Feed your sword souls to lift the curse
The very best game about being thrall to some uppity claymore is surely Nix Umbra, but Hallow Blade has plenty of promise. In this first-person “dark fantasy action adventure”, you are a woebegone knight who has ventured into a lost kingdom of luminous fountains and sun-spoked forests.
You somehow manage to team up with the titular Hallow Blade, a magical sword that eats souls. Feed it enough of them, and it’ll lift the kingdom’s curse. Or at least, that’s the claim. Something tells me the Hallow Blade might prove the greater of two evils. You also get a crossbow, which doesn’t appear to have any sorcerous properties or ectoplasmic hunger. It just kills things from further away. Consider me Team Crossbow, for the moment.
Servitude to ravenous knives aside, Hallow Blade’s greatest strength is surely its huge, “interconnected” world, which does admittedly look like a collage of From Software environments. Those woodlands with godrays so thick you could use them for cover are very Elden Ring, but then you trigger a crumbling floor trap and gosh, we’re in Tomb of the Giants all of a sudden. There’s a square stone keep that reminds me of Sen’s Fortress, and a lowering city of gaslight and spear-top fencing that evokes Bloodborne‘s Yharnam.
I suspect I’m only revealing how much Fromsoft’s labours live rent-free in my head, and in any case, I’m not complaining: these are gorgeous, withered places. In terms of traversal, you’ll be doing some giddy parkour platforming – with arrowfire that makes me think yet again of the Silver Archers in Anor Londo – and also using a grapple to airstrike Nito-ish skeleton creatures, whose torsos consist of lumped-together skulls. Genuinely, it looks like some overeager cannibal asphyxiated after trying to chug a dozen human heads at once. Slow down, Rodney!
The combat seems sturdy – parry, strafe, swing, backpedal, with magic rings helping to “define your playstyle” in unspecified ways. I’m a little underwhelmed by the enemy designs. There’s a burning dog and a molten hump of a boss who swings bits of building at you, plus the regulation relatively normal-looking human duellist who is probably way harder to kill than the first two. Still, I don’t mind the dogs being boring as long as the views from the parapet are fine.
“Master navigating the underworld by exploring utility-gated areas using your equipment, abilities, and weapons,” the Steam page comments. “Discover shortcuts and restore broken clocktowers to build a network of fast-travel destinations.” The developer is Xekvera, with Top Hat Studios recently announced as publisher, and there’s no release date yet. If you want a non-Souls parallel, the architecture and geography here aren’t leagues away from Dread Delusion.
