The Steam Next Fest demo for ex-Skyrim dev's huge action game is a stealth archer’s dream - but trust me, skip the tutorial

With so much on offer in Steam Next Fest, I figured it made sense to narrow down my choices with a game that I was at least passingly familiar with. Fortunately, it wasn't long before I stumbled on The Axis Unseen, a heavy metal horror game from former Skyrim developer Nate Purkeypile. Even more fortunately, it turned out that I was far more familiar with how this sprawling action game would play than I expected.

The Axis Unseen is played from the business end of a bow and arrow, which immediately appeals to that most iconic of Skyrim builds, the stealth archer. I lost uncountable hours to the archery skill tree in Bethesda's RPG, and it's fun to see Purkeypile resurrecting an immediately recognisable version of The Elder Scrolls 5's sneakiest combat strategy. Down to details as fine as the sound of a stretching bowstring, it brings me straight back to the plains of Whiterun.

But The Axis Unseen isn't resting on Bethesda's laurels, and Purkeypile is using his new setting to bring some entertaining archery tech to bear. Your bow is magical, and with the help of various runes etched into its limbs and tattooed on your hands, you get a much clearer picture of the world around you than anything Skyrim offered. The stealth indicator - the iconic opening eye that marked out your Dragonborn's visibility - can be found at one end of the bow. A sound monitor flares up if you make too much noise - running makes your footfall louder, of course, but so does walking over solid rock rather than soft mud - helping you keep an eye on how conspicuous you're being. Nearby enemies cause a symbol on your hand to flare up. Your bow might seem low-tech by modern Olympic standards - the use of a makeshift flag to track wind direction is particularly basic - but it's got some nifty tricks at hand.

Arguably my favorite of the bunch are your spirit arrows. These spectral missiles can be fired wherever you like, offering an eagle-eyed view of the surrounding area as they fly and hover in place for a moment or two. It's a dramatic effect, especially in The Axis Unseen's mysterious landscapes. It's so effective, in fact, that I quickly depleted my reserve of magic arrows, and was forced to figure out my location the normal way. I learnt the hard way that I only had a small number of arrows in my quiver, and while you can add to your arsenal and recover arrows from the world, if a shot goes wide of the mark, that ammo might be gone forever.

That adds an extra layer of danger to everything in The Axis Unseen. Your enemies are fast-moving and erratic, and while you do have a melee weapon that you can use on approaching foes, it's very much a last resort. You certainly don't want to be forced to use it because you've blasted all of your arrows into some distant forest.

Frustratingly, that's something I was inadvertently prone to doing thanks to the demo's intro/tutorial hybrid. When you first load up The Axis Unseen, you'll be asked if you'd like to check out an intro sequence. Set to heavy metal music and offering a glimpse at the wildly gothic world that Purkeypile created for his game, this intro sequence teaches you the basics of the game, but skips on to the next vignette every ten seconds or so. It's chaotic - so much so that Purkeypile himself chimes in to tell any players that might be easily overwhelmed that it's OK to skip it. 

It's an interesting idea, but it gives away too much of the game's mythos, without really giving you any reason to ground yourself in its world, or enough time to get to grips with its systems. I don't count myself among the crowd that might find this kind of thing overwhelming, but I certainly found it bewildering, especially when all the tutorials it offered me were repeated immediately upon starting the game itself, and in a manner that was far easier to get to grips with. The Axis Unseen is a strange yet enticing creation, but it's one that you probably don't need to learn to play while fleeing its most terrifying monsters during its wild opening sequence.

The Axis Unseen is five times bigger than Skyrim, and Purkeypile isn't afraid to riff on Todd Howard's infamous line.