Master the art of sword and sorcery in the Early Access release of Fatekeeper

THQ Nordic and developer Paraglacial released Fatekeeper into Early Access, a promising looking action RPG that mixes melee and magic in a handcrafted world. Note: personal purchase.

Unlike some other games that drop into Early Access nearly finished, Fatekeeper is very much a game they're building up with the community and so it's a bit on the short side right now. Still, it's a promising look into what could turn into an excellent action RPG with a price to match the early stage at just £8.49.

If you've ever played the classic Dark Messiah of Might & Magic, you might feel a little at home with this. As will fans of the vast skill tree in titles like Path of Exile as even this initial release has a fair bit you can level up and unlock across different paths allowing you to really hone the particular play-style you're aiming for to create various different types of builds.

See the release trailer below:

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How does Fatekeeper run on Linux then? Tested with Proton 11.

Well, it's been a little bit odd. Sometimes it just refuses to start up properly and freezes. So I have to force-kill the whole thing. But then clicking play again, and it works. Then the first time getting to the logo screen where it was compiling shaders and it went a bit weird here too. Flickering between 0% done and a different seemingly random number and back again to 0 constantly. It does eventually get you to the main menu properly though. That's possibly an issue with Proton.

Once getting into the game and you meet your strange talking rat guide, I noticed the spoken audio is far lower than it should be compared to the rest of it, I had to tweak the audio settings a fair bit (like turning music right down) for it to be clearer. Unsure if that's a Proton issue, or the way the game audio has been set up, but the speech was simply far too low. Same again with the default mouse sensitivity - too low. Hopefully those will be sorted soon.

Aside from that, the first impression here is quite good. The style is fantastic, and the awe-inspiring backdrops of the mountains when you first get in is quite something to see. I don't often just stand around in games to have a look, but I really had to here when initially making my way up as the beauty in it all was quite surprising.

The rest of the game is a bit different though, as you explore there's lots of caves and cramped corridors but it still does look visually impressive.

Exploring different parts of it has been really interesting because Fatekeeper when thinking more on it actually gives me vibes of a mixture between Elden Ring and Skyrim - like it's somewhere in between them in terms of the combat, progression and save system but much more linear overall. The save system is a nuisance though, needing to find campfires so you can easily lose some progress if you miss one - I'm never usually a fan of these specific checkpoint-only styles of saving.

I do very much enjoy the mixture of melee and magic though. The weapons feel like they have actual weight to them in the way you swing. Launching a fireball, or throwing some creature into a wall and then dashing in to slice them up is quite the highlight.

All the different equipment and items to find also makes the loot goblin inside me quite happy.

Some nice physics here too. You can break apart various boxes and crates to see if you find anything, along with your spells reacting with the enemies like throwing them, setting them on fire and freezing them. I did have quite a funny physics interaction with an enemy up close, they got sort of stuck to me so I had to flail about for a bit to slice them up to get them off me - hilarious.

How's performance then? Testing on my Fedora KDE 44 desktop with the AMD Ryzen 5800X and Radeon 6800 XT at 2560x1440p at the High preset and it has been okay. It certainly could be better though with it hovering between 50-80FPS depending on where I currently am.

I'm so far pretty impressed with this one but it's early days for it yet and they have a lot to add into it to expand it past a few hours of gameplay.