ELDERBORN, released on Steam on January 30, 2020
— a first-person slasher with souls-like combat, melee weapons only, and a heavy metal soul.
Six years later it sits at 87% positive across nearly 1,500 reviews, it made its way to PS5 and Xbox Series… and the sequel I begged for at the bottom of this page has finally been announced. Let's start from the beginning.
↑ We Dug Into It ↑
Read the Verdict
Elderborn the Cimmerian
It's no secret that Elderborn was heavily influenced by Conan and dark fantasy culture 😉 For me, this game was a big surprise — which is usually what happens with small independent studios. If you're lucky, one catches your attention. Otherwise you discover it years later, when it's already too late to matter for the developers' sales.
That's exactly what happened with a great little independent RPG called Paper Sorcerer — and it's precisely why I originally wrote about Elderborn a week after its release. I wanted these devs to sell as many copies as possible, so they'll be motivated to make a sequel. Because this barbaric experience — too short for my taste — was fucking enjoyable.
Here's what Hyperstrange say themselves, in their own words: "The world of ELDERBORN is an imaginary one. A fantastic vision of the ancient time of heroes, not unlike the one created by Robert E. Howard in his saga of Conan. But it's not just pure work of fiction.... We drew inspiration from the ancient Middle East cultures."
Elderborn is a mix between Dark Souls and an FPS. You're in Doom, but with melee weapons only — exploring, finding the right items to push forward, with RPG elements like attributes to raise and skills to unlock. Everything is useful, that's what gamers want!
Fountains, Phials and Saving Your Neck
As in every Dark Souls, you get a checkpoint that heals you and brings back every enemy you killed.
Here the Bonfires are called the Fountains.
But careful — fountains are not save points in Elderborn. To save, you open the menu and select "Save and Quit", which takes you back to the main menu with your progress stored.
The Fountain and your avatar's attribute menu; there aren't as many to upgrade as in Dark Souls.
Your survival tool is the Phial — the talisman worn by the Elderborn, three small vessels on a leather strap around your neck. You drain them one at a time to heal, and once empty they slowly refill with the essence you gather from killing. It's Elderborn's Estus Flask, and it means healing is never free: you have to earn it by fighting.
Important: to avoid corrupted savegames, and since — like Dark Souls — you only get one save per profile slot, make a manual copy. The path is: C:\Users\profile\AppData\LocalLow\Hyperstrange\ELDERBORN
A ruined monolithic city under a rose-coloured sky. Not bad for a twelve-dollar game.
Heavy Metal Played on an Armenian Duduk
We need to talk about the soundtrack, because it's the single most underrated thing about this game.
Elderborn's music hits like Doom's did in its day — visceral, driving, the kind of score that makes you want to demolish everything in your path. Some tracks have guitar riffs good enough that you could play them to a metalhead friend and they'd never guess it came from a video game.
But here's what makes it genuinely unique, and I only found out years later. It was composed by Kacper Kajzderski and Piotr Stachera (aka Buffout Boy) of Ivory Tower Soundworks — and Kajzderski built it around the Armenian duduk, the Turkish oud and the zurna, layered into modern heavy metal.
That's why it doesn't sound like anything else. It isn't metal with an "epic fantasy" veneer bolted on — it's metal genuinely fused with ancient Middle Eastern instrumentation, which is precisely where the developers said they drew their world from. The exotic edge you hear isn't an effect. It's a duduk.
If you want to hear what I'm talking about, I've got two Elderborn tracks — Call of Jur'mum and Towers of Jur'mum — on my video game music page. And yes, Jur'mum is the name of this world: Hyperstrange still greet their players with "Greetings, warriors of Jur'mum!" to this day 🤘 Also... Did you notice Jur"mum sounded like "Your Mum" ? 😅
The soundtrack perfectly matches the exploration and the carnage you'll leave in your wake!
Rewarding Challenges
Elderborn is no simple Doom. Open your character menu and, like in any good RPG, you get access to the Knowledge section — information on enemies, places, weapons, and beyond that, the Challenges.
Every weapon and every special skill has its own challenge. Complete one and you're handed a huge sum of Essence (that's the experience currency here). These challenges unlock the moment you acquire the weapon or skill in question.
Every weapon has its own challenge, its own mastery track, and a reward you must claim yourself.
One thing to watch for that I didn't mention back then: the reward isn't automatic. When you complete a challenge, you have to open the menu and hit "Claim Reward" to actually collect the Essence. Ignore your Knowledge screen for a few hours and you could be sitting on thousands of unclaimed points.
And that's not all: the more you use a weapon, the better you get with it, eventually reaching mastery grade for a permanent +5% bonus. There are 11 weapons in the game, each with its own mastery track.
The more monsters you kill, the more information you unlock about their hit points and weaknesses — the bestiary entries fill in as you slaughter your way through. Everything you do in Elderborn, even boring grind, ends up paying you back. 🙂
Grinding will not go to waste, even the Monster Bestiary will have its purpose.
Taste My Steel! (Play on Hard AF)
There will be a lot of enemies in your way, and I highly recommend playing in "Hard AF" mode.
The devs said normal difficulty runs roughly 6 to 10 hours. I can assure you that Hard AF stretches that to 15 hours, purely through the number of times the game will kill you. All the better for your investment, no? 😏
There are also secrets to hunt down — jars and chests holding Essence, and Codex entries you unlock by reading stone tablets. Speedrunners won't care. Completionists — and I'm one — absolutely will.
