Metroid Dread studio's latest is Blades of Fire, a brutal blacksmithing action game with a cruel Dark Souls core

I tried to play Blades of Fire like a game I already knew, and I suffered for it. I died, over and over again in MercurySteam’s new action-adventure, the same studio behind Metroid Dread and Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, and it wasn’t until I began to get on board with just how pig-headedly and stubbornly different Blades of Fire is that I realised how exciting it can be.

Blades of FireDeveloper: MercurySteamPublisher: 505 GamesPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Releases 22nd May on PC (Epic Games Store), PS5, Xbox Series X/S

Blades of Fire was only announced last week, so you’ll be forgiven for not knowing what it is. But it’s coming out very soon, on 22nd May. Somehow MercurySteam kept this game a secret through four years of development. Quite how it managed that with a team of 200 people, I don’t know – it’s a minor miracle. What it means for the game I play at a preview event is that it feels all-but finished, so it makes an incredibly glossy first impression.

We’re squarely in fantasy territory here – rich, overabundant, lavish fantasy, as well as occasionally brutal and twisted. Magic courses through a land teeming with flowers and buzzing with wildlife, and creatures like trolls and elementals romp around. Soldiers who look a bit like the Locust enemies from Gears of War – they have that same chunkiness and sallowness to them – loiter, waiting. In fact, the whole game has a chunkiness to it, a bit like Blizzard games do. Hands and arms are oversized, and buildings and walls are double-thick, which combines not only to make a pleasing visual picture, but to give the game a sturdy feeling, and heft. Remember how chainsawing Locust in two in Gears of War felt? That kind of splattery satisfaction is here too, popping heads like watermelons with huge hammers, or lopping off limbs with scything strikes of your swords.

To give you the topline: Blades of Fire – not to be confused with ice skating film Blades of Glory – is an action-adventure that’s heavy on the combat and features a unique forge mechanic, around which everything revolves. You play as a gruff character called Aran who wakes up one day in a hole of some kind, and crawls out to find himself fighting soldiers and being handed a magical forge hammer that he seems to know and fear. Upon using it, he’s whisked away to a magical forge realm where he’ll return time and time again to make his weaponry.