The team behind Metroid Dread plans to reforge action-adventure with Blades of Fire

Blades of Fire takes place in an age of petrified steel. An all-powerful witch queen’s spell turns all the world’s steel into stone, apart from that wielded by an army of brainwashed minions who once served her father. This one small technological twist changes everything for this unique fantasy world. Granted a legendary hammer, Aran de Lira is the only one who can forge new weapons and fight back, becoming an unwilling hero on an unlikely quest.

MercurySteam’s much-anticipated follow-up to Metroid Dread, Blades of Fire is a brand-new IP that aims to reforge the action adventure genre with strategic combat, the debut of a rich sword-and-sorcery fantasy world, and a deep weapon forging system that hopes to deliver unlimited customization. Each weapon you forge is one-of-a-kind, ready to carve out its own destiny. You don’t build a character—you build an arsenal.

We recently played the opening stages of Blades of Fire and spoke to the team about how they’re reforging the action adventure and making players think about weapons from a fresh perspective.

Closing the circle

It was a long path to get here for Enric Alvarez, MercurySteam Co-Founder, CEO, and Game Director. Just as the age of iron and steel was preceded by 2,000 long years of the Bronze Age, Blades of Fire is the culmination of a 24-year journey, a period the Madrid-based studio spent sharpening their skills and burnishing a prestigious reputation.
 
In 2001, the founding members of MercurySteam worked at Rebel Act. The studio only released one game: Blade of Darkness, a PC cult classic sometimes regarded as a precursor to the Souls games for its minimalist storytelling, challenging stamina-driven combat, and a dark fantasy world beyond redemption. The influence of Conan and The Lord of the Rings (pre-Peter Jackson adaptations, as The Fellowship of the Ring came out that December) was strong, pairing exhilarating sword-and-board action with epic grandeur. Perhaps too ahead of its time, Rebel Act closed its doors after Blade of Darkness failed to find a sufficient audience.

Two decades since, it’s safe to say MercurySteam landed on its feet. The fledgling studio gained early acclaim co-developing horror FPS Clive Barker’s Jericho, before convincing Konami they were a safe pair of hands to reinvent Castlevania with the Lords of Shadow trilogy. They rewarded Konami’s faith with the best-selling titles ever released in the franchise’s storied history.

One classic series down, MercurySteam next turned to Metroid. The team first impressed Nintendo with the remake Metroid: Samus Returns on the 3DS. Next, given leeway for an all-new title, they blew Nintendo and audiences away with the even better Metroid Dread, which released in 2021 and made a strong case for Game of the Year with its irresistible pacing, polished gameplay, and excellent boss fights.

With MercurySteam's stock as high as it’s ever been, the time was finally right to return to their passion project—a spiritual successor to Blade of Darkness, returning to a genre close to Alvarez’s heart in order to, as he puts it, "pay tribute to the game and the developer upon whose ashes MercurySteam was born."

Growing up in the '80s, Alvarez says he was obsessed with classic fantasy movies of the time like Excalibur, The Princess Bride, Ladyhawke, and The Dark Crystal, as well as mind-expanding sci-fi novels like Solaris and Limbo, the gothic fantasy Carmilla, and ambitious graphic comics like Watchmen and Akira.

"Whatever little money I had in my pocket always ended up at the bookstore, the comic shop, the movie theater, or the arcade in my town," says Alvarez. "I thought it would be amazing to do something that combined it all. I still don’t know how, but that’s exactly what happened!"

"For us, it's like closing a circle," he adds, his enthusiasm clear to see. "We started with a sword and sorcery game—very dark, very gritty, challenging combat. All these years, we’ve been craving to go back to that setting. Finally, we had the opportunity."

 

A sword and sorcery revival

Aran de Lira is an unlikely tragic hero. He’s lived his life secluded, a once-comfortable existence among royalty cut short by ruinous events. He now resides in an isolated cabin, scarred mentally by regret and physically by a deep facial wound. Aran's a middle-aged man with salt-and-pepper hair—just like his creator, who chose to write a character he could empathize with. Someone with history, with regrets, but who expected to be a hero all the same.

"It's not a redemption story. He has nothing to redeem," says Alvarez. "It’s a reunion story."

Perhaps not a happy one, as Alvarez explains the inexorable emotional influence of Alexandre Dumas’ famous revenge novel The Count of Monte Cristo. Like the Count—who was wrongfully imprisoned for treason for 14 long years of suffering—Aran paid a painful (and entirely undeserved) price. The adult who went through much sorrow in his past life now seeks to recoup what destiny stole from him and potentially rekindle a long-lost romance.

