I first noticed this interesting game — Lords of the Fallen — many years ago on Steam, but I never got around to playing it. It appeared on my radar quite a few times, especially during Steam sales, but I never had the chance to try it. Fortunately, they made a reboot, and I played that instead.

In this game, players navigate the physical realm while also having access to the shadowy Umbral world through a magical lantern, both via the lamp’s light or by fully and directly transporting yourself to the alternate reality. We also have a more forgiving combat system, with a balanced implementation of using dodges, blocks, and parries. The wither system designed to buffer your HP from attacks is a commendable feature, and encourages actually taking risks with your attacks instead of extremely playing it safe.

The game features new mechanics and novel ways to spice up the Souls-like gameplay, which is refreshing to see. However, I experienced a bit of mechanic overload at the start. The game is explaining things at an accelerate rate, like using the lamp to peer into the alternate world and maybe traversing through it, gathering and pulling souls from enemies, the dual stance mechanic of weapons, or perhaps the wither mechanic that goes hand in hand with blocking and parrying.

When I started the game, there were so many stutters at first; even the movie cutscenes were stuttering. However, after a driver update and a reboot, things initially looked promising on my i7-8700k, RTX 3080 system. However, as soon as I left the starting area, I encountered glaring performance issues. Erratic frame times, poor and unstable frame rates, and visual bugs like heavy texture pop-ins were prevalent. Overall, this game looks fun and feels like a Souls-lite game instead of a true Souls-like, but the technical issues are severely undermining this game’s potential.

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Originally posted on TapTap.