An adventure game in a dark medieval setting is nothing new. Neither is the fact that this type of game is being shown from a first-person perspective. The game gets some attention if the marketing team keeps mentioning that the main developer came from Bethesda, and one of the big hooks is the game's heavy metal aesthetic. At initial glance, The Axis Unseen makes good use of these things to deliver something interesting, but it doesn't take long before the game starts showing its many flaws.

In The Axis Unseen, a village has been massacred by what people would assume to be wild creatures. A hunter tracked down these creatures to kill them but failed to do so and paid with his life. As a fellow hunter, you take it upon yourself to pick up where your comrade left off and slay the creatures that murdered the village.

What makes this unusual is that the story is told as a playable music video. The game automatically switches the scenes for you, but you have full control over almost every scene. You can move around and attack everything around you, and all of your abilities and items are intact — much like how most Metroid games start. You can get hurt but you cannot die, especially since you're completely refilled after every scene transition.

The idea is fine, but the tutorial text changes how you feel about this section. You're trying to read the text and come to grips with what you should be doing. However, each scene doesn't linger for very long, so you sometimes don't have enough time to do what the game's asking you to do before being whisked away to another tutorial. Once the music video sequence is over and the game really begins, you're given tutorial prompts anyway, as if the previous section didn't exist. Again, the idea is neat, but the execution gives a player a very bad first impression of the title.

When you finally take proper control of your character, the game is fairly easy to pick up and understand. You have a hunting knife for melee attacks and a bow and arrow with limited ammo for projectile attacks. You can scavenge arrows from the ground (if they haven't been broken) or creatures you kill. You can acquire new arrow types in shrines, such as flaming arrows or arrows that stop time. The former becomes extremely useful because fire reacts well to the environment, causing normal arrows to catch fire and setting up walls of flame if you shoot them near tall grass. As far as defense goes, you can crouch to make less sound when walking, but you also have to be wary of where you walk, since different surfaces create different noises.

The Axis Unseen gives you a little more to work with in the form of magical abilities and tools. For example, you have a magic arrow that lights up the environment when you take it out but gives you a look at more of the environment when you fire it; it can also act as a beacon. Throughout your journey, you'll find spells that show scent trails for creatures and highlight when creatures are nearby or leave behind tracks to follow. You can also perform a teleport move to save you from a freefall, and you can pull up a stone wall from the ground to protect from charging animals. The wall also provides some elevation to give yourself an advantage when taking a shot against a creature.

As you can surmise from the tools and abilities, this isn't a run-and-gun title with medieval weaponry. Running is a handicap, as it takes away some abilities and muffles hearing and sight, making you more helpless if you need to flee any situation. You'll need to be aware of leaving behind footprints while also realizing that some surfaces makes footsteps more audible. Wind plays a part in ensuring your scent travels to other creatures. This is a game that really needs to be played as a stealth title in a big, open-world setting if you want to survive anything other than the Casual difficulty setting.

The benefit of these hunts is spiritual energy, which is the most precious thing you're seeking. That energy acts as XP which can be exchanged at your camp for various things, including more health, more sound dampening, and the ability to sprint longer. The camp also acts as a refill station for your arrows and healing items. Finally, the camp acts as a means to permanently store whatever spiritual energy you gather. The Axis Unseen takes a page out of the Dark Souls series by having you drop energy where you die, and you have one shot to re-acquire it before it permanently disappears.

The game emphasizes minimalism. With the exception of the pillar of green light that marks your next potential destination, there is no HUD. If you want to check how many arrows you have left, you need to pull up your quiver, which also has a flag to indicate the direction in which the wind is blowing. Your hand tattoos light up for things like your overall health or if your magic is in use. Your bow measures the sound of your footsteps, how much spiritual energy you've banked, and how much you're carrying at the moment, but you'll need to translate the meaning of the symbols to determine your exact number. For fans of immersion, this works out quite nicely, even if the lights on your hand and bow look more electronic than mystical in nature.

The combination makes for a very intriguing gameplay loop. The journey from spot to spot is freeform enough that no two treks will be the same. The game leans closer to a hunting sim due to the various aspects of your environment and the need to be aware of creature behavior at all times. It's one of those games where you can see yourself booting it up for a quick animal hunt, with the side effect of powering yourself up. The story takes a backseat to everything else; even when you pick up some scrolls to see the tales left behind by other hunters, you won't care about them as much.

The focus on minimalism presents the game with a major drawback: It is easy to get completely lost when navigating the world. You have beams of green light to provide a general direction, but the exact path is up to you. This is fine most of the time, but one time, a beam of light appeared after I obtained the night vision ability. That beam came from a mountain, but after several hours of wandering around, I wasn't able to reach the beam. It didn't help that the game's collision with rock walls was spotty, so I was taking paths in areas that were supposed to be out of bounds. In one case, it looked to be a plausible path until the clipping with rock walls began and I fell through some of the rock walls. This is where a lack of proper navigation or map started to backfire, as I'm now left wondering if this was a bug, if I had completely missed a path, or if I was in the wrong area to begin with. You get the feeling that most people running into this kind of problem would never finish the game if they got lost for too long.

