Lords of the Fallen is a hauntingly beautiful soulslike that brings its own unique spin on the genre with it’s dual world concept, layering two immaculately designed settings atop one another for you to explore, fight through, and die in, time and time again. With the power of a GeForce NOW Powered by CloudGG membership, you can experience it at its best and see just how beautiful the world of the dead can really be.
Soulslike games really embody the feeling of adventure for me. That feeling of blindly exploring a mysterious, unknown world, hazards around every corner and only your wits and your blade to see you through. There’ve been many great ones in recent years (Including Blasphemous 2, which I recently did a spotlight on), but I don’t think any have captured that special magic the father of the genre had quite how Lords of the Fallen has.
The game opens with you being dropped into a mysterious world, torn apart by the war between self-flagellating templars (bit of a theme I have going), demonic creatures, and the strange, faceless entities of the Umbral. From there, in classic Soulslike fashion, it’s up to you to piece together what happened to this ruined world through environmental storytelling, rare snippets of conversation, and item descriptions.
But whatever happened, it had left a truly beautiful ruin in its wake. It is no understatement to say that in terms of art direction and world design, Lords of the Fallen is one of the most beautiful games I have ever played; that’s why all the screenshots used in this blog came from my own photo mode vault. I felt like a virtual tourist, taking snapshots of the developer's artistry in action. Gothic cathedrals tower into the horizon, their ceilings packed with bleeding corpses that rain their viscera upon you as you fight your way through corrupted clergy, only to fall and slip into the Umbral, the world of the dead, where the world of the living is mirrored but twisted.
They're just hovering there. MENACINGLY!
Umbral titans reach towards an eye that replaces the sun, bonfires are covered in the bodies of every victim to ever grace that spot, bodies hover ominously in the air above you, tendrils like fronds of seaweed drifting from the empty holes of their faces. There is no water in the Umbral, which lets you navigate several areas by passing into it to avoid lakes or rivers. However, the entire realm has the feeling of being trapped beneath the waves.
And you will spend a lot of time in the Umbral because Lords of the Fallen is hard. Hard in a way few Soulslikes truly manage, or even always want to manage. It is cryptic and unhelpful; it tricks you, misleads you, and it tells you in no uncertain terms that you will play by its rules. Not the other way around, and god I love every second.
Ah yes, the blood cathedral, home of the good guys.
That is what I mean when I say this game feels like a love letter to Dark Souls. Both games were punishingly hard, and though for certain the latter entries in the series were still difficult, they were hard in different ways. Lords of the Fallen captures that impenetrable mystery that so many gamers have been trying to recapture ever since they first felled the Lord of Cinder.
This game has captivated, infuriated, and infatuated me since the day of its release, and I cannot recommend it heartily enough. You will struggle, you will get frustrated, but by God, it will be worth it. To see just how beautiful it can be, I recommend an Ultra membership for GeForce NOW Powered by CloudGG. This is a demanding title, and many PCs, my own included, might struggle to run it. But with GeForce NOW Powered by CloudGG you can really see how beautiful the dark places can be.
This spotlight was written by CloudGG team member “Motley” and do not represent the opinions of CloudGG or NVIDIA.
