It’s genuinely wild that the Skaven — one of Warhammer’s most beloved and enduringly popular factions — have spent most of their video game existence as cannon fodder. You chew through them in Vermintide. You fight alongside them occasionally in Total War. But starring as one? Playing from inside their beady little eyes, plotting betrayals and scurrying through gloom with a grudge and a grappling hook? That’s new. And from a 30-minute hands-on demo, Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Deathmaster is pulling it off with more charm than you’d expect from a game about murder rats.
Developed by Old Skull Games and published by Dotemu — the team behind the Street of Rage 4 and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge revivals — Deathmaster is a 2D stealth-action platformer launching on PC (Steam), PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch 2 in 2027. Here’s everything worth knowing from the preview.
Who Is Vihneek and Why Should You Care?
You play as Vihneek, a Skaven who we meet at his absolute low point — unceremoniously dumped into a festering pit of corpses, bound at the wrists in wooden stocks, and apparently written off by whoever put him there. Not exactly the hero’s call to adventure you typically get in an action game. But that’s part of what makes Deathmaster immediately interesting: it commits completely to the Skaven’s nature from the very first second.
The Skaven, for the uninitiated, are giant intelligent rat-men who worship the Great Horned Rat and live in a massive underground civilization called the Under-Empire. They are scheming, backstabbing, cowardly in groups, terrifyingly vicious in the shadows, and absolutely obsessed with warpstone — a solidified form of Chaos energy that mutated them into sapient humanoids in the first place and powers most of their technology. Think of it as the magical space cocaine of the Warhammer universe. Yes, that’s a real description from the lore, and yes, the game leans into it.
Vihneek belongs to the world of Clan Eshin — the assassin and espionage specialists of Skavendom. Where Clan Skryre builds warpstone-powered death machines, Clan Moulder grows terrifying flesh-mutant monsters, and Clan Pestilens spreads disease as a religious act, Clan Eshin operates entirely from the shadows. Their Night Runners and Gutter Runners are the most individually skilled fighters in the entire Skaven race. Vihneek starts out beneath even that — a nobody in stocks at the bottom of a corpse pit — but the game is built around his rise.
Movement Is the First Thing That Sells It
Once Vihneek frees himself from his bonds, the game’s core movement system immediately does something no other 2D platformer really does: it makes you feel like a rat. He can run along walls and ceilings with natural fluidity, scurrying across surfaces that would stop any human character cold. It’s not a temporary power-up or a limited ability — it’s just how he moves. The animations that bring it to life are spot-on, selling the idea that this is a creature built for exactly this kind of movement through tight, layered underground spaces.
Compared to most 2D sidescrollers where horizontal movement is the default and wall interactions are a special mechanic, Deathmaster feels genuinely distinct from the opening minutes. Vertical and diagonal movement through multi-layered environments becomes as natural as running left or right, which is a hard thing to achieve and an even harder thing to make feel earned through character design rather than arbitrary game logic.
The Hollow Knight Comparison Is Real and Earned
The level design in the demo is what prompted the Hollow Knight comparison, and it’s not a superficial one. The environments reward exploration over linear progression, regularly offering branching paths and hidden routes that a player rushing the main objective would completely miss. The primary incentive for exploring is warpstone — scattered through the environment as an optional collectible that converts into skill points for unlocking new abilities. It’s not mandatory, but the game communicates clearly that thorough players will be meaningfully stronger than those who steamroll forward.
The rooms themselves are built to make you stop and think. Where is the guard’s patrol route? What in this environment can be interacted with? Is that hanging crane useful, and how would I use it without getting spotted? That deliberate, almost puzzle-box feel to environmental navigation is very much in the same space as what makes Hollow Knight’s level design satisfying — it trusts the player to observe carefully rather than hand-holding every interaction.
The art style reinforces this. Gloomy, grimy, and layered with the kind of gothic underground atmosphere that makes every corner feel like it’s hiding something. Layered caverns stretch into the background, torn canvas and rusted pipes signal a civilization that’s been here a long time, and the overall visual tone is dark without being unreadable — a harder balance to strike than it sounds.
Stealth First, Then Power Fantasy
The demo opens in a deliberately limited state. Vihneek’s wrists are bound, then he’s essentially powerless — slow, fragile, and completely dependent on stealth to survive. Getting caught by any of the armed guards means instant death and restart from the chamber entrance. These guards are not passive either: they throw projectiles at a surprisingly accurate rate when they spot you from a high perch, keeping the tension real even from a distance.
The stealth toolkit in this early phase is satisfying and familiar without feeling basic. Hiding behind drapes, extinguishing lights, and throwing skulls as distractions are the early options. More interesting is the Instinct Vision mode — triggered by holding L2, it locks Vihneek in place but lets him see enemy vision cones and interactive environmental objects, including things like cranes that can drop boxes onto guards below. The right stick also lets you look ahead in any direction, which is consistently useful for scouting routes before committing to a move.
