In the world of Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000, Inquisitors are the feared secret police of the Imperium of Man, tasked with rooting out extraterrestrial threats and internal dissension. Warhammer 40,000: Dark Heresy, Owlcat Games’ adaptation of the Dark Heresy tabletop role-playing game, lets players step into the role, conveying the faction’s amorality and broad authority by letting you choose who to blame, no matter what the evidence says.
A hands-off demo at Gamescom picked up at the isometric role-playing game’s 15-hour mark, with the Inquisitor leading a five-person party investigating a series of disappearances on Scintilla, a planet in the Calixis Sector where the corrupting power of Chaos has already taken hold. You’re also seeking to unlock the larger mystery of the Tyrant Star, a mysterious planet-killing force from ancient times. Hope is lost for the people of Scintilla, but at least you can get some answers for the Imperium.
Of course, you’re keeping all this a secret from the characters you’re working with. You’re looking to earn the trust of the Tyrantine Cabal, the local branch of the Inquisition, by investigating disappearances from a site being excavated by a giant drill.
Owlcat has leveled up its visuals since 2023’s Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, and you can take in the detailed environments as you command your party to run and jump across the makeshift platforms and bridges while searching the site for clues.
Evidence you find, like a bisected body, goes into your investigation journal, where you can read your interpretation of the facts and get additional details based on each of your companions’ perspectives. Your party’s awareness skills can let you find extra details, but ultimately it’s up to you how to interpret the information. Existing knowledge of the Warhammer universe can make it easier to jump to conclusions about what left big claw marks near a swamp, but it’s not necessary.
After the search, we returned to offer answers to a set of three questions, including “Who ransacked the camp?” and “Why are there work boot tracks here?” You can select an answer from a dropdown list based on the information you’ve learned – some options won’t appear if you missed things – and each answer manifests with a little silhouetted animation as we spin our tale. It’s a very evocative way to make the RPG feel more like a mystery-adventure game.
Dark Heresy won’t offer any correcting prompts or stop your progress if you give the wrong answer, but your choices do have consequences. That can be just a snide comment about your competence from the person you’re talking to or something you won’t learn about until much later. In this case, we were able to impress the Inquisitor enough that she asked us to take someone with us. The new companion brought our party to six.
We spent a bit more time exploring the grim planet, which includes a cage worshipers place themselves in to show their devotion to the God-Emperor, tubular mushrooms, people whispering in the darkness, and fishermen cutting away at their catch – an enormous fish with two mouths full of sharp teeth. Our next mission was hostage negotiation, as a local gang had taken a group of divers hostage. We opted to kick things off with some subterfuge, offering a gift of poisoned alcohol. This got them to open the doors of their hideout and meant that they were already at a disadvantage when the fighting started.
The turn-based mechanics use many of the same systems as Rogue Trader, but cover has been reworked. Objects can either provide full cover while they still have hit points or won’t provide any cover, but will block line of sight. You need to make good use of this system to protect your units, choosing carefully where to place them at the start of battle.
Every unit has armor durability, which protects them from wounds or critical hits. Crits don’t just deal damage, but have special effects based on what part of the body they impact. Characters with precision attacks can target specific body parts to fish for these injuries, trying to gravely injure legs to immobilize an enemy or targeting their arms to make them drop their weapon.
The system provides a rich layer of complexity, though you can’t guarantee getting a crit, so a bit of bad luck can mess with your strategy. The same is true for the random roll that determines when characters act in a fight or the saving throws against psychic disciplines. Ideally, you want to string abilities together for maximum synergy, having one character drop a target’s armor and then another take advantage of the opening to crit or kill them.
Character order is especially important when it comes to concentration abilities, powerful effects that will go off at a designated time in the initiative order unless they’re interrupted. In this encounter, it created a countdown until a gang member would execute one of the hostages. Even the best-laid plans can be interrupted if an enemy moves to block the way or destroy cover you were counting on. Things were looking pretty bleak as the gang killed the prisoner, closing the door and piling on the psychic we’d sent in for a failed rescue.
But Dark Heresy also features a morale mechanic based on Rogue Trader’s momentum system. Boost morale high enough, and the character becomes heroic, receiving a massive static buff and a powerful free ability they can use. Killing the gang’s commander caused their whole faction to lose morale. In this case, it freaked them out so much that they started shooting each other.
If they were to drop one of my party members, they would gain back morale, which could allow them to regroup. But we didn’t give them a chance, pressing the advantage and quickly shattering their forces, meaning that their average morale was -5, and they had just half the strength they started with. That prompted an option to declare victory and end the combat or to finish mopping it up. Factions will have different surrender conditions, a clever way to turn a time-saving mechanic into a bit of storytelling.
I’ve played a lot of Warhammer video games from the perspective of a Space Marine, but it’s exciting to have the chance to take on a very different role. Owlcat Games has a great track record of CRPGs that blend rich storylines and deeply satisfying gameplay, and I’m looking forward to getting to explore more of this dark world and decide who to blame for what’s going wrong.
