Video Here's the trailer for Metal: Hellsinger, also on YouTube.

David Goldfarb appeared at the PC Gaming Show today to show off some gameplay from the studio's upcoming rhythm FPS "Metal: Hellsinger". The game tells the story of a demon called "The Unknown" who descends into the abyss of "Thousand Hells" to seek revenge against the "Red Judge," with guns and music clanging at the same intensity.

"Metal: Hellsinger" can be played as a straight FPS, but the matching of action and music "is a big part of the playing experience," Goldhaber said in a recent interview.

"You can also play Metal: Hellsinger like a shooter. But the most effective way to play it is to match the beat, to get into the song, to kill people to the beat, to reload to the beat, to dodge to the beat. And you use different weapons with different rhythms. So it's a shooter in many ways and a shooter in another way."

Goldfarb described Metal: Hellsinger's Thousand Hells as looking like "an old album cover," and I'm pretty sure Ronnie James Dio's face would look right at home in the background of any pre-alpha demo I played. The game world has plenty of the usual fire and brimstone, but also includes frozen wastelands and other areas of "madness," and the music is all very metal, written specifically for the game, with "layers" that can be layered as you play. At a minimum, a basic beat is played, but as the rhythm kills go up, the soundtrack becomes more complex, and lyrics are inserted when all the balls are out.

"The more you do well (in other games), the crazier things get. In our case, the better we do, the crazier the songs get."

It took me a few tries with the preview build before I really "got it," but around the fourth or fifth time, suddenly it all made sense. Suddenly someone started screaming in my ear, guitars were grinding, double kicks were speeding up my eardrums, and I was killing and rocking. The action isn't as good as the "Doom Eternal" I'm playing now, but it's more metal. Or maybe it is.

"Metal: Hellsinger" came out shortly after the end of the Viking monster game "Darkborn," which broke up in April, but "The Outsiders" had actually been working on this game for about a year. At this stage it is still in pre-alpha, and Goldfarb said this is the earliest he has shown off the project he is working on.

"But anyway, time for a pandemic preview. It's cool. It's nice to be able to show people early on, even if it's far from perfect. I feel like it's the right time to do something different in that regard, so I think we'll be fine. We all need distractions."

He declined to mention the untimely demise of "Darkborn," but suggested that "Metal: Hellsinger" is in some ways a mirror image of that game and a reaction to it.

"I wanted to make something fun. For me, music is the thing. It's funny that for me, music was the turning point. It's a 'dark bone,' but it's also really sad and depressing, basically two parts of my personality. There are basically two parts to my personality, one really sad and melancholy, and the other really aggressive and agitated. That kind of thing. So this is the other part that says, what if I just make something fun?

And while he was obviously very deeply disappointed about the failure of Darkborn, "If I could have found a way to make it work, I would have made it work."

"At the end of the day, it's about how to make something that you really enjoy and that you have fun making. And that's rare. Usually, it's really hard to do. In this game, I didn't have that kind of pressure. I think the whole team is the same. Everybody is," he said.

"Everyone should make the metal game. That's my recommendation."

Metal: Hellsinger is currently slated for release in 2021. As of now, it can be wishlisted on Steam and has a website with more details at metalhellsinger.com.