dark messiah of might and magic gameplay

‘Kick this one down the stairs!’ the game insists. As soon as the tutorial finishes, it deposits you in an arena where anonymous swordsmen rush you from the shadows forever. It’s a thick-bottomed flagon of whatever it was that Conan the Barbarian was drinking, intended to be knocked back, smashed over somebody’s head, and replaced. ‘Kick this one down the stairs!’ the game insists.ĭark Messiah’s violence is a less heady vintage.

They’re grim things, sometimes, these games. They chop pieces off people in the same way, too: someone at Arkane sat down one day and outlined the specific way in which swords should connect with necks, the drop to slow motion that should occur at the precise point of impact, the whoosh and pained shout as first air then flesh splits as an opponent’s head comes free. Sareth and Corvo climb chains in the same way, hauling themselves upwards with a gratifying clunk-clunk-clunk that sells the physicality and athleticism of their adventures. It is to videogame high fantasy what John Cleese’s Lancelot was to that wedding party in Monty Python and the Holy Grail: they share an idiom.ĭark Messiah echoes Dishonored in the small details. It is spectacular fun exuberantly brutal to the point of subverting the vanilla fantasy setting it occupies. You get the impression that this is a journey that Arkane was on regardless, its adventure craft evolving as it meandered from Arx Fatalis’s buried ruins to Dishonored’s blood-slick ballrooms via this strange holiday in the D&D-ish kingdoms of Ashan.

Yet being tied to a relatively sedentary roleplaying series doesn’t appear to have dampened Dark Messiah’s spirit at all. Conceived as a sequel to Arkane’s debut game, the ruminative dungeon RPG Arx Fatalis, Ubisoft’s money brought with it the Might and Magic licence.

Dark messiah of might and magic gameplay