Lords of the Fallen dares to ask: “What if Soul Reaver, but Dark Souls?”

You can’t play Lords of the Fallen (the PS5/Xbox Series one, not the last-gen one) even for a second and not see the similarities it has with the critically-acclaimed, goth-favourite, action-adventure PlayStation and PC game, Soul Reaver.

From the very start – as your character is unceremoniously killed and granted passage to the netherworld via mysterious death lamp – you can start to draw allusions. Phasing between worlds, flaying the souls of the dead to progress, trying to remain in control of your humanity as other forces threaten to unhitch you from everything that kept you pure… for Lords of the Fallen, the comparisons are more than just skin deep.

“Soul Reaver is absolutely, 100% a reference point for us,” laughs Cezar Virtosu – creative director at development studio, Hexworks. “When you have to explain the weird mechanics we have in our game with the money people – who are about to put everything, everything and the kitchen sink, behind this project – you need to find an easy well to tell them what you’re cooking, right? So we say ‘have you played Soul Reaver?’ [Laughter]”

You can see why Virtosu makes the comparison. As an elevator pitch, it’s effective: ‘what if Dark Souls, but Soul Reaver?’ As a (fairly recent) FromSoft convert and long-time fan of the moody, gothic nonsense that characterised Crystal Dynamics’ cult game, that proposition makes my gooseflesh prickle immidiately.

“Soul Reaver, Stranger Things’ Upside Down, and those nightmares that when you die, you are trapped, you are soulless, the idea of corruption made manifest, something entropic and mysterious, something cosmic horror. This is where everything began,” continues Virtosu. Once again, you can draw a line between this game and Soul Reaver, where protagonist Raziel was embelmatic of the undoing of the vampire kingdom he came from, where his aberrant flesh stood at the center of vampire, human, and hylden… yet came to embody the most corrupted parts of each.

“When we were discussing the game with investors, people where like ‘hmm, yeah’ and [being a bit indecisive], and [ex-Eidos Interactive president], Ian Livingstone was there,” laughs Virtosu. “We had no idea he would be there, as a consultant to the investors, and I saw the Tomb Raider and Soul Reaver statues behind him and I was like “‘brother, I think that consultant might be Ian Livingstone…’

“When we were giving the PowerPoint and presenting the game, he said [laughter] ‘this reminds me of something I made…’ And we were incredible humbled, as you can imagine.”

The pitch clearly worked, because Hexworks has been hard at work on the game for a good few years now, and the money behind the project hasn’t run dry. The publisher and developer confidence in the project is not misplaced, either; from what I’ve played so far, I feel confident in saying it’s one of the most interesting takes on the hardcore action-RPG genre I’ve seen in years. How it plays with death, and how it pricks aggression out of the player… it’s more reminiscent of Bloodborne than anything else.

“That Soul Reaver reference, that’s just the elevator pitch,” adds Saul Gascon, head of studio and executive producer at Hexworks. ”But from there, you need to do your own thing, because you cannot just deliver what Soul Reaver did. Decades ago. You need to update everything, make it work with modern ideas. Even with how you interact with the [the other world, Umbral], how you can lift your lamp up and peek into the other world… it all needs to be different.”

And it is. Thanks to the power of the PS5 and Series X/S, the studio can better stream in two worlds, and have players play with the liminal space between. Shifting into the Umbral in real-time and clawing your way back to life when it gets too tense is part of the gameplay loop. Using your lantern to peek into the world and figure out how to solve puzzles is required of the player.

Lords of the Fallen is utilising its tech to achieve what the Soul Reaver never could. The whole Legacy of Kain franchise jumped so that Lords of the Fallen can fly. And I just hope it sticks the landing when it launches October 13 on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.