Launching earlier this month, Fatekeeper is an early access title developed by a small team of just 13 developers known as Paraglacial and published by THQ Nordic. I saw it picking up steam on, well, Steam, and after seeing a few screenshots I just had to jump in.

In many ways, it feels like a spiritual successor to Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, Arkane Studios' beloved first-person action RPG. This isn't Skyrim, even though the aesthetics might fool you at first. It's a linear RPG. Across roughly four hours of gameplay, Fatekeeper revolves around brutal combat, potion crafting, and exploring a gorgeous fantasy world. The visuals are unreal. It’s basically what Skyrim looked like in my head when I was a kid.

Deep In Early Access

The problem is that much of what would traditionally make Fatekeeper feel like a complete title is either unfinished or just not in the game yet. This is proper early access release stuff. I don’t like that there are only two songs in the game that play constantly over and over, and the voiceover work is pretty weak, too. There are some elements of exploration worth praising if you go looking for things (I found a cool sword once, pretty neat), a game like this needs a lot more to stay enticing. Fatekeeper feels less like an RPG and more like a tech demo demonstrating some chunky combat mechanics.

Despite all that, I still came away impressed. For less than £10, it's easy to recommend as a way of supporting a small team that appears to have something special on its hands. The combat certainly needs more work, as sometimes it feels like the enemies are just so much faster than you, it becomes frustrating, but in its most basic form, the foundations are there. The question is whether Paraglacial can build the rest of the game around them and then some.

Usually I'm wary of projects like this. Early access is full of ambitious games that showcase impressive tech but never quite get off the ground. PlayerUnknown’s Go Way Back was just cancelled following exactly this pattern. Since launch, however, Paraglacial has already been responding to feedback and pushing out updates. The studio hasn't shared a roadmap quite yet, explaining that it wants to remain flexible during the initial early access period before commiting to such a thing. As the developers put it: "Our current priority is improving and refining the experience that's already in the game before we start introducing large amounts of new content."

Dark Messiah Pedigree

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic was one of the first PC games I ever played on a PC that belonged to me, and it will always hold a special place in my heart because of that. Arkane Studio’s now cult-classic first-person action RPG has yet to be replicated: nothing has quite captured the brilliance of its physics-heavy combat system, kicking enemies into stuff and then blowing them up with fireballs is just so visceral and heavy, even revisiting the game 20 years on. Much like Dishonored that came later, Dark Messiah provided immersion in the small moments, the sort of eureka sparks of, ‘wait, I can actually do that?’ as you catch a barrel in midair and slam it onto a bad guy’s head. It’s easy to see the inspiration of Dark Messiah in Fatekeeper.

What makes that comparison interesting is that not many games have really built on Dark Messiah's ideas over the years. Sure, we’ve had Dishonored follow in its footsteps, but in terms of fantasy RPGs? There has been very little.

Modern fantasy RPGs tend to focus on open worlds, crafting systems, sprawling quest logs, and endless loot progression. Crimson Desert is the perfect example of this sort of open-world bloat that is refreshingly missing from the linear progression of a game like Dark Messiah. Fatekeeper feels old-fashioned by comparison, but not in a bad way. Every encounter is designed around what you can physically do to your enemies rather than: ‘my number needs to go up on my sword, so I just need to kill forty of these guys and solve a puzzle to unlock an item to upgrade my slashing skill.’ It's a style of design that has largely disappeared as RPGs have grown larger and larger.

However, what Fatekeeper has in excellent visuals and meaty combat mechanics, it lacks the same immersion that made Arkane’s earlier games so good. The environments are beautiful and technically impressive, but there isn't always much reason to engage with them beyond admiring the woodland walks and sprawling vistas. The game hints at something bigger, but it’s just not there yet. Fatekeeper is deep, deep in early access.

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That leaves Fatekeeper in an unusual position. Most early access games struggle because the foundations aren't there, or the core mechanics are just broken. Fatekeeper has the opposite problem. The foundation is strong enough that it makes you think about what the finished version could become, and hopefully will become, if Paraglacial can see it through with its small team.

Whether the game succeeds will likely depend on what Paraglacial builds around that foundation over the next year or two. If the team can create a compelling progression system and give players meaningful reasons to keep exploring beyond the combat itself, Fatekeeper could become something special. If not, it might just end up being an impressive demonstration of what could have been, which is something we have seen time and time again with early access games. I have hope, though. I don’t need a massive open-world RPG. Sometimes you just want to kick goblins into spikes.

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Fatekeeper

RPG Hack and Slash Action Systems Released June 2, 2026 Developer(s) Paraglacial Publisher(s) THQ Nordic Number of Players Single-player Steam Deck Compatibility Unknown Early Access Release June 2, 2026
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Genre(s) RPG, Hack and Slash, Action Powered by Expand Collapse