The Lantern of the Laughless Saint

My first hour on that island was mostly me standing around trying to work out what the game actually wanted from me, and I came close to bouncing off it entirely. You wake up somewhere you did not choose to be, pulled there by a dream you share with strangers, under a Tower that refuses to say anything. The Lantern of the Laughless Saint does not open with a tidy sequence of tasks to keep your hands busy. It opens with silence and a horizon, and it assumes you will get curious on your own schedule. My advice: push through. By hour three that disorientation had curdled into the good kind of obsession, the sort where I was keeping my own notes because the game clearly was not going to keep them for me. NerveLabs are upfront about the lineage. This is a game made by people who think Morrowind understood something the genre later traded away, namely that a world feels bigger when it withholds. So expect an RPG far more interested in atmosphere, ambiguity and interpretation than in a checklist of glowing objectives. The mystery of the Laughless Saint is something you assemble out of fragments and inference rather than something handed to you in a quest summary. If your ideal RPG evening is reading environmental detail and arguing about what it means, this is aimed squarely at you. If you want momentum and a clear next step at all times, the opening stretch will feel insufferable, and I would not blame you. The genuinely odd choice, and the one I keep turning over, is co-op. Solo is how the tone reads by default, but it also supports online and local play, which is a strange thing to bolt onto a slow, ominous, self-serious mystery. In practice it works better than it has any right to. Bringing someone else along turns the interpretive work into a debate, and a world this deliberately opaque gets more interesting when two people disagree about what the Tower is for. It also does something to the loneliness the game is clearly cultivating, so if atmosphere is your priority, do your first run alone. Where it works, it works on theme. The pitch about the weight of human desire and deciding what deserves saving is not decoration. It is the frame the whole island hangs on, and the game keeps returning to the uncomfortable version of that question rather than the flattering one. The reception so far backs this up. Very Positive at 87 percent across roughly 776 reviews is a strong signal for a launch-week Early Access RPG, and the shape of that number tells me that the people it clicks for, it really clicks for. Now the part that matters for your buying decision. This is Early Access, released this month, and it should be treated as such. Content is going to shift, balance is going to shift, and the threads that feel deliberately unresolved right now may be unresolved because they are unfinished rather than because they are artful. I cannot yet tell you whether the build variety holds up past hour 40, because there is not enough game in front of me to make that call honestly, and anyone who tells you otherwise five days after launch is guessing. It is PC only, there is no critic consensus to lean on, and a 776-review sample is enthusiastic early adopters rather than a broad verdict. If you need a finished, complete arc, sit on it and check back after a couple of content updates. But if the phrase "Morrowind, but I can drag a friend into it" made something light up behind your eyes, that instinct is correct. Go in expecting to be confused, expecting to take notes, and expecting the Tower to stay quiet longer than is comfortable. That patience is the price of admission, and the island is worth it.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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