Let me get this straight, right from the first paragraph – Blade Of Darkness isn’t a walk in the park. It’s challenging and fairly unforgiving, brutally punishing those who rush happily at their first enemy with a sword in their hand by chopping their head off. Severance requires quite a bit of discipline, caution and patience – but if you possess all that, it’s going to be one of the most rewarding and fun games you’ve ever played.

If I had to summarize this game with just one word, it would have to be ‘combat’. BOD puts combat above everything else, combat is its heart and core. The combat mechanics were fairly revolutionary at the time of its release; while the fighting system of most other hack-n-slash games of that time (Enclave, Rune…) consisted of the player’s character jumping around and click-spamming the enemies, combat in Blade Of Darkness instead resembles a fighting game like, say, Mortal Kombat – although not as hectic and far more strategic. “A fighting game in third-person view” would be a fairly fitting description; while the camera is kept behind the character’s back at all times, the combat consists of blocking, attacking and performing keyboard combos – and keeping an eye on the character’s stamina and everything else going on around you, because the other enemies won’t hesitate to attack you while you’re busy trying not to get killed by that one troll with a poisoned sword in front of you. Every fight is truly an adrenaline rush – no matter how confident you are, the harsh reality is that the ork around the next corner can chop you to pieces just as easily as that fearsome minotaur that you’ve just defeated.

To make things better (or, perhaps, worse, depending on how you look at it), the movement and combat feels heavy and slow-ish, making it impossible to just jump and click your way out of every situation. The characters can indeed dodge and jump out of the way of the enemy’s blade if you’re quick enough to react, but if you hope that you can pull that off in a small room with a few enemies, you’re in for a rude awakening. Every blow and every slash of the sword feels heavy, no matter if it’s your club hitting an enemy knight or his sword cutting through your flesh. It’s outright impossible to simply click your foes to death. Like it or not, you’ll have to learn to fight efficiently and skillfully.

But once you master this skill, every fight becomes a beautiful dance rather than a challenge. The succession of dodges, quick stabs, blocks and well-timed combos is an entrancing and captivating sight, something that turns the fight into a product of intuition rather than precise calculation. Has the enemy started doing that particular attack that exposes his side? Go for a quick swing from the left. Or raise your weapon for a second, blocking his move, and counter-attack with a fierce diagonal cut. Rebel Act did an amazing job, making the gameplay fluid and intuitive, hard enough to keep your teeth clenched but incredibly rewarding when it all pays off at the end and you successfully chop the head off that ork and watch it fly across the room with spurts of blood painting the walls red.

Speaking of that, the game is notoriously violent and outright gory – something that only adds to the satisfaction after defeating a difficult enemy. Heads, limbs and pieces of torsos are all perfectly detachable when it comes to sharp weapons applied to them, with obligatory blood pools completing the picture – and the playable characters aren’t safe from having their limbs chopped off, too. Furthermore, the hacked off gibs can be picked up and carried around and even used as weapons in their own right – not particularly efficient weapons, sure, but definitely intimidating ones. The same applies to just about any other object of right size in the game – anything from bones to stools can be picked up and used to hit enemies with.

But it would be a lie to say that all that this game has to offer is combat. Oftentimes, you’ll find yourself running around temples and tombs, palaces and ancient ruins trying to solve a mystery or (most often) open a particular gate or door to advance through the level. A game with a brilliant combat system but terrible location design would be a huge disappointment – thankfully, Severance isn’t one. Whether it’s a foggy circular fortress or a creepy island of the dead, ruins of an ancient city in the middle of the rainforest or a sand-swept temple in the desert, all the locations are absolutely beautiful and atmospheric – and, let’s admit it, that is quite a compliment for a game released in 2001. Some of the architecture and sceneries are jaw-droppingly gorgeous, making you stop all the running and fighting for a minute just to admire the view. Drawing influence from various cultures around the world (mainly those located in the Fertile Crescent, but reaching as far as India and even South America for one location), the level design has amazing style to it, fully immersing the player into the world of the game. At the same time, with all their richness and beauty, the locations never feel safe. Both the dark and gloomy levels and the bright and sun-caressed ones have that feeling of disturbance to them, making you look behind your back every now and then and expect a foe to jump at you from any recess in the wall. Occasionally, Blade Of Darkness takes a nosedive straight into the horror genre, making you visit dark creepy dungeons and towers of necromancers – and even a pitch-black crypt once, where you have to fight through hordes of mummified zombies in the flickering light of your torch that has an annoying tendency of burning out.

