What do we want? The ability to be evil in video games! How do we want it? Designed in a way that’s mechanically enriching! That’s what I’m hoping Arise Dark Lord will be, anyway, a Frankensteinian mish mash of action, real-time strategy, tower defence and base building where you are an evil overlord who rules over a nefarious army and wants to kill all humans.

That is, obviously, quite intense! So let’s break it down. You take direct control of the Dark Lord, a slightly generic looking big baddie. You’re able to move around as him, raising up the undead to do your evil bidding, using your mouse to direct groups of these wights towards your enemies. Over time you can seemingly add relics to your collection, improving your sorcery, giving you the ability to revive felled opponents and add them to your army.

This predominantly takes places across an overworld that, very appealingly, aesthetically calls back to illustrative maps from the likes of Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings and other fantasy settings of similar vibe. Here, you find your own sort of Barad-dûr stronghold tower thingy (where the eye of Sauron hangs out), which you must defend by posting up turrets, barricades and cursed traps. Conversely, you can invade your enemies’ homeland and lay west to them, assuming you’re strategic enough in your decisions.

While details are slimmer on this front, it does sound like there’s some resource management to be done, presumably through that evil army of yours (the Dark Lord? Doing manual labour? Heaven forbid!), and I assume this factors into the kind of constructions you can erect. Overall it looks like quite a neat approach to the RTS genre! Whether it’s any good or not, you can find out through this prototype on itch.io, but the full thing’s not due out until sometime in 2027.

If it’s of any interest to you, you can wishlist it on Steam while you wait to hear more.