I'm getting some tasty Skyrim and Dark Messiah vibes from this first-person action RPG

If you like tromping around a fantasy world in first-person casting two-handed spells, whacking ogres and goblins with an ornate sword, and solving huge mechanical puzzles in mysterious chambers, here's a game you might want to keep an eye on.

IGN was kind enough to post a new trailer, which you can see above. There's not a whole lot of gameplay shown, but it offers a nice look at some of the fantasy environments, enemies, and some tattooed, outstretched arms wrapped in leather bands preparing to cast some cool-looking spells.

Luckily there's quite a bit more to look at on Testament's page on Steam. For instance, one of the gifs on the page shows some goblin-lookin' dudes charging the player who swats them with a sword, then jabs and stuns the mob with some sort of electric shock effect.

Then they use a sort of Force-push spell to knock the mob back to a safe distance, before finishing them off with an explosive arrow. I like the mix-and-match approach to combat where you can combine different weapons and spells quickly to neutralize a bunch of attackers, and knocking monsters back gives me those Dark Messiah of Might and Magic Vibes. Hopefully there are some convenient spike walls in Testament to impale them on, too.

Another gif on the page shows some puzzle solving, where a spell cast on a hovering gem causes obsidian chunks to fly together to form a cube, followed by a room where levitating blocks are crisscrossing the floor. I'm not a huge fan of first-person platforming, but I do like massive, mysterious chambers that need some careful puzzle-solving to beat.

Testament also has something called "the wheel of consumables" that lets you craft and then quickly apply enchantments to your weapons, making your arrows deadlier, turning your sword into flames, and other magical effects. It's especially nice that you don't need to open an inventory menu screen and hunt around a long list to quickly supercharge your gear on the fly.

Testament has been in the works for a while—I found a Kickstarter page for it from way back in 2019, though it didn't secure enough funding at the time. When's it releasing? "Coming soon" is the only clue, which hopefully doesn't mean, like, 2025.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.