Mörk Borg Heresy Supreme, a videogame based on the heavy metal meat grinder TTRPG of the same name, released a demo on January 23. I’m an avid worshiper of all things Borg, and I was immediately enraptured by the grisly Gothic vibes of the game. And then I died. And then I died again. And again.
This wasn’t an unexpected outcome. The original tabletop RPG is famous for spitting out characters with a single hit point who survive about 15 minutes in your typical dungeon. Death is ever-present, and it’s rarely painless. You roll up a new character, and you keep moving.
Heresy Supreme recreates this feel by turning Mörk Borg into an arcade-style hack-and-slash. Your character is randomly generated exactly as it would be in the tabletop game, warts and all. The videogame does let you re-roll until you land a build you like, which is more forgiving than the TTRPG ever was. But the kindness stops there.
The torture begins in the tutorial, where I spent at least three of the five minutes that my first character was alive. Heresy Supreme drip-feeds you new mechanics as you go, and while this is pretty standard for videogames, the method proves inconvenient and incomplete.
Far too much of the game relies on the M key, which you find out (from a tavern keeper) opens your map. Without the map, you seemingly can’t access your character sheet – or the settings for the entire game. Said settings are the only way to see a complete list of controls. It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out how to swing the femur fate had handed me as a weapon, because the tutorial certainly never told me.
The settings is also where, as of a recent patch, you can change the configuration of your controls. The original keyboard controls for your character, when you do find them, are clunky. The left and right shift keys are two of your most important buttons, while your best skills and attacks are clustered together on the K, I, O, and L keys. While we’re still getting from A to B with the help of WASD, the setup isn’t overly intuitive.
That’s a problem with a game as brutal as Heresy Supreme. When you finally head down to a dungeon and meet your first angry skeleton, quick reactions are crucial. Your HP is already abysmal, and your gear is far from great. Failing to block at the right time could spell disaster. This is no button-masher, but your face is bound to get mashed before too long.
When death finally covers your corpse with its shroud, that’s game over. You’re declared a FAILURE and shown how long you managed to survive. If you want to see more of that dungeon you died in, you’ll need to start from scratch.
I’m a tabletop journalist by trade. I never claimed to be good at videogames. I’m yet to finish a Soulslike, and I rarely venture beyond a game’s normal difficulty setting. I’ll own that my five-minute high score is probably well below average. That being said, I’ve seen other players online proudly touting immense playtimes of 25 minutes. This is a game that revels in its deadliness. It’s a feature, not a bug.
Heresy Supreme has a few more teething problems to wrangle before its release in Q1 2026. I think I’ll have a better shot at surviving when the game comes to console. I will say, though, that it nails the Mörk Borg vibe.
Somewhere beyond the beginner dungeons, there are decisions to be made and dice to be rolled. The visuals are perfect recreations of the RPG book’s revolutionary art. It’s a similar story with the soundtrack, and there’s no better feeling than the metal guitar riffs kicking in when a fight begins. I got to enjoy that moment for about three seconds, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.
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