Cliffside City lives up to its name. Peer over the edge of one of its creaking wooden walkways, and you won’t see much bar a sheer drop into distant choking fog. Unless, that is, you unhook the magic lantern from your belt and hold it aloft, its light burning through the fabric of reality to reveal a corrupted twin dimension. Through the shimmering circular window you can peruse the Umbral, a blue-grey realm of departed souls, which lives up to its billing as a land of the dead. Over there, the holy crosses suspended beneath the city’s platforms are adorned with crucified bodies. The supports holding the structures in situ aren’t sturdy beams, but skeletal remains. But look down and you’ll notice that the bottomless drop has been replaced by a patch of solid ground – scenery that simply doesn’t exist on your plane. It feels ripe for exploration. Now all you need to do to take a closer look is die.
Videogame history is speckled with adventures set in overlapping dimensions, from the two-sided puzzle box that is A Link To The Past to Legacy Of Kain: Soul Reaver’s plane-shifting, and more recently the splitscreen machinations of The Medium. Even if the concept is well-rehearsed, though, there’s something visually and mechanically alluring about the way the Umbral waxes and wanes seamlessly with the rise and fall of the lantern in The Lords Of The Fallen, and how it lures and threatens simultaneously. It’s like peering into an abyssal hell, yet somehow feeling compelled to step inside.
The Umbral realm is the killer feature upon which Barcelona-based Hexworks, a new arm of Polish developer-publisher CI Games, is hanging its hat. “It’s very different from everything you’ve seen in other action RPGs,” the project’s executive producer, tells us. And let’s face it, it probably needs to be, given that it will be setting out to find an audience within the increasingly crowded Soulslike space, and especially following the aftershock of enormous impact in 2022. As CI looks to make a leap from its more traditional double-Aseries, towards triple-A
