It brings me no joy to admit this, but recently I've begun thinking that I'm finally nearing my fill of ARPGs. I've gotten a lot of great years out of clicking a mouse button and exploding full screens of skeletons, but the prospect doesn't quite spark joy like it used to.

Or at least that's what I thought until roughly 45 minutes ago, when I saw the announcement trailer for Tarae: The Unbound that had been slipped into a Gamescom 2026 Opening Night Live Montage.

The problem, I now realize, is that I've mostly spent my time with ARPGs looking at the same kinds of things. Most games downstream of Diablo tend to flow into the same basin of interchangeable demons, dark cultists, and piles of weird meat. But looking at the brief clips of Tarae, I realize now I'd just been aching for a jolt to the ARPG aesthetic palette.

Developed by Boundary and published by Krafton, Tarae's Steam page says it's set in "a world that reimagines Eastern myth, folklore, and traditional aesthetics, where beauty and mystery are entwined with darkness and brutality." It shows in the listings screenshots and embedded gifs, where enemies are being fought in Buddhist temples and player characters are battling bosses with hauntingly distended features plucked from East Asian monster illustrations.

If that's not enough, Tarae: The Unbound also includes one of my favorite character class conceits: Just an old guy with a matchlock gun. Although this particular handgunner seems to know something I don't about how historic firearms work, because he's able to pump out rapid fire gouts of firebomb explosives.

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