Aran isn't entirely without help. Your companion Adso is Aran’s complete opposite—a prolific notetaker, more talkative and intellectual than our taciturn, muscular protagonist. Don’t expect even the modest combat assistance Atreus provides Kratos in God of War (let alone its sequel), but Adso’s fragility is compensated by his knowledge and spell-crafting.

Adso and the other companions you encounter are often your way into this world. My favorite so far is an adorable skeleton-child always eager for a piggyback—you can’t say no to him after learning his story.

When duty calls, Aran reluctantly sets forth from his cabin with a clear and simple mission: kill the queen. Not that events are ever that simple in this vivid fantasy world, which is full of inventive peculiarities like shelled frogs that leap harmlessly around caves and insects with glowing embers embedded in their carapaces. The relative familiarity of the early hamlet and swamp areas soon gives way to more ambitious designs—such as the Crimson Fort, a colossal mountaintop castle made entirely from wood and an early highlight in Blades of Fire.

As a developer, Alvarez says he seeks out ideas that scare him. The process may be intimidating, but the results speak for themselves. "We freaked out at the beginning. It's never gonna work! You need stones to make a proper castle," says Alvarez.

But he insisted, and MercurySteam's art team proved the doubters wrong. The same chain of emotions played out later with a necropolis level, which eschewed conventional Christian gravesite influences for older and stranger roots—a burial place for humanity’s unknowable ancestors of murky legend.

Art director Arturo Serrano intends Blades of Fire to invoke the rawness of classic fantasy, citing Conan artist Frank Frazetta and French illustrator Gustave Doré, known for his deeply twisted depictions of Dante’s The Divine Comedy. "We aimed to bring their influence to a level of detail and dynamism that only modern video games can achieve," Serrano says. "This means vivid colors, dramatic compositions, and charismatic characters. Unlike modern fantasy, which tends to be more realistic and overly subtle in its designs, we sought a more expressive and creative approach."
 

Weaponized ignorance

This world doesn’t give up its secrets all at once. Like Aran, a man of few words after long solitude, Blades of Fire isn’t much for handholding.

"This is a story-driven game, but this is not a game that will hold your hand and tell you everything," says Alvarez. "It will need your active behavior. You participate in the characters' ignorance about the places they’re crossing at the moment."

That feeling was evident in the early stages of my playthrough, often marked by a sense of confusion and bewilderment followed by revelation. Yes, I unlocked a map, but I was rarely given a clear objective marker or a glowing trail to follow along the woodland floor.

Instead, charged to find a swamp for signs of the master forger, I cleared the first hamlet area section-by-section in systematic pursuit of a putrid bog or any evidence that I might be travelling in the right direction. I discovered dangerous platoons of the Queen’s Hounds (her run-of-the-mill lackeys), a troll whose rocky limbs defied the bite of my current weapons, a marsh occupied by a tricky elemental, and more and more interconnecting pathways.

At last, I stumbled into the swamp. I deserved my brief rest at a nearby waypoint, if not the swift demise that followed when mobbed by skeletons shortly afterward.

MercurySteam is devoted to immersion, creating a convincing world in Blades of Fire and handing players the responsibility to uncover it. You don’t find weapons; you gather materials and forge them by hand. Your companion won’t call out which weapon you should use mid-combat; the duty to experiment with weapons and stances (or bury your nose in Adso’s copious notes to find the solution) lies with you alone.

The last time MercurySteam worked on a melee-centric action game was Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 back in 2014. Much has changed since then. Alvarez explains that linearity fell away for contemporary action-adventure narrative design.

"In Blades of Fire, players decide the pace they advance towards the story. 15 years ago it was the other way around! The story was in control, the players followed it," he says.

Meeting expectations for a rich and exciting environment—one whose events can be triggered in any one of numerous orders—is a steep challenge compared to the older, simpler structure of narrow corridors into cutscenes. "It's like speaking a new language. You have a lot more things to consider."
 

Forging your weapons

The steepest challenge was the mechanic that binds the entire game together, the Forge. A mechanic designed to produce limitless possibilities had equally limitless ripple effects on every other part of the game. Alvarez compares every change they made to shifting a single card from a house of cards—a risky move that often left them picking up the toppled pieces.

"Forging is a complex thing," says Alvarez. "Human beings have been forging weapons, blades, and steel weapons forever. It's immense, the science and the art of forging, but we had to choose a way to present this to people that was both entertaining and useful for your combat experience."

