Atmosphere. Incredible atmosphere. This is what I kept thinking as I watched a demo of the upcoming Lords of the Fallen last week at the Game Developers Conference. Set a thousand years after the first entry in the series, the new Lords of the Fallen acts as a reboot of sorts, bringing new features, mechanics, and a new open world to explore.

Unlike the previous Lords of the Fallen titles, this time around you get to choose and customize your character, from the type of build you want, body type, and more. Thanks to Unreal Engine 5, armor and clothing will effectively fit every body type, so the team is able to create highly detailed assets that will just *work* on any character you create.

In our demo I got to see the traditional sword and board-style character, as well as a magic-slinging sorcerer. The play styles, like any good Soulslike, look as varied as they should be, with the Sorcerer opting to fight with spells, only going in for Melee to close things out, while the sword and shield character excelled at close combat, using its block and parry to great advantage.

One major change from the series is how parrying works in Lords of the Fallen. Before you had to have frame-perfect timing to pull off a parry. Missing that timing would leave you open for attacks, oftentimes punishing ones. As a result, many but the most skilled players would eschew parrying altogether (*raises hand*) instead opting to block or dodge.

Now there is a mechanic called “last-minute blocking.” This was part of an effort to help onboard with the smoothest possible learning curve as possible, and it also helps to solve that frustration that would lead players to just opt out of parrying altogether.

“Last-minute blocking has been an addition,” Cezar Virtosu, creative director at Hexworks said during our demo while Matthew Fryer, a graphic designer at CI Games and our tour guide through the hands-off demo, deftly performed the new mechanic on-screen. “So two percent of our players tried to do parries. For us, that was a problem, right? Therefore we removed the parries and now if you block at the last possible [moment], you perform a parry, which means if you fail at least you block.”

As the demo progressed, I was enthralled by how smooth each animation looked. The fluidity each movement had looks so realistic at times I thought I might have been watching a movie play out. That’s a lot to do with the skilled animators behind the scenes, but also the Unreal Engine 5 tech powering Lords of the Fallen, namely its Chaos Physics engine.  Everything looked so lifelike, and it really adds to each and every frame when the game is in motion.

However, one of the most exciting aspects in the demo was a new feature, one that has massive, wide-sweeping implications on the whole of Lords of the Fallen: the Umbral realm.

Exploring The Umbral Realm

Almost immediately in the demo, I was introduced to the concept of the Umbral world. The world of Lords of the Fallen is split, with the regular, material realm existing as it always has, but underneath is a parallel, darker world that is rife with its own dangers and puzzles to solve.

The two are always present, seamlessly accessible at any moment. Axiom and Umbral are, as Hexworks says in their State of Unreal video released during GDC, “two sides of the same coin.” You can peek into the Umbral realm by lifting your Umbral Lantern - and indeed you’ll need to do this often as some puzzles and challenges are tied to jumping between worlds.

Unlike other Soulslikes when you die you respawn at the nearest campfire, Lords of the Fallen treats the Umbral realm as a sort of “second chance” world. In fact, one way to move between worlds is to commit ritualistic suicide in the hopes of finding the way back to Axiom.

The way the player experiences the game world in the Umbral realm is very different than in Axiom, as the Umbral is twisted, distorted, and corrupted place. The very nature of the world slowly affects the player character in a way that traversing Umbral becomes a challenge all its own.

“It is a disease, it is the Umbral Wither,” Virtosu explains. “And the more you’re exposed to the Umbral is like you’re being exposed to radiation and you grow increasingly sick. You see hallucinations, the Umbral treatment gets more dire, you see things that are not there.”

It kind of reminds me of the old Sanity meter in Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem in a sense, only this has real, lasting effects on gameplay. Virtosu explains that your experience multiplier will increase the longer you’re in Umbral, and you’ll experience more and more dangerous enemies compared to what you might meet in Axiom.

“So it’s like holding your breath underwater every time we’re in Umbral. It’s difficult because we wanted this feeling of foreboding and corruption.”

You can escape Umbral by finding effigies that you reincarnate and destroy, sending you back to Axiom as if you were never waltzing around in a world made of the world’s nightmares. If you die while in Umbral, though, this is when you drop your experience gained to that far and have to start from your last anchor point, Lords of the Fallen’s version of the campfire.

Doing some detective work

The world of Lords of the Fallen is, in many respects, a character itself. The grim fantasy of Axiom takes place in a world with two opposing mountains: one inhabited by demonic creatures while the other stands as a bulwark against them with the Knights. Umbral itself is its own unique character, the dark, twisting miasma, and eldritch horror that inhabits that realm contorting around everything in view. It’s not just how the worlds look, though, that makes them different and a character unto themselves.

