Is it finally happening? Are we, as a community, as a people, ready to accept that maybe Deus Ex: Invisible War kind of ruled? I think we might be, and as evidence I present the demo for Corpus Edax, an "immersive first-person-melee RPG" created by a developer named Luis Bento.
Set on a blighted, dystopian planet to which humanity fled after turning Earth into a blighted, dystopian planet, Corpus Edax wants to combine "the freedom of choice from immersive-sims like Deus Ex and Dishonored with RPG systems and dialogue choices from Fallout," and blends it with "first-person-melee combat system similar to Condemned: Criminal Origins and Dark Messiah".
In other words, you can decide to kick out the windows on your apartment complex/space station within about 30 seconds of starting, pulling people nearby to an early, airless grave before the security system can manage to slam down its shutters.
Apparently stealth is an option, but I honestly never tried. These powerful legs were made for flying bicycle kicks, not crouch-walking. There are other skills, too, stuff like hacking and lockpicking, but it just felt too correct to zoom around menacing everyone in creative, physics-y ways to spend a long time trying much else.
It's reminiscent of the wacky Havok physics engine that let you get up to all sorts of profane tomfoolery with everything from basketballs to human corpses in Invisible War. There are no guns in Corpus Edax, so you rely only on your wits, fists, and whatever melee weapons you can improvise. Once you've finished bludgeoning a guard to death, you can pick up his helmet and attempt to drop kick it at his allies, or even just heave his entire body at them if you're strong enough.
The game isn't out yet (though it does have a Steam page), but the developer is running an Indiegogo campaign to get it off the ground and anticipates a release date of November this year. It has a couple of demos you can try right now, though. There's the short, relatively unpolished game jam version—made in a single month—that you can play on Windows, macOS, and Linux, as well as the more recent Indiegogo demo, which is a bit shinier but only has a Windows build right now.
They're both free, and if your feelings about the janky, underloved immersive sims of old are as warm as mine, I'd recommend checking them out. The spirit of Alex Denton is back, my friends, and their boots weren't made for walking.