In Blades of Fire, you first need materials, mostly found randomly by killing enemies and smashing every destructible in sight. You then choose a Forge Scroll, featuring numerous weapon designs split across seven weapon families. Forge Scrolls unlock over time, so pick from the designs you've already accrued.

Next you can select the weapon's components and weigh their numerous trade-offs. An axe head made from rare Reaper Steel, for instance, adds significant slashing power and durability at the expense of stamina and speed, while Unyielding Steel adds a tremendous amount of durability. Multiply these decisions over eight different areas of each weapon.

The resulting weapon is tailored to your preferences, your available resources, or maybe simply designed to deal with a currently impassable foe’s weaknesses.

With your design chosen and materials ready, it’s time to forge. A surprisingly intensive mini-game follows where you beat the metals into the shape of your blade. Like creating art from a bar chart, you slam down your hammer time after time, spreading blocks of molten metal into graceful form, maneuvering dents and ridges into a streamlined shape. Your success and the time taken to achieve its desired form sets the number of times the weapon can be repaired to its full condition. Your best score per weapon is saved, so you won’t need to repeat the task if you’re happy with your best performance.
 

Flamed blades don’t always burn

After much experimentation, my proudest accomplishment was my first Flamed Blade. Given the game's fiery title, you might expect a "Flamed Blade" to feature tongues of fire erupting from the sword, a flesh-searing and armor-melting wonder.

That wasn’t what Aran held in his hands. It was spectacular, but in a different way. These flames were figurative—a distinctive pattern of undulating waves running along my flamberge’s edge. The pattern is more than just decorative. It increases durability by engineering even distribution of each strike’s force rather than creating a weak point likely to snap. The result was a durable, lengthy weapon that became a favorite, whether spearing dangerous foes from a distance or sweeping away multiple weaker enemies, like skeleton warriors.

I never thought I’d care so much about cross-sections, pommels, the qualities of various types of steel, and the various nitty-gritty details of forging steel that produced my trusty flamberge. I made it. I designed it. I selected materials, and then I forged it by hand, beating the metal into shape to the extent of my ability. Somewhere along the way, I invested part of myself in my tools, as attached as I’d become to my favorite XCOM 2 soldier or Football Manager striker.

Aran himself won’t level up in Blades of Fire. You’ll never see a character sheet or a litany of unlockable special moves and magic powers. Everything comes down to the Forge and the tools you make with it. When you die, you don’t drop currency, crafting materials, or a Soulslike's XP collectibles. You lose your weapon, your most vital tool, and must fight to reclaim it from where it rests, marking the spot of your demise.
 

Reimagining weapons

Joan Amat, Lead Game Designer, is responsible for designing the house of cards that is the Forge system, as well as its combat. He tells me that, to create the Forge—with its emphasis on underexplored physical properties—the team had to reevaluate the way they looked at weaponry.

First, they dove into historical weapons YouTubers and studied what they considered to be a weapon’s most valuable traits. Amat explains that the way most games think of blades differs from reality. "[Historical YouTubers] are talking about edges, they're talking about balance, center of mass, grips and handling and edge alignment. They’re not talking about agility, strength, stamina, intelligence, and dexterity, right? Those are not the stats."

The reason any weapon functions as it does comes down to its design and materials. Those determine how kinetic energy from a swinging arm translates to a lethal cutting, piercing, or bludgeoning force.

The team found themselves questioning the fundamental physics behind steel. A bladed weapon’s sharpness comes from its edge, but what makes the edge sharp?

Amat discovered edges can accommodate a variety of designs: straight, concave, convex, and more. These features create weapons with greater penetrative force, but at a cost: less durability, or a blade that grows dull faster, or complex edge shapes that make sharpening take more time. Likewise, the steel used to design the core and edge—which use different alloys with different features—makes a marked difference.

This intricate combination of factors goes into each and every weapon made in Blades of Fire. It’s streamlined, of course—you’re not dictating your blade’s length down to the millimeter the way you might decide the length of a Dark Souls character’s nose—but you’re still judging weapons by different metrics. Combined, these push players to specialization, matching form to function. You can’t make a long weapon that won’t take up significant amounts of stamina when you spin it around quickly. Instead, when the situation demands, you’d be wise to switch to twin axes or kukris.

Initially, MercurySteam went a bit too deep into technical factors for materials. Hardness, flexibility, and tenacity are the qualities material engineers prize about steel. More carbon for greater strength, more chrome for flexibility. There was a risk of the Forge becoming a simulation that bogged down the system at the heart of the game instead of enriching it.

