Dark Messiah Of Might And Magic

Arkane let loose and made a murder sim. 

- Chris Thursten

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic feels like it comes from Arkane’s adolescence. Dishonored and Prey are the more mature output of the same creative mind. Here is a fantasy action game with not a whole lot to say but an infectious enthusiasm for freewheeling violence. Intricate physics, AI and combat systems converge to create a world that is spectacularly lethal for everybody, except you. As adventuring wizard’s apprentice Sareth, you kick men and orcs with bone-shattering force into spike traps and off rope bridges. You combine directional movement and mouse swings to lop limbs with your sword just so. You emit fireballs from your palm and watch as enemies, stumbling over the flaming corpses of their comrades, catch fire too and flail and fall.

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. Yet being tied to a relatively sedentary roleplaying series doesn’t appear to have dampened Dark Messiah’s spirit at all. 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. It is spectacular fun; exuberantly brutal to the point of subverting the vanilla fantasy setting it occupies. 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.

DEEP CUTS