The developers behind an upcoming open-world RPG called The Lantern of the Laughless Saint stop just short of throwing a white glove at Todd Howard's face in a new trailer for the game, billed as a Morrowind-inspired prologue to an even bigger RPG called The Holy Fool.
NerveLabs, whose recent oddball release Angel Engine has fared decently well on Steam, rightly argue that The Elder Scrolls 6 has taken way too long. In fact, "Elder Scrolls 6 is taking so long that we're just making our own," the devs say. Well, they also say, "Fuck you, Todd Howard." But like, in a nice way?
"Everyone's making a Soulslike," the devs observe. "We're making a Scrolls-like." To that end, NerveLabs channels Morrowind elements such as: first-person combat, killing every NPC, open-ended quests, lockpicking, and casting "spells that make you jump 5,000 feet and fucking die."
There's a winking, unserious, Powerthirst chest-beating to the whole thing – not that I'm turning my nose up at it – but what actually grabbed me about The Lantern of the Laughless Saint is the pitch for its central island.
"Somewhere in the depths is a theater with an empty stage, waiting for an audience," its Steam page explains. "As you repair or ruin the lives of the island's inhabitants, the phantoms they leave behind take their seats in the audience. The more seats you fill, the more the island listens, and the greater the applause for your final act."
There's something a bit Fable about this, even if the presentation and mechanics are straight out of Bethesda's playbook. I've always liked to see RPGs keep tabs on your collective actions and decisions and then fold them into the finale somehow, preferably more elegantly than in a binary karma system. This also sounds like an interesting application of the jester and performance theming for The Holy Fool, which stars a being cursed, almost like Jim Carrey in The Mask, with an artifact of "ancient power and cosmic madness."
The retro, '00s aesthetic looks pretty spot-on, and surprisingly, there's also full co-op support. Co-op RPGs are excruciatingly rare nowadays, so just about anything with a big world built for two players is going to get a second glance from me.
I was ready to write this off as a meme game, yet here I am cautiously, but curiously, adding The Lantern of the Laughless Saint to my Steam wishlist. NerveLabs says it's coming this year. Making not one, but two ambitious RPGs at the same time sounds like the indie dev equivalent of trying to ride two horses at the same time, but maybe it'll pan out, and maybe we will get them before The Elder Scrolls 6 after all.
