this two-pronged approach to life and death actually serves to make the game accessible… even if that has become something of a dirty word in Soulsborne circles.

“Accessibility is a bit of a taboo word when it comes to this genre,” agrees Virtosu. “And we knew we were making a niche game when we started this endeavor. The market had not yet exploded. So when we were thinking about accessibility, it became clear that we need to act on it – and not through over-tutorialization, but through a lengthier on-boarding, and with the Umbral mechanic, where you resurrect.

Virtosu tells me that, initially, the team experimented with a system where you resurrected at a checkpoint, and then would have to fight your way through to where you died whilst trapped in Umbral. You could not escape it until you found your corpse and – assumedly – reinhabited the prison of your flesh. Only then you could come back to reality.

“But then we realised that whilst this is very correct fantasy-wise, you know, being a revenant and all that – if you don’t learn the experience of failure, if you don’t associate death with failure, if you don’t experience it, if you don’t have enough ancillary game mechanics for you to change death – it all feels a bit hollow.

“So this was a highly iterative process. We want you to understand why you failed and be able to work on that – change frustration to motivation as you understand what the game is asking you to do.

The result is a hardcore action-RPG that has slightly more push-and-pull than its genre brethren. Death is not binary, here. Instead, it feels exciting – if you’re a great player that rarely dies, slipping into the Umbral against your will actually excites you; you get to see new areas, encounter new enemies, sniff out new puzzles. Of course, you can decide to spelunk the underworld on a whim and sink into death whenever you like, but getting back should always be a concern. And, it goes without saying, if you die in Umbral, you're spirited away back to a checkpoint (which, at this stage of playing, seem quite sparse).

The game is not as obscure as its FromSoft progenitors, and that works in its favour, because when you’re being pulled in two directions and interrogating the tension between worlds, you want a sense of what’s going on, and where to go.

Lords of the Fallen is all about playing as a heathen, shunned by the world for embracing a dark lantern that allows them to traverse the realms of light and dark. It’s all about being sacrilegious, defying the common knowledge and tasting the forbidden fruit. If you wanted to do away with subtext, you could say it's what Hexworks is doing in discarding the commonly-held beliefs around how death should work in this genre. How traditionally hard it must be. But the studio eschews that. And the result, at least at this early stage, is unique and compelling.

“There are a lot of things we’ve done in changing things you’d expect from the genre, but if I had to mention just one – when it comes to narrative and environment and gameplay and everything – it’s the Umbral element,” concludes Gascon. “That’s the thing that permeates everything. That’s our secret sauce.”

Lords of the Fallen arrives October 13 on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.