Fatekeeper

Fatekeeper opens with a simple set of tutorial rooms in a ruined chapel, a rusty short sword you find in a corpse's hand, and no explanation about who you are or what you're supposed to be doing beyond broad narrative gestures at "you have been marked, you must fulfill a fate." Standard opening for a first-person fantasy RPG. I've played thirty of them.

But then, twenty minutes in, I found myself on a stone bridge above a chasm, facing a goblin with a rusty scimitar. I raised my sword. I noticed the boot icon at the bottom of my HUD. I looked at the goblin. I looked at the edge of the bridge. I kicked the goblin. The goblin flew backward, off the bridge, into the chasm, with a very satisfying physics animation. The game did not treat this as an exploit or a hidden Easter egg. It was, apparently, just how you were expected to solve certain encounters.

Anyone who played Dark Messiah of Might and Magic in 2006 will recognize this exact feeling. That game — from Arkane Studios, before they became famous for Dishonored and Prey — introduced the specific joy of kicking enemies off ledges, into spikes, into fires, into environmental hazards designed to make the player feel like a witty combatant rather than a stat-check character. Dark Messiah was a landmark game. It had one direct spiritual successor (Dishonored, though that pivoted to stealth), and then the entire subgenre of "first-person physics-driven immersive RPG" went dormant for close to twenty years.

Fatekeeper is that game returning. Currently on sale in Early Access, this is one of the more interesting rough diamonds in the current sale corner, and its full value depends heavily on where the development goes from here.

Hours Four Through Ten: The Physics Start Doing Real Work

By hour four, I'd stopped kicking things purely as a novelty and started planning encounters around environmental physics. A room with an oil lantern on a low table becomes an ambush point — you can push the lantern off, set the floor on fire, and force enemies to reroute or take burn damage. A narrow corridor becomes a choke where you can slam a heavy door on someone. A spiked ceiling in an old ruin becomes something to fear when a goblin shaman tries to knock you into it.

This is where Fatekeeper starts feeling meaningfully distinct from its more famous cousins. In Skyrim, the physics engine exists but is mostly cosmetic — you can knock over pots but combat isn't really about physics. In Elden Ring, combat is beautifully choreographed but always character-versus-character, not character-versus-environment. In Fatekeeper, the environment is a weapon, and pretty much every encounter has a secondary spatial solution beyond just "hit the enemy until it falls."

The magic system layers on top of this. Spells include fire (obviously), telekinesis (crucially — you can grab objects mid-air and hurl them), and various utility magics. Combining physics-forward combat with telekinesis creates genuinely creative moments. Grab a barrel from across a room, launch it into a group of enemies, follow up with a fire spell. Push a heavy shield-bearer into his allies with telekinesis, use the stagger window to close and hit the softer targets behind. This is not new in the abstract — Arx Fatalis in 2002 did some of this — but it hasn't been done at this fidelity in a modern game in a long time.

Hours Ten Through Twenty: The Cracks Start Showing

By hour ten I was through the current EA content and had bounced off the game a couple of times. Not because it was bad — because it's an Early Access build that only has roughly two-plus hours of designed critical-path content plus a fair amount of exploration space, and after you've experienced the initial systems the current version has run out of new things to show you. This is what Early Access is. It's fine. But it's important to understand: buying Fatekeeper today is not buying a full game, it's buying access to an interesting prototype that will (hopefully) become a full game by 2027.

The systems are compelling but under-cooked in specific ways. Combat controls, per player feedback and my own experience, need refinement. Right-click should probably be block rather than the current mapping. The heavy-attack windup is longer than it needs to be. Consumables and spells occupy the same hotkey slots, which means switching between healing and offensive magic mid-combat is clunkier than it should be. These are things Paraglacial has acknowledged and are being iterated on, but they're currently rough.

Save system is a specific point of friction. The game uses bonfire-style save points ("very Souls-like on paper," except without the healing and respawn mechanic that makes Souls saves work). If you save at a bonfire with low health and no healing items, you can genuinely soft-lock yourself into a hard restart. The developer has said they're rethinking this.

Some areas are too dark. The torch mechanic works but its light radius is too small for the dungeon scale, meaning you spend more time struggling to see than you should. Again, iteratable, but currently a real friction point.

