Certain ideas that crop up every so often in games will always grab my attention. One of them is letting players defeat enemies with bits of other enemies. As such, my interest in Heathen—an upcoming indie dungeon crawler—went from 'mildly curious' to 'smashing the wishlist button' when its most recent trailer revealed you can beat your foes by volleying other enemy heads at them.

Developed by solo developer Christoper Yabsley, Heathen takes the frantic monster bashing and loot hoarding of Diablo and reworks it for a first-person perspective. Set in the fantasy town of Saltgrave, it sees your character seeking fortune and glory in the vast subterranean labyrinth beneath the town, encountering an "ancient horror" in the process in what the Steam page describes as a "descent into madness."

The chief addition that the trailer explores is a new enemy dismemberment system added by Yabsley, which he says has "done a lot for making swords and axes feel really good". As a longtime fan of first-person melee games like Dark Messiah of Might and Magic and Warhammer: Vermintide 2 (the latter of which is an influence on Heathen's combat), I'm highly impressed by how slick and tactile Heathen's combat looks. It isn't easy to make first-person swordplay satisfying—especially as a solo indie dev—and Heathen's fast-paced hacking and slashing makes an excellent initial impression.

Yabsley says that dismemberment will have greater implications for combat than simply making it grislier. As players delve deeper into the dungeon, they will encounter stranger, more horrific enemies, and lopping off appendages will play a key role in defeating them: "Imagine fighting some many-limbed creature, and you have to chop it all apart just to keep it from killing you," Yabsley explains in the trailer.

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