Speaking of torches and pitch-black crypts, Blade Of Darkness loves playing with light and shadows. It was one of the first games – if not the first one – that featured real-time volumetric shadows, and, as if that was not enough, shadows from several sources of light at once – which is truly an impressive feature for a game from 2001. The graphics of Severance were fantastic at the time of its release – for 2001, it was essentially what Crysis was for 2007, a benchmark and a new standard for videogame graphics. In addition to the games of shadows mentioned above, the graphics quality plays a defining role in the beauty of architecture and landscapes described in the previous paragraph. When you see a sacred temple of a deity, sculpted with meticulous attention to detail, or a cold fortress of the knights atop the mountain, with patches of snow covering passageways between its high stone walls, it is sometimes hard to believe that something this beautiful and detailed was made in 2001. In this regard, the game has aged astonishingly well, enemy models being just about the only thing that immediately doesn’t look modern at first glance.

Music is something else that adds to the atmosphere greatly. It suits the events of the game perfectly; it’s rich and beautiful when you’re exploring deserted areas and taking in the magnificent views, it’s tense and exciting when you’re battling a difficult enemy, it’s epic and solemn during some of the game’s most climactic scenes and fights. It can be chilling and creepy in dark dungeons, but then it will smoothly change to a lighter ambient score once you make it to an outdoor area. Overall, sans some somewhat cheesy suspense effects, the sound design of Severance is brilliant – it’s definitely a shame that the game’s score was never released separately. While all the sounds and music of BOD are easily accessible in the game’s folder, the audio quality is quite mediocre, some of the music pieces being mono wavs sampled at 22 kHz, others – 128 kbps mp3s.

The player has four playable characters to choose from, each character specializing in his or her types of weapons and fighting style. Each of the characters has their own unique starting level and their own story, although the storyline differences between them disappear fairly early into the game. Most new players love the Barbarian, with his two-handed swords and cool-looking attacks, although he might be a bit too difficult for the first-time players. A balanced choice for a first playthrough would be the Knight, with his efficient use of shields and easy to master combos. Additionally, his starting level was the one bundled with the demo of the game, so it was meticulously polished and demonstrates the game’s mood and gameplay features very well. The Amazon is also a good choice for first-timers, though playing with her feels almost cheatingly easy at times, with her long-range attacks and the ability to quickly roll far enough out of harm’s way (although her starting level is actually quite the opposite of ‘cheatingly easy’!). I definitely wouldn’t recommend playing with the Dwarf on your first playthrough, though, since playing with him has a very high chance of rage quits and throwing the keyboard out of the window in frustration. In any case, once you’ve completed the game with one character, what could be better than starting it over with another one, just to see how well you’ll manage this time? BOD has fantastic replayability. Besides, over the years, the fan community has created countless mods and singleplayer maps to check out, some of these maps rivaling the original campaign in their detail and complexity.

Perhaps the only serious downside of the game is its story. It’s not that the storyline is inherently bad – on the contrary, the game is set in a world heavily influenced by Zoroastrian teachings and the Earth-that-was a few dozen centuries ago; the story is a prime example of the monomyth found in many cultures and has a couple of (admittedly, fairly cliched) plot twists. The real problem is that the storyline could have easily not existed here at all. Most of the time, all you’re doing is going from one door to another, trying to find keys and gems while fighting abominations and evil guys and admiring the atmosphere – and wondering why you’re here. It’s not that the story is nonsentical, has plot holes or is unrelated to what’s actually happening on the screen – but the only times when it actually surfaces are level intros and intermission screens with the narrator saying a few words about the place, and occasional cutscenes that are few and far between. To figure out what’s actually going on, the player has to pay rigorous attention to these small bits of information, then piece them together and speculate on things that were left unsaid or just mentioned briefly in the passing. If you go through the trouble of actually doing that, the storyline does indeed make sense, justifying everything that happens (or, at least, most of it) and making the ending truly satisfying. If not… The storyline could have just as easily been something along the lines of “everything in this world wants to kill you” and it would have affected the gameplay just the same.