In particular, Amat says their early experiments recreating the interaction between blade types and armor added too much complexity. For example, the bigger the impact area, the more armor protects against it. A club bounces off plate armor that a spear can pierce. It was interesting, but unintuitive and hard to communicate—players may strain to judge if an enemy's armor is chainmail or plate between evading strikes.

Streamlining was the answer, dropping elements from Blades of Fire that added unnecessary complexity. Like the designs produced by the  Forge, their system needed to be honed to a sharp point.
 

Creating a strategic challenge mentality

Customization often invites min-maxing, an urge to optimize your way to an all-powerful weapon. Early in development, the team investigated what Blades of Fire looked like if it played into those impulses.

In this incarnation, the Forge revolved around scaling. Your aim was to layer damage multipliers on top of one another to produce greater and greater numbers. You can see this exact process in endgame Path of Exile builds geared to output sky-high damage, or in the smug thrill of racking up an incredible points total in Balatro after triggering a cascade of Joker effects.

MercurySteam removed the feature. Decisions in Blades of Fire now simply add or subtract from weapon stats, with no multipliers in sight.

Why cut such a reliable dopamine rush? One reason was practical—the complexity of hyperscaling demands huge playtesting resources to maintain balance and limit (not even eliminate) inevitable game-breaking combos. The second, more important reason was it reduced gameplay to a math problem, not a bespoke strategic puzzle.

There’s no perfect weapon. Each enemy should test a different skill, not simply be swatted away by a perfect hyperscaling build. Some enemies won’t lower their guard, demanding a high-stagger weapon like a warpick. Some dodge backward, requiring extended reach or good carrying capacity to match their steps. Others test endurance, needing weapons with good handling and low stamina expenditure per hit.
 
"When we moved from the stats combo into a challenge mentality, balance became so much easier," says Amat. "We only really need to make sure that the enemy is strong against some things and weak against some other things. There are all these other great RPGs that are about power complexity. That's not what this game is about."

Mechanically, Blades of Fire is about solving problems. Context makes or breaks a weapon. The short swords of Roman Legionnaires, useless against enemies more than two feet away, were lethally effective when thrust forward in unison as a unit. Amat particularly enjoyed YouTuber Skallagrim’s explanation of the Egyptian khopesh, a curved bronze sickle whose short blade limited its reach. Its design holds its edge better than other tools made from soft metal, while doubling as a useful tool for harvesting crops.

It’s an instance of designing around a material’s limitations towards a specific intended use. "That's the epiphany we want players to have," says Amat.
 

More than a weapon to me

Weapons are more than mere objects. The alluring sheen of their steel comes from more than their physical parts. Whether it’s the Master Sword in The Legend of Zelda, Cloud’s Buster Sword in Final Fantasy VII, Doom’s chainsword, or a prized weapon displayed in a museum exhibit, their appeal comes from the emotional attachment they built across history.

It’s the same in Blades of Fire. You name your weapon, tend to its needs, and later choose whether to melt it down for parts or keep it as a memento. This mirrors the way many cultures treasure legendary weapons, shattered or blunted swords proudly hung on the wall.

"Weapons don't scale. Weapons don't get better," Amat explains. "You made a weapon—this weapon doesn’t grow stronger in reality. It wouldn’t make sense! Why is your grandfather's katana so good? It was a great weapon when they made it, and it is a good weapon still if you maintain it properly, but really it’s because it has a reputation, because of what it's done."

Blades of Fire’s reputation mechanic means weapons gain reputation as they slay more and more foes. They gain repute and additional worth, meaning they can be traded to Glinda, the master forger witch for better materials. Amat can’t wait to see how players respond when the time to retire their favorite weapon comes. He wants you to build a relationship with your weapons, an emotional weight to your tool—something he has encountered in many Japanese-inspired tabletop RPGs and looks to replicate here.
 

Putting your steel to the test

Now we understand the physics, the material science, and the myriad decisions other titles take for granted but that play into creating a weapon in Blades of Fire. What happens when the time comes to put your steel to the test?

MercurySteam set out to make a combat system that felt physical, strategic, and consequential. When Amat says the game is about the weapons, he truly means it. You won’t find showy magical attacks  Weapons have four directional attacks and two stances—switching between slashes and piercing moves. There's also a dodge, a block, and a parry. That’s it. The rest all comes down to your skills and your weapons’ capabilities.

Did the team miss the hallmarks of most action-adventures, the special abilities and spell unlocks?

"You definitely can’t turn Aran into a magic god at the end of the game, right?" says Amat. "There's lots of spectacular things that you could do, have your weapon shoot fireballs or other things that are really spectacular."