The shift happens when Vihneek acquires a shield that lets him execute enemies from behind in a single button press. This changes the flow significantly — rather than pure avoidance, you start sequencing takedowns, identifying guards you can isolate and eliminate without alerting their patrol partners. Each area becomes a puzzle about order of operations: who do I take out first, where do they fall, and what does that open up next?
Becoming a Night Runner — Where It Gets Good
The real gear-shift happens when Vihneek gets inducted into the Night Runners — Clan Eshin’s entry-level assassin tier — after a close encounter with a Rat Ogre he had absolutely no business fighting. The recruitment comes with a new outfit and, more importantly, a grappling hook that opens up previously inaccessible vertical space across every area.
From here, Deathmaster starts to feel genuinely like a power fantasy — the careful, fragile kind where you’re still glass if caught, but you’re unmistakably the predator in the room. The upgrade system uses warpstone to unlock additional abilities: silencing footsteps, deploying smoke bombs, and other Eshin-appropriate tools that further expand your options for creative stealth approaches. The demo ended before these could be purchased, but even the grappling hook alone transformed the way each environment could be approached.
It’s worth noting that Jason and Lucia in GTA 6 aren’t the only characters getting a meaningful progression arc in 2026’s most anticipated games — Vihneek’s trajectory from bound prisoner to ninja rat assassin already has a satisfying shape even across just 30 minutes.
The Skaven Lore Is a Real Strength Here
What makes Deathmaster feel like more than just a competent 2D platformer is how deeply it commits to the Skaven’s established identity. The inter-clan politics are front and center — your first mission is to destroy a rival clan’s gnawhole, a passage deeper into the underground that allows them to summon reinforcements. The Skaven-on-Skaven violence is historically accurate: in Warhammer lore, one of the main reasons the ratmen haven’t overrun the surface world is that they spend roughly equal time trying to destroy each other as they do everyone else.
Vihneek himself has a few mysteries that the brief demo didn’t resolve: an odd glowing appendage welded where the back half of his tail used to be, and clanmates who mockingly call him “half-rat.” These are exactly the kinds of character hooks that build curiosity about where the story goes, even if the 30-minute runtime couldn’t answer them.
The boss fight teased in the hands-off portion — a Stormvermin that Vihneek defeats by weaponizing a warpstone-powered lightning cannon rather than direct combat — also perfectly captures how Skaven are supposed to operate. They don’t win fair fights. They win by not fighting fair. The whole design philosophy of the game appears to be built around this: use the environment, use stealth, use everything except a head-on approach. What good Skaven fights fair?
Developer and Publisher Pedigree Worth Noting
Dotemu’s involvement here matters. The publisher has built a strong reputation for bringing beloved IPs back to life with genuine care — Streets of Rage 4 was excellent, TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge was excellent, and their general approach of pairing experienced indie developers with established licenses has consistently worked. Old Skull Games, the developer, was founded in 2012 and has a strong gameplay-first philosophy. Putting these two together on what is genuinely one of Warhammer’s most underutilized factions in video games is a pairing with real potential.
For a sense of scale: the Warhammer video game catalog is enormous — over 100 licensed games across the franchise’s history — but the Skaven have almost never held a starring role. The closest thing is Queek Headtaker’s campaign in Total War: Warhammer, or Clan Eshin as a playable faction, but neither puts you in the first-person (or first-rat) perspective of a Clan Eshin assassin working their way up from nothing. Deathmaster is genuinely new territory for the IP, and the 30-minute demo suggests it knows exactly what to do with that space.
Early Verdict: Cautiously Excited
There are things still to be determined — the story quality is entirely TBD, with the demo too brief to assess narrative depth, and the full scope of the upgrade system and how the map opens up post-grappling-hook are unknowns. But the foundations are solid in a way that goes beyond “for a Warhammer licensed game.”
The movement system is genuinely unique. The Hollow Knight-style level design rewards player curiosity in ways that feel natural rather than forced. The stealth-to-predator progression has a good arc even in miniature. And the art direction — gloomy and grimy but consistently readable — looks like it’ll hold up across a full game’s worth of underground environments.
It also arrives in an interesting moment for licensed Warhammer games specifically, with the broader franchise expanding aggressively in multiple directions. Licensed tie-in products from unexpected sources are having a real moment in gaming culture, and Deathmaster feels like the kind of game that could become a cult classic for both Warhammer fans who’ve always wanted a Skaven starring role and 2D platformer enthusiasts who want something with more personality than the average indie entry in the genre.
Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Deathmaster is coming to PC (Steam), PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch 2 in 2027. Keep this one on your radar — it’s shaping up to be something genuinely different from what the Warhammer license usually produces, and different in all the right ways.