In a hotel room near GDC in March, I got my first look at Lords of the Fallen. It was a live, hands-off demo on PC: My guide no-clipped through the world to show me details of its ultra-gothic nightmare architecture and corrupted knights while creative director Cezar Virtosu rhapsodized about the lore. A favorite quote: "This is the tower of penance. This is guarded by one of the plague brothers. A horrid creature."
The 2014 Lords of the Fallen wasn't exactly Game of the Year material (I gave it a 58% and I've been told I was generous), and since no one else at PC Gamer saw the GDC demo of this reboot, I'm not sure they completely believed me when I told them that it looked really cool. And fair enough, because it's hard not to sound like a third-grader bullshitting on the playground when you start telling people how there's, like, two worlds, and one of them is the Umbral plane, and there's ghosts there and you don't want to die there, and also there are these guys called the plague brothers, and the fingers of God are a thing, and...
