ALLFATHER sends a fallen shieldmaiden through Helheim

Tommy McKay, one of the developers behind the tower-defence game Gnomes, has announced ALLFATHER, a first-person roguelike about a shieldmaiden the Valkyries rejected and sent to Hel anyway. The press release on the game's own site is dated 29 September 2026, the announcement trailer is already live, and the Steam page lists a 2027 release.

What ALLFATHER is

Combat is real time and stamina-driven rather than momentum-driven. You read an attack, then block at the last moment to turn the incoming hit into your own opening, and the pitch is explicitly against panic: McKay's developer note says every exchange is “brutal but fair” and that there are “no cheap deaths”. Weapons have their own movesets, with sword and shield, dual axes, the longaxe and a bow.

The level structure is one-way. Doors seal behind you, a keeper boss guards each region of Helheim, and portal choices decide which rewards you end up fighting for. Enemies fight for position around you, so retreat is not part of the design vocabulary.

Gods, gold and the run after this one

Levelling up offers blessings from the Norse pantheon, with each god pushing a different way to fight, and gold is spent with dwarven merchants. Relics bend the run further, and death is permanent, but Hel's domain remembers you: runes and weapons unlocked between runs carry forward, which is the standard roguelite bargain of losing the run and keeping the lesson.

A retro PSX look, in Godot, by one person

The whole climb is deliberately retro, with the dark, grainy look of a late-1990s PlayStation game. ALLFATHER is a solo project built in Godot, and McKay describes it as his first solo title and first 3D game after Gnomes and Sea of Survivors, with a soundtrack he is composing himself. The site is taking playtest signups, the trailer is embedded below, and the press kit lists PC via Steam and Windows, with the store listing still marked as coming soon.

Our opinion

First-person melee is the genre that punishes optimism hardest, because everything the pitch promises depends on the player being able to read an incoming swing in the fraction of a second before it lands. A deliberately lo-fi PSX look is a charming choice and a risky one in the same breath: grain, low internal resolution and chunky geometry all make the tells that a parry window depends on that much harder to see, and “block at the last moment” assumes those tells are legible. The stamina-and-spacing pitch is the right instinct though, and it is notable that the developer talks about patience over button mashing rather than difficulty for its own sake. The other thing to watch is the schedule: an announcement trailer, a live Steam page and a 2027 window with an open playtest suggests a studio trying to gather feedback early rather than a marketing beat locked to a publisher's calendar, which for a one-person project is exactly the order you would want those to appear in.