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Earth is now overrun by the Seven Deadly Sins and the mystical creatures and degenerated beings that serve them. The Charred Council calls upon Fury to battle from the heights of heaven down through the depths of hell in a quest to restore the balance and prove that she is the most powerful of the Horsemen.

The game is set to be an open-world action-adventure that includes a focus on exploration and environmental puzzles, and will continue the series’ staple hack and slash combat with new protagonist, Fury.

It’s set around the same time as the events of Darksiders 2, which was released almost five years ago, and will follow Fury’s quest to destroy unique physical versions of of the Seven Deadly Sins.

Gunfire Games’ development team includes multiple ex-Vigil Games employees who worked on Darksiders and Darksiders 2, including the Game Director, Executive Producer, Technical Director, Lead Environment Artist, and more.

Since the studio’s formation in 2014, they’ve worked on titles including Darksiders 2: Deathinitive Edition and Chronos, which was one of IGN’s nominees for the best VR game of 2016.

Lars Wingefors, Co-Founder and Group CEO at THQ Nordic AB said, “After countless rumors, a major catalogue acquisition, and even a corporate re-brand, the team at THQ Nordic is thrilled to finally confirm plans for Darksiders III.”

Play as FURY - a mage who must rely on her whip and magic to restore the balance between good and evil on Earth!
Harness FURY's magic to unleash her various forms - each granting her access to new weapons, moves and traversal abilities
Explore an open-ended, living, free-form game world in which FURY moves back and forth between environments to uncover secrets while advancing the story
Defeat the Seven Deadly Sins and their servants who range from mystical creatures to degenerated beings
Darksiders signature art style - expansive post-apocalyptic environments that take the player from the heights of heaven to the depths of hell, dilapidated by war and decay and overrun by nature

Similar to the way Zelda expanded on its own core concepts in Breath of the Wild, if a puzzle exists in Darksiders 3, it should make sense in an environment rather than being a trap some unseen character inexplicably laid out for the player for no logical reason. Don’t expect any gated combat, and enemies (some of which existed in previous games, some of which are brand new) should feel a lot more like they belong in the world natively, rather than just popping up inconveniently to fight you. Yes, there’ll still be collectibles creatively scattered throughout the world, but no out-of-place chests, and, ultimately, every inch of the world should feel more contextualized if all goes according to Gunfire’s plan.

That same ideology seems to echo throughout each level, in a world that is supposed to be fully connected and realized, without any hard loads. If you take an elevator down to a different environment, the one you came from really is the height of that elevator away from you. It’s supposed to be a physically, logically connected open-world, and in part because of that, it’ll also have a whole lot of ‘swiss cheese game design’ - basically, the idea that you should be able to see glimpses of environments you’ve already been to, or ones you’ve yet to go to as you traverse, like through the holes in swiss cheese. Based on the tiny chunk that I played, it made me want to explore everything so much more than I would have otherwise, because you can always see the next thing, just out of reach.

And Fury should be a fun character to explore all that with - we’ll talk about her a lot more in our Hero Feature later this month, but the short of it is that she’s fast, agile and feels a little like post-apocalyptic-Catwoman-meets-God-of-War, but with much cooler hair. If you haven’t played a Darksiders game, it should be easy for new players to pick up without any story confusion (though you can also grab both previous games as part of THQ Nordic’s ‘Fury’s Collection’ on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One).

One particular area, called Haven, is entirely shaped by the gorgeous, enormous tree that sits perched and glowing in the middle. It’s a relatively safe area, and the roots that tendril their way through the city slowly get thicker towards the center, which presents it’s own creative navigation tool.

It’s also just pretty overall, though it still maintains that unique, classic Darksiders art style, and with an immediately noticeable increase in verticality versus previous games. Darksiders 3 is the first in the series to run on Unreal rather than an internally built engine, and subtleties like water, lava and lighting particularly had noticeably improved. I didn’t get to explore the world anywhere near as much as I’d have liked, but did get to see what looked like a series of skyscrapers floating on clouds in the sky, a damp-looking, swampy area, and a fiery hollow - each of which seemed to exist exactly where it should in terms of verticality, with the hollow being far below the rest.