// PC GAMER — GAMING
This newly-announced FPS will let you blast through the worlds of Medieval Europe's weirdest artist, and I really hope it includes the 500-year-old butt song from hell
Hieronymus invites you to step into artworks like The Garden of Earthly Delights.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.
One of video gaming's great strengths is letting players step into worlds that previously only existed in words or on canvas or celluloid. Lush fantasy kingdoms, sprawling sci-fi universes, and of course surrealist dreamscapes where people have music printed on their butts.
Admittedly, that last one is a relatively recent addition to gaming's ever-expanding map of the human imagination. It comes courtesy of Hieronymus, an in-development FPS based on the works of late-medieval Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch.
Revealed at the Future Games Show during Gamescom, Hieronymus lets players explore 3D adaptations of Bosch's most famous works, such as his best-known triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. It sees you play as a woman named Helena van Aken as she attempts to unravel the mystery of her family's association with otherworldly powers, all while accompanied by none other than Faust himself. Or at least, the real-life alchemist who inspired the folk legend.
The trailer shows the player wandering through marshlands dotted with bulbous structures and mermaid knights, evading giant beasts as they stomp around the map, and watching some poor fellow get munched by a giant humanoid creature with a parrot's head.
Aesthetically, Hieronymus is instantly enticing. But how will Hieronymus actually play? Well, according to the game's Steam page, you'll be able to battle enemies with period-accurate weapons like a crossbow and an arquebus, employ alchemy to create projectiles that can stun creatures and influence their behaviour, and even catch and tame some of the weird critters that you'll find stumbling around.
Watching Hieronymus in action, my gut reaction is that visually it looks splendid, but mechanically it seems to need some work. The movement looks plodding and sluggish, while combat and interactions look quite slow and floaty and not especially engaging. Which is not to say I expect a game based on the works of Hieronymus Bosch to play like Doom Eternal, although now that I've thought about it, I really want to play an id Software/Hieronymus Bosch mashup.
I'm also curious to see how developer Hurdy-Gurdy Games deals with the fact that artworks like The Garden of Earthly Delights have a quite spectacular number of butts in them—which is something that Steam seems increasingly censorious about.
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.