“The world itself has a lot of environmental storytelling,” Virtosu tells me. “In fact, this is an interesting aspect: when in Umbral, the water holds no sway - you can walk on the bottom of the water.”

This is in stark contrast to how water typically operates in the normal realm, and the LotF team is hoping that these differences in how the worlds react and operate will play into the intricate puzzle-solving and detective work the player will be doing along their journey. The example of the water in Umbral allowed Matthew to access a ladder that he couldn’t previously in Axiom, navigating through the area in a way not possible without entering the eerie realm.

This was reinforced later on in the demo as we traveled through a winding cavern. Platforms spiraled the walls of the caverns, though sections were missing at spots. Raising the lantern showed an opposite way to go up the cavern itself, as a large tendril of ramps cross crossed the space ever upward that was only available in Umbral.

Maybe you need to get through a gate that isn’t there in the Umbral realm - you can do that by swapping realms. Everything is connected in a way where you are going to need to investigate more than just what is right in front of them at any moment.

Another aspect of using the world itself might come into play with combat. While fighting enemies near a cliffside, Matthew found himself slightly outmatched while working through the horde in Axiom. However, raising the lantern showed a giant with his arms stretched out over the battlefield, something that, if we were fighting in Umbral, could be used to our advantage here.

Enemies don’t stop pursuing you just because you’re in Umbral either, meaning you’ll still have the previous threat to deal with, plus the new ones that come from entering the other realm.

There is so much to explore in Lords of the Fallen, with Cesar saying that the world in the 2023 reboot is five times larger than in previous installments.

Addressing Feedback

Lords of the Fallen (2023) incorporates a lot of feedback from players of the previous titles as well, one chief area being the controls themselves. One example was a radial menu that would pop up when L2 is pulled on the controller that displayed a host of spells mapped there. It starts with three, but with upgrades the Catalyst class the demo was playing at the time could hold six.

This, effectively, means you can cast spells without having to swap weapons like you had to in the older entries of the series, giving much more control over the character. The idea, aside from simply addressing feedback, was to give the sense of attacking like a Jedi using the Force.

“[O]ur fantasy was to make this sort of Jedi feeling where you’re striking with the sword, then push, then keep stabbing with the sword. A lot of our magic is not based on nukes, let’s say on long-distance range options, but more close and medium range. Because for us, melee is king.”

This doesn’t mean that there aren’t long-range, powerful spells like a Meteor shower. But it feels like much of the fantasy here is about getting in close to kill with the sword, and using the spells to help make that happen.

Another aspect is that players can now craft their own Anchors. This effectively means you can drop a respawn point where you need it in the world, making it more convenient if you meet your worst fate out in either realm.

This change might be divisive, but the idea isn’t that you can just plop this down early on, instead, these Anchors are expensive items to craft that will take time to gather the materials to do so. To add onto that, you can only have one anchor placed in the world - a world that can also destroy the anchor itself, preventing you from using it entirely.

“It’s like parking your car in a dangerous neighborhood, you know what I mean?” Virtosu mentioned with a laugh as Matthew was being pummeled by an enemy known as a Knight Penitent - a creature that spawns from someone who almost became a knight but failed in their duties.

Playing Your Defeat

Running two realms parallel is insane enough, but you can also run these worlds in co-op, with zero loading screens anywhere you go. Whether you’re bouncing between Umbral and Axiom, running from one end of the game world to another, fighting bosses and so on, the world of Lords of the Fallen is meant to be one, interconnected seamless adventure.

Interestingly enough, the inspiration behind the second, Umbral realm, spawns from this desire to improve the corpse run. According to Virtosu it began as a way to allow players to “play the defeat.”

“Going back to Umbral, it began to allow players to play the defeat. Because when you’re killed and you’re respawned back at your previous checkpoint to retry again, you don’t really play your defeat. No, playing the defeat is resurrecting as a specter where you are and trying to escape or push forward. You have to play with the consequences of your actions. So it sounds a bit philosophic. But at the bottom of it all, we wanted you to play your defeat, death does not need to be a sign of failure.”

During the demo, I kept going back to the incredible atmosphere the team at Hexworks and CI Games have built with Lords of the Fallen. The dual worlds of Axiom and Umbral are dark, twisted, and just dripping with character. I want to explore Umbral despite how detrimental it might be to my character's health, soaking in the atmosphere as the Umbral Wither makes my character yearn for resurrection. I want to know more about the various Knights that failed in their vows and are turned into twisted, gnarled creatures that roam Axiom now, doing their best impression of Voldo from Soul Calibur. 

Everything that the team showed at GDC makes for an interesting approach to a genre that, for some, can be a bit out of reach. However, the Lords of the Fallen reboot looks to be shaping up to be something special when it releases later this year.