One piece of advice if you're going AF: dump every experience point into the Resilience attribute, and don't stop before you hit 20. Resilience unlocks three skills that are flat-out essential to survival, and even more so at that difficulty.
Oh, and one more thing — you're mostly exploring places full of undead. And undead mean… traps. So watch your step, or you'll end up like me: crushed between two walls 😑
Undead everywhere, and the traps they left behind. Watch your footing.
The Third Chapter Problem
Here's my honest verdict after completing the game in AF mode, 15 hours in.
Elderborn is split into three chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 are very good — good enough that I'd initially rated the game above 4 out of 5. But the third and final chapter feels rushed. Maybe to get the game out faster, I don't know. It turns into a straight succession of fights, as if there suddenly wasn't time left to design anything else.
That's why I lowered my score to 3.5 out of 5. Not because the game is bad — because it ends on its weakest hour, which is the worst possible place for a game to be weak.
Worth noting in hindsight: Hyperstrange themselves later described the game's launch as "rocky", and kept patching and expanding it well into the following year. Whatever happened in that final stretch of development, they knew about it too.
And remember — this was their very first game.
Mechanisms to activate, bigger weapons needed to clear some rubbles
I Was Wrong About This Studio
Back in 2021 I wrote an update at the bottom of this page saying I wasn't sure there'd ever be a sequel. Small studio, sales that weren't great, years spent making one game. I assumed they'd had their shot at gaming and moved on.
I could not have been more wrong. 😅
Hyperstrange is based in Warsaw, and was founded — I love this detail — on the day of the 2015 solar eclipse. Elderborn was their debut. And instead of fading away, they went on a run.
- 2022 — they took over the POSTAL franchise and released POSTAL: Brain Damaged
- 2023 — Blood West, a wild west horror stealth shooter, scored with the American band Ghoultown
- And above all: they became a publisher. Jupiter Hell, Supplice, Empty Shell, INCISION, Hordes of Hunger etc...
They describe themselves as a studio with "heavy metal embedded deep in its DNA". Six years on, that's not a marketing line — it's a track record. And Elderborn itself never died: 1,448 reviews at 87% positive, still gathering new ones every month, with console versions on PS5 and Xbox Series.
One tough and quite agile opponent and who knows what's behind this gate, maybe not opening it right now...
The Sequel I Asked For Is Real
I spent this entire article, back in 2020, saying one thing over and over: I want a sequel to Elderborn. Longer, more challenges, maybe an open world. I ended it with "crossing my fingers for you guys".
In June 2026, Hyperstrange announced ELDERBORN: VENGEANCE. 🤘
No release date announced yet. And from their own pitch: "The metal first-person perspective slasher is back with faster, heavier, unapologetically brutal melee combat! Hook, kick, counter, and crush enemies where movement, positioning, and your surroundings become weapons. Draw your merciless blade and deliver vengeance with glorious finishers!"
The headline addition is a grappling hook
— and the way they describe using it tells you everything about the tone: "Unleash the new hook to close the distance, lure them to the edge, and kick their pathetic forms into the pit." So the environment itself becomes a weapon this time.
Story-wise, it goes deeper into the ancient world that came before ours — "a harsh cradle from which known civilizations would one day rise" — with a tale of blood, ancient demigods, and a hunt that begins when someone close to you is taken.
Six years of waiting. It happened.
I've written a lot of these retrospectives where the studio died, the publisher collapsed, or the developer quietly gave up. This is the first one where the thing I wished for at the bottom of an old article actually came true.
So my advice from 2020 still stands, just louder: go buy Elderborn. It's cheap, it's brutal, it's got a duduk in its metal — and now you've got homework before the sequel lands. 🎸
Elderborn was one of the first big surprises of 2020. I'll be honest with you: there are literally hundreds of independent games released every year, mostly on Steam, and most of them range from average to awful. But every so often, a diamond emerges from that polluted sea — and Elderborn was one of them.
Looks like a path you would find in Dragon Age's Fade, and is it a Mini Sauron eye on the right ? 😉
Think I got it wrong? Prove it.
This is one gamer's take — not gospel. Agree, disagree, or think I completely missed the point? Drop your take in the comments below.
Leave Your Verdict in the Comment below ↓
Platform: PC (Steam), later PS5 and Xbox Series
Hours spent: 15 hours in Hard AF mode (6-10 on normal)
Difficulty played: Hard AF — the hardest setting
Weapons: 11, each with its own mastery track
Score: 3.5/5 — chapters 1 and 2 are worth a 4+, the third drags it down
Sequel: ELDERBORN: VENGEANCE, announced June 2026 🤘
%
Note on 100%
+ First-person souls-like combat with melee only — nothing else feels like it
+ A metal soundtrack built on Armenian duduk and Turkish oud
+ 11 weapons, each with real challenges and mastery bonuses
+ Hard AF mode genuinely doubles the playtime
+ Conan-grade barbaric atmosphere
- The third chapter is visibly rushed and ends the game on its weakest note
- Too short on normal difficulty, go for AF Difficulty
- One save slot per profile — back it up (Corruption happens...)
- Challenge rewards must be claimed by hand, easy to forget
