The Lantern of the Laughless Saint

An island, a silent Tower, and a saint who stopped laughing

The Lantern of the Laughless Saint drops players, alone or with friends in online or split-screen co-op, onto an isolated island crowned by a silent Tower, drawn there by a shared dream. The pitch is direct: unravel the mystery of the vanished Laughless Saint, confront the weight of human desire, and decide what deserves saving when the light beneath the world finally stirs. Released into Early Access on 17 August 2026 by small indie studio NerveLabs at NZ$30.99, its early reception is Very Positive across 1,283 reviews, a genuinely large sample for an Early Access launch only weeks old, and one comparison dominates almost every review in it: Morrowind.

Reviewers keep reaching for the same comparison

The clearest throughline across the sample is just how convincingly reviewers feel the game recreates a very specific, beloved era of Bethesda RPG design. One reviewer states plainly the game "feels very Morrowind-esque to a point where it definitely nailed the aesthetic of weird alien landscape and strange creatures running around," while separately praising combat as "a massive step up" over that direct inspiration. A more effusive reviewer, self-describing 200 hours of pre-launch playtesting, calls it "nothing short of an amazing RPG" that "recreates the same magic that exists in the TES franchise," while another simply asks, tongue only partly in cheek, "How ARE these lads outpacing AAA development, anyway?"

Exploration without hand-holding, and a map worth studying

Several reviewers single out the specific design choice to strip away quest waypoints and guiding arrows entirely, replacing them with landmark-based directions in the old-school RPG tradition. One reviewer calls the game "a beautiful love letter to what Bethesda used to be," specifically praising a highly detailed, hand-drawn 3D overworld map where careful players can even spot enemies if they look closely, and noting "there's a darkness and a weirdness to this game" that gives the world real character. A separate reviewer's account of the game's sheer scale backs that praise up concretely, reporting having explored only around 20% of the map after 26 hours of play, calling that pace "par for the course on what anyone would expect from a morrowind style game."

A team reviewers say is genuinely listening

A recurring, more practical thread of praise concerns the developers' visible responsiveness during Early Access. One reviewer who playtested for over 200 hours specifically credits the team as "hands on" and intently focused on incorporating feedback, while a separate reviewer writing at launch notes the game is admittedly buggy and needs polish, but points out it had already seen "numerous fixes in the first few days alone," alongside more general balancing and content publicly on the way. That same reviewer frames the current state as a fair price of entry specifically for players who want to watch an ambitious indie take on the Bethesda RPG formula develop in real time.

Performance complaints reviewers describe as widespread and specific

Set against that praise, the review sample's most detailed critical account is direct about where the game currently falls short. That reviewer calls it "a decent Morrowind clone that is fun when it works," but reports the game runs their system unusually hot for a game that, in their assessment, doesn't look meaningfully more advanced than Morrowind did on hardware from decades earlier. Multiple other reviewers independently corroborate specific, measurable performance problems: one reports 99% GPU utilisation even on low settings at 1440p, a Steam Deck player reports a hard cap of 40 FPS with stutters and only around an hour of battery life even on the lowest settings, and a PC player reports a ceiling of 70-80 FPS on a high, non-maximum preset.

Bugs, soft-locks, and one genuinely bizarre keyboard issue

Beyond raw performance, several reviewers report the crashes and save-related bugs typical of a fresh Early Access launch. One reviewer describes NPCs falling dead upon reloading a save after a crash, while another reports being soft-locked during one of the game's very first quests. A particularly specific and unusual bug affects players with a Belarusian keyboard layout installed anywhere in their system settings, silently breaking the majority of movement and action controls until that language is removed entirely or every control is manually reassigned, a narrow but real issue worth flagging plainly for affected players. Several reviewers who report these problems are careful to frame them as expected Early Access growing pains rather than disqualifying flaws, with one writing directly that the game "does a lot of things right and is on track to be amazing once its out of early access."

What independent achievement data couldn't confirm

Steam's global achievement-statistics endpoint returned no accessible data for this title at the time of writing, meaning there's no broader player-behaviour data available to independently cross-check how far into the game's advertised exploration and combat systems its large early audience has actually progressed, or how widely the specific performance and bug complaints above extend beyond the reviewers who detailed them directly.

Final verdict

The Lantern of the Laughless Saint backs up an ambitious, openly Morrowind-inspired pitch with real, specific praise for its combat, its landmark-driven exploration, and a level of developer responsiveness reviewers repeatedly call out by name, from a Very Positive, unusually large early review base for an Early Access launch. Its detractors are equally specific, pointing to genuinely demanding performance, GPU strain even on modest settings, and the bugs and soft-locks typical of a title only weeks into Early Access. At NZ$30.99, this is a confident recommendation for fans of old-school, waypoint-free open-world RPGs willing to tolerate real technical rough edges for a world reviewers consistently compare to Bethesda's most beloved era.