Some people have found the controls to be difficult at first, though not exactly awkward. The core feature of BOD – combat – relies on the attack and block functions and combinations of movement keys that result in directional attacks and weapon-specific combos. Lack of strafe outside of combat situations is something that many have found confusing and unexpected.

To conclude the list of downsides, the game’s development was somewhat rushed during the last few months of production, leading to some gameplay features and parts of storyline being abandoned. Various signs of this are noticeable throughout the game, such as the presence of a different type of bow that you never get to use, the aforementioned heavily fragmented storyline and various minor bugs that may happen every now and then. There are major bugs as well, but nowadays most of them are caused by the game being pretty dated already and not always running perfectly on modern machines and modern Windows. One of the features that definitely suffered from the rushed development is multiplayer, which was left not as exciting as it could potentially be and clearly underdeveloped – nowadays, it requires a considerable amount of effort to set up a match since the game supports only LAN connections; a VPN software like Hamachi would come in handy in this case.

The game has aged fairly well and will sometimes work out of the box on a modern version of Windows like Windows 7. Players experiencing crashes, glitched fonts and such are advised to google “OpenGL Raster” for Blade Of Darkness – it’s a fan-made (as far as I know) alternative to DirectX Raster DLLs that come bundled with the game; OpenGL offers far better stability these days (the game might look a bit dark with it, so you may have to adjust the brightness and gamma additionally in the game). Occasionally, some cutscenes will not work as intended (usually resulting in the character walking in circles and other similar issues); this can usually be solved by temporarily switching back to DirectX Raster (even if only for this one cutscene) or toggling VSync (it’s the “swap buffers” parameter in the “Misc” tab in the OpenGL Raster settings window). If you’re having troubles with the fog being too thick to see anything in some locations, google “Fog Fix” (sometimes spelled “FogFix”) which is a minor mod that solves this problem (it doesn’t affect gameplay). Lastly, just for the record, the game is locked at the 4:3 aspect ratio so if you’ll set up a widescreen resolution for it, everything on the screen will be simply stretched horizontally. As of early 2015, there’s still no fix for this, although the developer of the ENB mod for BOD (google “Blade Of Light” if you’re into that sort of thing) is currently experimenting with some ideas. If you’re reading this review in the far future, go take a look if they succeeded. The best (though not always available) solution these days is to set a 4:3 resolution like 1440×1080 for a 1920×1080 monitor and then choose letterboxing the image instead of always forcing fullscreen stretching in the settings of your graphics card or your monitor.

Despite these flaws, Blade Of Darkness is truly unrivaled when it comes to gameplay. If you haven’t heard about this hidden gem and if you don’t mind a game that won’t let you stroll through it casually, you should definitely give it a try. These days, it can be obtained on GOG for just a few bucks. Have fun chopping up knights and orks and saving the world in the process!

Conclusion: Severance: Blade Of Darkness is one of the cornerstones of the genre of hack-n-slash games. Despite being fairly obscure due to bad marketing and the teeth-clenching difficulty, it is rightfully considered by many to be one of the best examples of how a sword combat should be handled. Blade Of Darkness teaches a painful lesson to those accustomed to jumping and clicking their way out of any fight; it’s challenging and at times frustratingly unforgiving – but in the end, it all pays off when a visceral, beautiful fight ends up with you standing and your enemy having his head chopped off.

If you don’t mind a game that won’t let you stroll through it casually, if the thought of intense beautifully choreographed fights fascinates you and if you haven’t heard about this hidden gem yet, don’t hesitate. You’re in for a world of fun.