"This is not our aim! Our aim is to make everything really important," he continues. "You can fill the screen with VFX and make the character feel really powerful, but we’re forced to make sure you feel powerful because you're doing meaningful stuff—because you're wielding that weapon, you created that weapon, that enemy has a long-range weapon and I have to solve that problem."

The way Amat sees it, hack-and-slash games from a decade ago were generally more spectacular, full of lavish acrobatics and special moves. Now, the action can show more restraint. Actions mean more when given space to breathe, rather than being lost in extended Devil May Cry or Bayonetta-style combos full of particle effects and bloodshed.

Amat sees Blades of Fire’s encounters as akin to a duel in a Kurosawa movie, whether you encounter a wild beast or a miniboss like Mayhem Warmongers, medieval Space Marine-looking figures laden with enormous war hammers and intimidating HP totals. The pause is all-important—a moment of suspense to size each other up, a moment to evaluate, adjust your stance, choose your weapon, test its edge, and sharpen it if found lacking. Then battle ensues.

No battle is meaningless or trivial in Blades of Fire. Enemies can access the same basic defensive skills as Aran. Even if your weapon could dispatch them in two hits, landing those two hits is no simple matter.

The Vexers are the perfect example. These unpredictable monkey-like enemies use swords as pogo-sticks, bounding towards you before performing an agile somersaulting attack. "We designed these enemies with an almost chaotic movement style, forcing players to react rather than memorize patterns," Serrano explains. "The idea of them using their own swords as trampolines came from our desire to make players constantly ask themselves, ‘What the hell are they going to do next?’"
 

Caution by design

The rhythm of these fights is cautious by design. I found no opportunity to recoup health outside my flasks, and enemy attacks are hard to interrupt. When I tried trading blows, hoping to induce a stagger, I rarely came out ahead. Instead, I hunted for openings, landing attacks on green-indicator weak zones with a well-timed hit before baiting out the counterattack.

Amat confirms enemy interruptibility is just one of many ways they set a slower, deliberate tone for their combat. It's an invisible background stat, but hugely important. "You cannot interrupt enemies easily. That is what keeps the pace down. If you could, it would speed up everything. If you had the initiative, you would be always dealing damage first, being the first to act. The game would not be as lethal. Enemies would have more HP if you're just attacking over and over."

Some weapons, however, are exceptions. Equip the twin axes, and you’ll be executing lunging flurries of attacks, a smash-and-dash approach whose high number of strikes has an excellent chance of staggering a single enemy—but leaves you at risk of being flanked. Warhammers and other heavier weapons have a good chance of staggering, too, at the cost of slow attacks with lengthy windup animations.

For all MercurySteam's commitment to realism, you won’t be using one tool that was essential for medieval combat: a shield. It was never considered because its addition would warp everything. The romance of the Forge changes. Now you’re a shield-maker, too. Combat’s texture becomes too cautious, too safe. The epic fantasy of venturing into the unknown, sword in hand, feels less daring with a cumbersome shield in your off-hand. You may be a fool to venture into a historical battle without one, but Blades of Fire is better for their absence (and perhaps better still without the prospect of weapons becoming lodged in shields and armor, which Amat says was once under consideration).   

All things must come to an end, your weapon’s finite lifespan included. Weapon durability has proven to be (pardon the pun) a double-edged sword. Even in a bona fide modern classic like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, weapon degradation was widely regarded as one of its most contentious features, especially the sacrilegious act of applying it to the unmatchable Master Sword itself.

The decisions and trade-offs associated with weapon degradation play an important role in Blades of Fire’s journey. Players are entrusted with a rare responsibility to their tools. If you use your best weapons to swat away the putrid zombies in one hit rather than two, you’re expediting your path at a cost. The same when smashing barrels with your finest blade—it loses durability each time it clangs against a wall. "You don't want to be grocery shopping with a Ferrari, right?" says Amat. "That's something that gave the weapon an extra dimension."

Here, weapon degradation forces continual experimentation. You have no choice. Your next weapon will likely be different, or enemy designs will nudge you into a new approach or a new tool.
 

Forging your legend

As an independent developer, MercurySteam is best known for outstanding work-for-hire projects with other companies’ IPs. They’re comfortable with the model and the creative freedom and success they’ve found within it. "You are not free, but you have your own wings," as Alvarez describes it. But new IP is a powerful asset to secure any studio’s future.

Now, armed with Blades of Fire, they’re set to blaze ahead, no matter what. "Blades of Fire is an attempt by us to be owners of our own destiny."

Blades of Fire releases on the Epic Games Store on May 22.