Compounding the navigation issues is the multitude of bugs in various areas of The Axis Unseen. When it comes to diary entries, you're only given a prompt once. That wouldn't be much of an issue, but just about every other thing you do in the game gets multiple on-screen mentions. Unless you're playing on the easiest difficulty, it seems like the stealth barely works. You can be absolutely quiet with a stagnant wind, and even if an enemy is a considerable distance away, they'll start charging the moment they look in your direction. The hit boxes for enemies are large, so you'll get hit from far away because you're watching the animation play out. When you get hit, some enemies will knock you back a short distance, others will knock you back farther than expected, and a few — like the large boar — hit you so hard that you'll fly high into the air and land so hard it's a double damage attack. It gets worse if you land in front and get hit again, placing you in a near-infinite juggling combo. It's laughable, but it quickly grows tiresome because it happens far too often.

As far as the presentation goes, the sound design is strong. The music is the immediate highlight; the somber moments when you're in your own realm provide a good contrast to the more hectic moments when a creature is chasing you down. It's metal but not the overwhelming style that most newcomers to the genre may know. The only knock is how often you'll hear the same tracks due to the nature of the game. The music isn't overwhelming, so you'll hear mostly ambient sounds, and the sound design is very good, so footsteps are distinct and clear with good sound positioning. The game has no voices, but you won't miss it.

Meanwhile, the graphics turn out to be the presentation's weak point. The environments are desolate wastelands full of natural rubble, dried vegetation, twisted trees and bare earth. You'll only notice a change of scenery if you see the desert areas, but otherwise, you'll be hard-pressed to tell the swamps from the forest. There's also a plethora of skeletons of all shapes and sizes: giant bird and snake skeletons, human skeletons that are normal size and giant, and skeletons made completely of obsidian. Almost all of them are completely intact and shown with mouths agape. It starts off looking cool, but there are so many of them that it almost feels farcical. Foes are also twisted if they're made from living vegetation, while regular animals have not only mutated into large beings with mangled horns but also seem to suffer from mange with wrinkled skin and scant patches of fur.

Regardless of how you feel about the metal aesthetic, it's difficult to ignore the various graphical bugs. Many of the mountains and cliffs feature basic textures that barely show any color but appear smooth and shiny, a big contrast to the other rocks in the world that show off more detailed textures. Those same mountains have a tendency to let light pass through, giving you a false sense of hope that there's a passageway. In large patches of land, grass appears out of thin air at a very noticeable distance — and so do some enemies. Particles seem plentiful enough but completely disappear if you turn at the correct angle. Flame effects look flat when seen from above, which is a view you'll grow accustomed to, considering how high some enemies fling you. Rain looks nice until you notice that it consists of many flat polygons with transparencies on them; the boundaries are noticeable enough that they look like giant squares of raindrops. The various light shafts and godrays make the game look good until you see the flickering shadows left behind. Enemy animations also look bad; some creatures, like the giant boars, seem to prance rather than charge when running at you. It makes their hard, physics-defying hits more hilarious than menacing.

What makes this so befuddling is that The Axis Unseen does not run well at all on high-end hardware. Using the opening music video as the benchmark, a system with a Ryzen 7 7700X, 32GB of DDR5 RAM clocked at 6000Mhz, and a GeForce RTX 4090 on a 4K display can drop below 60fps in some sequences with everything cranked up to the max settings. You will need DLSS or something similar to get consistent high frame rates, and with the game looking far less impressive than other titles that seem to mandate DLSS with ray tracing, this game feels like it needs more optimization time.

Based on the game's performance on more powerful desktop PCs, it remains surprising that it runs rather decently on the Steam Deck. The title runs at the device's native 1280x800 resolution while set to a mix of low and medium graphical settings. For some reason, FSR is disabled, and the only upscaler to toggle on and off is Intel's XeSS. The frame rate fluctuates between 30-50fps depending on the area you're in and how much is going on, but the game looks fine. Battery life hits an average of 90 minutes with these settings, and be prepared to hear the system fan work hard during that time.

There's potential in The Axis Unseen. The idea of an adventure game with no HUD and an emphasis on your instincts is an intriguing setup, and the use of a simple set of weapons and powers keeps you from feeling overpowered. However, the combination of laughable physics and a plethora of bugs and design issues make this a game that's difficult to love if you aren't into the heavy metal aesthetic. As it stands now, it is an interesting title, but it needs plenty of patching before it will be worth checking out.

Score: 5.5/10