While scrolling through press announcements this week, my eyes stopped on a word I haven’t read in a long while. Terrinoth. I had to look twice, because I know Terrinoth as the world of Descent, Rune Wars and Battelore, the world of Fantasy Flight Games’ big board game IPs. For those who do not know Fantasy Flight Games, it’s a big American board game developer and publisher and especially, Descent was once one of its biggest IPs, while today they mostly do their Living Card Games.
Checking out the announcement, it just got better. Terrinoth: Heroes of Descent turned out to be a video game adaptation of FFG’s famous Descent IP based on their latest entry from 2021, Descent: Legends of the Dark, which was a visually stunning and streamlined approach to the dungeon crawler genre.
Heroes of the Descent now plays a couple of years before Legends of the Dark and will be the first-ever Descent video game, and the trailer immediately got me hooked. With a demo out now and a release already set for Q2 2026, I got super excited, because Terrinoth is a huge world, with multiple fighting factions, from undead over demons to elves and humans. There is a lot of potential for a good dungeon crawler and an infinite number of stories to be told.
So I took a good evening and checked out the demo. Developed by Artefact Studios, which already did other video game adaptations, but also worked on games like the new Disciples Domination and the lighthearted dungeon crawler The Dungeon Of Naheulbeuk before, it seems to be in good hands.
The Descent demo took me around an hour to finish and started with difficulty selection, including an Iron Man option already, a nicely drawn intro cutscene with 2 established and quite chatty heroes in a city to meet up with the rest of their party, chase a bandit that stole something important from the party’s mage.
The isometric camera and the art style look very familiar and beautiful, and events and cutscenes are well presented within them. A big surprise for me was how much voice acting there already was. The party members chat a lot and have a lot to comment about, and give their respected character a lot of uniqueness and depth already.
The UI is quite familiar to people who already played a turn-based game before and keeps it quite clean. Abilities and most information at the top, bottom, turn order at the top and the main goal on the right side. It keeps a lot of room to enjoy and oversee the nicely done enemies and areas. However, in the second dungeon of the demo, which is quite a bit larger than the first one, I sometimes wished for a small minimap at the top left, because I kept switching in and out of the map a couple of times, which could have been avoided with that.
But back to the game as I am moving ahead too fast. The first mission of the demo starts with your party assembling and getting the hang of combat. Every character in your party has a basic set of 3 abilities without a cooldown, 2 with a cooldown, which are also usually much more powerful and an ultimate attack that charges over time. The tank of the party, for example, has a shield bash that knocks enemies backwards into things or even off the map, has a range fireball taunt, which comes in super handy during most of the fights and has some damage-reducing aura as well. Your mage, on the other hand, has a very powerful Blizzard area damage and multiple other long-range spells. Your rogue is more reactionary in a lot of cases. So, for example, if an enemy dies within 2 attacks, you get additional movement, or if an enemy moves past you, you attack them on their turn. Every character in the demo felt quite unique, and given that enemies have resistances and weaknesses and there were little events and objects only specific characters could interact with, you must utilise their abilities. In Mission Select, the game also shows you what to expect, so it encourages you to bring the right heroes with you for the mission. So instead of the mage, I brought the priestess of Kellos with me for the second scenario. All the combat is loosely based on how it works in the most recent Descent board games as well. There is a turn order for all characters, and every character has 3 action points to use. However, movement and actions share the same pool of points in Heroes of Descent. The more you move, the more AP it costs, the more powerful the attacks are, the more AP they cost. But it is nice to use all AP on attack,s and the animations for melee and ranged attacks are quite satisfying already.
During the two scenarios you can play in the demo, you unlock a total of 6 very different characters, and it sadly ends on a spoiler and no level up, which made me furious, because I was curious to see how levelling up works in the game.
What started as a chase for a stolen item quickly turned into a dungeon dive full of undead and vampires, and the addition of a priestess of Kellos and a new druid-like character left the party to chase the vampires in and outside of the city. From the menu, it looked like the little adventure was set for 4 scenarios, and there were multiple other adventures locked as well.
The game advertises itself as one-shot and full-campaign friendly, and I am very interested in what that means in terms of character progression and multiplayer. Sadly, the multiplayer was not in the demo yet, but from the get-go, the demo felt like it was made for dungeon crawling with friends.
Given the game is supposed to come out in Q2 2026, which isn’t far off, I am very much looking forward to hearing and seeing more about it. I put hundreds of hours into Descend 2nd Edition, as it was a super lightweight dungeon crawler for me and my friends and additional hours into the Battlelore and Rune Wars games by Fantasy Flight Games. If Terrinoth: Heroes of Descent stays and releases this polished, I am more than excited for FFG’s next attempt at bringing their IPs to the digital world. Especially since Terrinoth has such a big potential with its already established but still open and unknown fantasy world!
