The game will send you to very different and exotic places such as Arabic oases, abandoned fortresses and deep wilderness. Doors, gates and various mechanisms will always bar your way so you will spend most of the game looking for keys. Traps of all sorts are present at every corner and levels are extremely long, so saving often is always a good idea.

Once the titular Blade of Darkness is acquired, you can either choose to proceed to the final boss's lair or backtrack to previous levels. Indeed the magic weapon is weakened and its power needs to be unlocked by using eight runes, hidden through the entire game. It's better to keep a lookout for those early on because revisited levels are filled with highend monsters. Collecting those runes will unlock an additional level and the true final boss. He is pretty tough, but at this point you should have seen worse.

Beyond its tough-as-nails difficulty, Severance's novelty at the time came from its use of lighting. Completely coded in Python, the game engine displays beautiful shadows and makes a clever use of light sources. Some levels, like the Knight's starting level, offer a gothic and dreary atmosphere propelled by torches and eerie sound design. Fire can also be used to inflame wooden structures and solve a few puzzles, which is a pretty cool feature.

The funniest thing about Severance, and one of its most marketed features, is the omnipresent gore. After a few exchanges, your character and the enemy alike will be covered with wounds and the ground repainted with litres of blood. Characters can be brutally dismembered, and you can then use the body parts lying around as weapons. It's pretty satisfying and completely ridiculous at the same time.