In Bladesong you are both the real hero and villain of any fantasy RPG - the person who makes all the swords

Advance the story by arming the NPCs

Video games in general have a surplus of weapons. It's gotten to the point that if I had any freelance budget, I'd commission somebody to count them up. Just give me an approximate running total for the industry at large, so that whenever next a shiny-eyed producer regales me with the prospect of enchanted lazurite rapiers at a preview event, I can quietly ask how many enchanted lazurite rapiers we're talking about, then open my laptop and generate a scrolling image akin to those comparison pages for stars and planets - a cosmic mountain of points and pommels, with the new game's armoury forming a pixel-wide foothill in the bottom left corner. "Are there not enough enchanted lazurite rapiers," I will kindly enquire, as the producer sobs brokenly into my shoulder.

In the absence of an artform-wide disarmament project, with shame-faced RPG adventurers handing over their runic heirlooms to local constables, games could at least teach their players to think more about each individual weapon: its design and history, how it fits into some on-going story. Bladesong seems helpful on that front. It's a blacksmithing game where you make swords to play out the tale of a mighty fortress, "one of mankind's last remaining bastions after the gods have banished themselves".

It doesn't look a lot like blacksmithing, mind you. It's a spotlit model-editing garage that burgeons with icons, fields and sliders for things like "distal taper" and "flamboyance". There is minimal hammering, as far as I can see. No actual in-game singing either, despite the title. I feel like there genuinely are blacksmiths who sing to their creations, to regulate the rhythm of their strokes. I guess you can always sing at the screen if it helps with your APM.

If you dislike crafting screens in video games, this is your worst nightmare. But I'm already enjoying both the nerdy extravagance of options, and the accompanying requirement to meet specific buyer requests that factor into the aforesaid narrative. Somebody needs a lightweight training sword - perhaps they're a juvenile Chosen One embarking on that very first tutorial rat hunt. Somebody else wants a blade that's hefty and not too long, so that they can slash with it in tight spaces - perhaps this particular individual is a city guard who patrols a lot of narrow alleyways. Somebody else just wants a shitload of pretentious glowing sigils. He's likely a witcher.

It'd be nice if we had the option of deliberately failing commissions and saddling people we dislike with minimally hardened or heat-treated swords. A few days later, there's a story in the papers about some git noble splintering his bejewelled katana against a peasant's scythe while trying to collect taxes.

Sadly, the Steam page doesn't give much sense of the story and how much control you have over it. The morsels I sponge from the trailer suggest that there's a lot of text, but it's tersely phrased. Makes sense - there's no room for roundabout adjectives when you're commissioning weapons. It would be like making a rapier out of lazurite. Lazurite, incidentally, is a tectosilicate mineral often used in painting. I don't speak from any experience, but you probably shouldn't try to make a sword out of the stuff.

Bladesong will have a public playtest from 4th-13th December. You can sign up on the Steam page. In the shorter term, I welcome any recommendations for other games in which you largely just make weapons for people. I know there are a few.