Morbid: The Lords of Ire

I went into this one with the kind of cautious optimism I reserve for small studios swinging above their weight class, and Still Running does land some honest punches. The Lords of Ire is a third-person action RPG sequel to the well-regarded isometric Morbid: The Seven Acolytes, and the shift to full 3D is both the game's most ambitious decision and its most consequential stumble. The Lovecraftian creature designs carry over with real commitment, and the five distinct lands, from frost-crusted mountains to decaying cities crawling with Gahar-possessed flesh, give the world a genuine sense of horrorpunk personality. Protagonist Striver cuts an imposing silhouette and handles with surprising responsiveness once the combat language clicks. The core loop is stripped-back souls-like: melee attacks split across light and heavy inputs, a block and a parry, a lock-on, and a posture-bar system where landing a stagger opens a riposte window. Weapons span close-quarter brass knuckles up to ludicrous two-handed war hammers, each weapon family sharing a move set but feeling meaningfully different in weight and impact. A Spectre Blaster adds a ranged poke when you have the slugs for it. Runestones let you infuse and customise weapons, and Professor Maximus hands you the Morbid Menagerie codex, a collectible enemy encyclopedia that quietly rewards thorough play. On paper: a tidy, focused package. In practice: the parry timing is satisfying, the posture-break rhythm genuinely fun, and each of the five main Lords has enough visual ambition to make their arenas feel earned. Optional side bosses lurk in every region if you want more punishment. The problems are real, though, and they stack up in ways that critics across the board flagged. Enemy variety thins badly in the later levels, with the same creature types recycled across different backdrops until what felt like tense encounter design starts feeling like filler. The camera misbehaves in tighter spaces, the voice acting is flat, and the sanity mechanic, where pushing into high-insanity states warps your perception and can grant power at personal cost, never develops enough mechanical teeth to change how you actually play. The absence of a proper in-game map compounds early navigation confusion, and the UI telegraphs its budget loudly. Steam user reception landed in mixed territory, sitting around 69 percent positive across a few hundred reviews, which feels accurate: the game earns genuine goodwill and then fritters some of it away on rough edges that a bit more development time could have smoothed. Where Lords of Ire genuinely earns attention is at the level of moment-to-moment combat feel. Players who give it the time to click, who learn the parry windows, manage the HP-versus-guard-bar choice in each fight, and experiment with weapon infusions, tend to come away impressed. The soundtrack gets specific praise for mood-setting, the creature grotesquery is legitimately memorable, and the game never outstays its welcome in terms of runtime. For genre devotees who have already cleared their Thymesias and their Blasphemous entries and want something new with a horror-adjacent aesthetic, there is a solid time buried in here. New players to the genre, or anyone who bounces off rough technical presentation, will struggle to see past the seams.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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