This bowhunting game created by a Bethesda veteran plays like if you made a whole game out of Skyrim's stealth archer playstyle

The Axis Unseen is a very different sort of game to The Elder Scrolls' decadent, sprawling slices of fantasy life, but it also kind of feels like Skyrim stripped to the studs, an entire game made out of one strand of The Elder Scrolls series' DNA. No townsfolk, guilds, or celebrity voice cameos⁠—just you, a bow, a crouch-walk button, and a world full of skeleton-strewn alpine vistas and vaguely Norse creatures to hunt.

The result definitely impressed me in The Axis Unseen's first publicly available demo after years of trailers and teasers. It's arguably in a completely different genre than the Bethesda RPGs creator Nate Purkeypile formerly worked on, but it feels like an elaboration on a very specific way of playing those games. This is a ranger simulator, not an RPG where you get to play a ranger. Thanks to that focus, The Axis Unseen is an isolating, surreal, and very satisfying stealth-shooter.

The demo opens with a sort of combination tutorial and playable trailer following a hunter through their early life, training, and flashes of mythic battles. It's sort of like the beginning of Metroid Prime in that you get to frag out with a full endgame arsenal before you're brought back down to earth. In this case, the hunter you're playing as dies, and you take control of their successor in the game proper.

While the game eventually opens up an arsenal of magical powers and alternate arrowheads, you've got two main moves at your disposal: crouch walking, and shooting your bow. After that pre-game frag out, your quiver is severely restricted: Just three arrows to start, though you automatically hoover them back up on approach. The resulting shooting is tense and high stakes, demanding you make every shot count with a robust locational damage system. Aggressive fantasy elk go down quick with a shot to the lungs, for example, but their gnarled horns make for a natural protection against headshots.

And it feels fantastic to land a killing blow on one of Odin's magical