Metal Action Fantasy Slasher
In the times of legend, the barbarian tribes need a new dark messiah.
— The game's store description being cheeky about one of it's influences.
ELDERBORN is a first person hack and slash with Souls-like elements and an aesthethic influenced by Sword and Sorcery as well as Heavy Metal album covers, developed by Hyperstrange, released for the PC in 2020 after two-ish years of early access.The game puts the player in sandals of a Barbarian sent to uncover the secrets behind the long dormant city of Jurmum.
This game contains the following tropes:
- Anti-Frustration Features: If an enemy dies by getting kicked into a bottomless pit and other unreachable area, the essence spawns in the place get got kicked out from.
- Apocalyptic Log: Half of the game's lore is uncovered through codex entries added by discovering lore tablets through the levels.
- Attack! Attack! Attack!: Compared to the other games in the Souls-like RPG genre, there's no stamina meter to limit the player character's offense.
- BFS: Big Swords are one of the weapon categories available. Janus's sword has a gimmick of dealing more damage the more essence you'd keep.
- Boom, Headshot!: The Skullcrush's gimmick is that blows to the head deal more damage.
- Combat Pragmatist: The player Barbarian has a kick ability, which can be used to break guards of shielded mooks or just straight kicking out mooks into spiked traps or bottomless pits.
- Counter-Attack: Some of the melee weapons have a parry manuever instead of a regular block, allowing the player with proper timing to deflect enemy attacks and retaliate for huge damage. It can also be upgraded with an ability to reflect projectiles.
- Damage Typing: Weapons are divided between the types of damage (blunt, slashing, piercing) and certain enemies are more or less vulnerable to certain types of damage.
- Damn You, Muscle Memory!: More UI-related rather than input related, the attack notification may appear when the enemy is about to attack, the player is better suited actually paying attention to the enemy's attack animation to get the parry timing right than just going by the notification. The notification is mostly there to show whenever are there enemies attacking outside your vision, as well as whenver one isn't doing an unblockable attack, which has it's own icon.
- Dare to Be Badass: The player barbarian, considering his/her narration in the cutscenes:No one returned from the pilgrimage, yet there is no fear in my heart as I stare to the darkness.
- Death of a Thousand Cuts: The Bronze Katars, whose gimmick involves dealing increasingly more damage when attacking the same target.
- Dual Boss: The Jurmum act has a boss fight with Amazarak & Amane, who are essentially this game's Ornstein and Smaugh.
- Dual Wielding: The sickles and the katars are handled this way.
- Fish People: The drowners, who slightly resemble Deep Ones a bit.
- Life Meter: There's an obvious one for the player, and many enemies happen to have diegetic life meters in the form of glowing tips or slugs in their models that go dim as they take damage.
- Monster Compendium: The monsters and bosses have their own codex entries, and killing enough of them expands their information.
- Mummy: An agile enemy type encountered mostly in the catacombs.
- New Game Plus: Handy as you are unlikely to unlock every single of available skills in a single playthrough, letting you play through the game with all of the weapons and levels gathered. The mode ups the challenge by introducing essence conduits, randomly encountered variants of enemies that are worth a bit of the essence but are also powerful enough to potentially defeat you with a single hit.
- The game even has a New Game Plus Plus mode, which increases the likelyhood of encountering conduits.
- Off With The Head: Can happen quite a bit with your counter attacks. An unlockable skill would also allow you to take heads off defeated enemies to be used as projectile.
- Purely Aesthetic Gender: There's not much difference in gameplay between the player characters beyond the cutscenes, voice and player arm model.
- Rated M for Manly: The developers outright describe this game as "Metal AF".
- Regenerating Health: Sort of. In a vein similar to Bloodborne, whenever you'd take damage, you're able to regain the health you'd lost if you strike back the enemy that hit you quickly enough.
- Reset Button: Much like in the specimen of the Souls-like RPG genre, healing at the fountains - the game's equalivements of bonfires - also resets every single non-boss enemy in the level.
- Robbing the Dead: Few of the weapons (including the Ancient Spear, which is stumbled upon being stuck onto a long dead corpse) are obtained this way.
- Sandal Punk: The game's setting, which mostly harkens to a period between the Dark Age and Iron Age with some medieval and even futuristic aesthethics sprinkled in.
- Schrödinger's Player Character: Downplayed. The game's intro cutscene involves two of the player characters having a duel. Naturally, the one the player picks wins and goes on his/her quest.
- Set a Mook to Kill a Mook: In Jurmum if you'd get an enemy of various opposing factions (like say, Golden Army guards versus the Lepers) in a close vicinity they would certainly start a fight with each other.
- Sequential Boss: Janus, having three phases with their own movesets each.
- Shield-Bearing Mook: There are few enemy types like this, namely an armored ghoul, sword-wielding Golden Army troopers with a buckler and Golden Army Spearmen with larger shields.
- Souls-like RPG: The game has few characteristics of the genre, including common enemies that hit like a truck, focus on learning enemy attack patterns and visual cues, essence dropping upon player death thus have to be recovered in the next life, the use of a portable healing item, rewarding unorthodox tactics and checkpoints respawning enemies when the player choses to regenerate from them. It also differs from the norm in few areas, namely the tone not being as bleak as it tends to be with similar games, said portable healing item being recharged as the player kills enemies and the player not being limited with a stamina meter.
- Stripperiffic: Both of the playable barbarians.
- Teleport Spam: The melee Bandit variants first encountered in Jurmum love doing this. One of the types commonly teleport behind you while the other use their ability for fakeouts.
- Underground Level: The entire first act is set in The Forbidden Caves, which is the only remaining way into the sealed off city of Jurmum.
- Video Game Dashing: The player has a dash ability, which would especially come to play when dealing with enemies that have unblockable attacks.
- Wretched Hive: What's left of Jurmum has been reduced into this, especially the slums that are crawling with Lepers and Bandits.
- You Kill It, You Bought It: When you defeat Janus at the end of the catacombs, you open the entrance out of it to Jurmum with his sword and get to keep it.