Anyone who played Dark Messiah of Might and Magic in 2006 will recognize this exact feeling.

The Visuals, Because They're Actually Remarkable

I want to spend a moment on how Fatekeeper looks. Because it looks very good.

Paraglacial is a team of thirteen people. That is a genuinely small studio. And what they've built in Unreal Engine 5 is, honestly, closer to the graphical quality of Epic's own tech demos than to what you'd expect from a team this size. Rock textures are crisp. Landscape rendering has real depth. Water and lighting are handled with what look like AAA production values. Character models are the one place the small team shows — humanoid enemies are competent but not spectacular, and facial animation is present but limited.

The art direction is dark fantasy in a specific medieval-European register. Ruined monasteries, forest paths choked by fog, torchlit dungeons carved through stone. This is not the bright, ornate fantasy of Elden Ring or the specifically Anglo-Saxon medievalism of Kingdom Come. It leans more toward the grim, damp, oppressive atmosphere that made Dark Souls' Undead Burg so evocative. Except in first person, which somehow makes it worse — meaning better — meaning creepier.

The Combat Question: Is This a Soulslike?

The community has argued about this for months. The Steam forums have threads with hundreds of posts on whether Fatekeeper is or isn't a Soulslike. The developer has explicitly said: it's designed to be challenging, but not Soulslike.

Having played the current EA build, I agree with the developer. Fatekeeper is not a Soulslike in any meaningful sense. It does not use the specific stamina-timing-punishment loop that defines Soulslike combat. It does not have the specific difficulty curve, the specific boss encounter structure, or the specific asynchronous online mechanics.

What Fatekeeper is, mechanically, is a first-person physics-driven action RPG with challenging combat. That's a different lineage. It descends from Dark Messiah, Arx Fatalis, King's Field, and Ultima Underworld. The difficulty is present because the combat physics reward skilled play, not because the game is designed around a punishment loop.

If you're going into this expecting Elden Ring in first person, you'll be disappointed. If you're going in expecting a modern Dark Messiah, you'll be delighted, at least by the current systems.

The 2027 Question: Will This Deliver?

Paraglacial has committed to roughly 18 months of Early Access before a proposed full release in Q4 2027. THQ Nordic is publishing, and while THQ Nordic's track record is mixed (Gothic Remake landed well, some other recent titles less so), their willingness to fund small studios doing distinctive work is genuine. This isn't a first-time developer trying to Kickstart a dream — it's a small team with publisher backing making steady progress against a stated timeline.

The risk is the standard Early Access risk. The current build shows all the right ambition and design taste, but shipping is hard. Content can slip. Balance can go wrong. Studios can lose developers. Between now and Q4 2027, anything can happen.

The reason to buy now, at the discounted EA price, is if you want to be part of shaping the game through feedback and if you want to lock in the discount before the full-release price hike. The reason to wait is if you'd rather play a finished game than an interesting prototype.

I bought it. I don't regret it. I got about ten hours of engaged play out of the current build, and I'll get more from each major content update. But I'm also honest that if I were buying purely for entertainment value hour-per-dollar, I'd probably wait until 1.0.

Who This Is Actually For

Buy Fatekeeper if: you loved Dark Messiah of Might and Magic and have been waiting twenty years for its spiritual successor, you play first-person RPGs specifically for physics-driven combat, you're okay with Early Access rough edges, or you want to support small studios doing distinctive work in an underserved subgenre.

Don't buy Fatekeeper if: you need polished combat controls out of the box, you prefer third-person RPGs, you want a large content base immediately, or you specifically want either a Soulslike combat feel or a stealth-focused immersive sim.

This is a modest bet on a game that could be genuinely excellent by 2027 and is already interesting enough to justify the current price for the right kind of player. The physics-driven first-person melee subgenre has been dormant for far too long. Fatekeeper is not going to fix that alone, but it's the strongest attempt anyone has made in years, and it deserves to succeed. Whether it does depends partly on how the developer executes and partly on whether enough of the right players give it their attention through the Early Access cycle. If you're one of them, the current price is fair, and the game you'll be playing in eighteen months could be one of the more distinctive RPGs of the decade.