False Hero Key Art
Image: Torchlight Games & Ytopia

Sometimes, it takes an outsider's view to come up with a fresh take on the familiar. That certainly seems to be the case with solo indie developer Torchlight Games, who only stumbled upon FromSoftware's classic Souls series six years ago and was so inspired that they've dedicated the intervening years to making False Hero, which launched yesterday. A low-fi but very confident souls-like that does some genuinely new and exciting things with a time-tested formula. Specifically, all those cool attacks you see monsters and bosses doing? They can be yours.

While you can just try the demo (a real hit in the last Next Fest) for yourself to get a feel for what to expect, False Hero immediately makes it clear that it doesn't play like other Souls-like games. Sure, it's an action dungeon crawl through interconnected maps with slightly-too-far-apart checkpoints, shortcuts you can open to make deaths less painful, and tough multi-phase boss fights, but the combat is radically different here. You've only got one basic melee attack, and it's not very useful. And then you kill a few brain-melted wizards that are hucking books at you, and suddenly... you know how to throw books too.

And this here is what makes False Hero special. There are dozens of these learnable attacks, each of which you can bind to a different button on your gamepad or keyboard. They can be comboed and chained together, and cost no stamina. The only requirement to use them is to build magic by hitting enemies with your basic melee swing, which fully recharges your bar in just two or three hits, and can also chain into or out of those attacks you've stolen from foes.

And so, you've got that tense classic Souls-like combat, but instead of being locked into a character build, slowly optimizing the few abilities you have, you're constantly gaining new moves and encouraged to switch them around to adapt to the enemies you're fighting. You can create elaborate melee combos that dart you into range, then back out again, or pummel monsters with elaborate chains of projectiles. But none of this would matter if the enemies weren't fun to fight and the world not interesting. Fortunately, False Hero feels like it's nailed it on those fronts too, at least from the couple of hours I've played.

As is standard for Souls-likes, False Hero has you thrown into a dying world full of tattered, half-living people and weird monsters. There's something especially vivid and surreal about its environments so far, though, and the lore so far feels intriguing, speaking of a world torn away from the god's control by a prophet known as the mask-maker, with your character wearing one of their creations- the source of your skill-stealing powers. Wherever the mask-maker went, their message seems to have been interpreted so differently that everyone turned on each other in a fit of murderous philosophical debate. That's fun.

So far, this one feels like a real sleeper hit, and at the time of writing, every single user review is glowingly positive. While I'd be happy just to play this game through once, a quick glance at False Hero's achievement list does reveal one interesting extra note: It has an integrated Room Randomizer mode, potentially turning the game into an endless, unpredictable dungeon crawl. Nice.

False Hero is out now for £17/$20, with a 10% launch discount, and can be found in bundles with several other great games like Lunacid, Dread Delusion, and (most fittingly) Verho: Curse of Faces, another FromSoftware-inspired game about a world of masked survivors in a world going mad. And as mentioned, False Hero has a demo, too, if you're on the fence.