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You’ve got to be packing some heat to introduce a game with the words, “Fuck you, Todd Howard!” Fortunately, it seems like The Lantern of the Laughless Saint<\/em> really is about that life. This might be the best (and most aggressive) video game ad of 2026 so far.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n If you haven’t heard of this game before, it’s an indie RPG that bills itself as an open world ‘Scrolls-like.’ The developers claim they are making this exploration game because Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls 6<\/em> is taking way too long to get here. The pitch is that Laughless Saint<\/em> is a throwback to Morrowind<\/em>, a time when Bethesda allowed The Elder Scrolls to be a much weirder series than it is today.<\/p>\n You can expect the hallmarks of a meaty RPG here: a multitude of creative races, lore dispersed within scraps and books, quests tied to rumors, and NPCs with problems only you can solve (or make worse). Quests are open-ended and, according to the game’s Steam page, offer options involving “mercy, violence, compromise, and deceit.” This probably sounds like a lot of RPGs you’ve played before, but Laughless Saint<\/em> wraps these elements around a game with mechanics that are meant to be abused and broken. In the trailer, we see the protagonist learn a spell that catapults them 5,000 feet into the air \u2014 and then immediately die from that hubris \u2014 an experience that many Morrowind<\/em> players will surely remember.<\/p>\n The developers also continually emphasize their desire to make Laughless Saint <\/em>a fundamentally strange game. The trailer mentions things like fungus wizards, vulture gorillas, and lizard men; the RPG’s Steam page makes note of an illiterate giant toad and an ancient skeleton who wants to swim. The game’s low-poly graphics add to the bizarre ambiance as well, because the game can only <\/em>render ugly little guys.<\/p>\n Another thing that sets Laughless Saint<\/em> apart is that it is a co-op game, a fact that developer NerveLabs introduces in the trailer by mocking Bethesda. Really, the tone throughout the latest trailer is audacious \u2014 yet undeniably effective.<\/p>\n Topping all of this off is that Laughless Saint<\/em> aims to release in 2026. Given that The Elder Scrolls 6<\/em> is currently at a stage where builds of the game are only starting to consistently run well, I’m guessing that we won’t be playing Bethesda’s RPG anytime soon.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n