Arise Dark Lord
You are The Dark Lord.
Raise an evil army, and crush the race of men.
An action-strategy hybrid RTS, blending tower defence, base building and
direct control of your Dark Lord avatar.
You are The Dark Lord, and your goal is to raise an undead army and crush
the feckless, godless heathens known as humans.
As your sorcery and your evil army grow, all of the world will rise up against you
to destroy your Dark Tower and end your reign of terror.
Fortify your dark realm, upgrade your sorcery, and build enough strength
to march out and crush the humans once and for all.
Introversion Software are the BAFTA and IGF award winning developers of
seven indie videogames, including Prison Architect, DEFCON, Darwinia, and
The Last Starship. Arise Dark Lord is in early development, and is due for release
sometime in 2027.
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Development log
- New update - v0.3d53 days ago
- New update - v0.3aApr 29, 2026
- New update - v0.2cJan 16, 2026
Comments
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Really fun game, excited for the full release!
the conquest mode is freaking impossible - Fun idea though, i hope it isn't so difficult
edit: oh, you keep your levels on replays. okay nevermind
Could use more UI indicating casting range. Also, because spell levels are preserved (and unlock spell upgrades), some way of quickly dumping all of your mana into spells for the XP once a level's cleared.
As been a week, i found my self to say, Thank you. This game is something amazing and i don't remember how many years i have been with out playing something like this! Take your time and don't rush it, it as potential for awy more then it may to became. I look foward to keep testing next update so i can stream it.
Thank you! I've really enjoyed making it and I can't wait to add all the ideas I have for the game, and for more players to discover it
Great little game! Love the map style and visual feel. Lots of love and polish!
This game is addictive. These guys are cooking with a novel 2d RTS feel with great gameplay. I'm excited to see where they take this and what it inspires.
This was very... relaxing to play? Very easy, definitely, and it felt kinda cozy after defeating all the humans to get as large as possible army and equip them all with iron armor and shields. Of course, iron runs out quite quickly, and I could only get ~400 fully armored orcs. If you rush the humans quickly, it's trivial to defeat them. My first game was intense, where at times I lost large amounts of orcs or the tower, but I felt the spiders were OP. In the second game, I "challenged" myself to win with only orcs and imps and it was trivial - 100 of each and you can easily take down castles, took me less than 10 minutes to win. You can cheese the villages by spawning turrets around them. You can fly out of the map with the dragon. I made a small cozy orc village on an island, flying there with the dragon. Would be great to have a difficulty slider to x2-x10 the enemies. Of course I am aware this is demo, just sharing my thoughts :D
Maybe orcs could have a bit more personality? Small brawls when bored with no job, etc. Also can imps fight?
DUUUUD THIS IS SO SMART AND AMAZING I LOVE IT !
Loved it! Definitely will follow this "little studio" ;-)
Maybe as feedback, I have been missing a bit of music (of course it is still very early in the development) and it feels strange to be the lord of darkness and step in a pillar of light. Why not a chasm of evil with a red of black collum?
Anyway, great work again!
A startlingly good looking game
I found a bug for prolong 2, If you defeat the castle before getting the necromany ring you can't go to the next level
Thank you, i'll look into that. You must have destroyed all the towns first? Did colelcting the Necromancy Ring not trigger the victory and exit elevator?
I destoryed the town and the castle then collected the ring but the exit didn't appear, I could just refresh collect the ring then defeat the castle for the exit to appear
Could there be another town you haven't destroyed? In the South-West of the map?
I'd was expecting to see a summary after clearing a map telling me how many people i killed, mana spent, etc, and then be graded! Grade me, Evil one,
Cool game!
Looks great, always a fan of hundred of little guys doing stuff!
Oh me too!
Nice game I do enjoy the mechanics but tutorial is a bit slow to get going. Interested in a full release :)
I like it. It really cool to raise enemies to get different types of units.
Maybe i just prefer a different pacing but its feels a bit slow and clunky? You slowly walk across a big map. Sometimes a ton of units stands around a village and only some attack.
But overall I had my fun and played through the entire Demo.
Just wait until you get the winged fell beast
Hi!
I got this error when running it:
Error
The following features required to run Godot projects on the Web are missing:
Cross-Origin Isolation - Check that the web server configuration sends the correct headers.
SharedArrayBuffer - Check that the web server configuration sends the correct headers.
How strange! Could you tell me what browser and version you are using?
This is when launching from the Itch.io client. Apparently it works fine if I go to itch on the browser then start it from there!
Though after writing this, in Firefox it crashed the video drivers so I had to power the PC off. Seems to work better in Chrome. Is very fun looking forward to more development on this!
Amazing game with a lot of promise and a really active development, had a lot of fun trying different runs and can't wait to see what the dev has teased in the discord server for the full release.