You’ve got to be packing some heat to introduce a game with the words, “Fuck you, Todd Howard!” Fortunately, it seems like The Lantern of the Laughless Saint really is about that life. This might be the best (and most aggressive) video game ad of 2026 so far.
If you haven’t heard of this game before, it’s an indie RPG that bills itself as an open world ‘Scrolls-like.’ The developers claim they are making this exploration game because Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls 6 is taking way too long to get here. The pitch is that Laughless Saint is a throwback to Morrowind, a time when Bethesda allowed The Elder Scrolls to be a much weirder series than it is today.
You can expect the hallmarks of a meaty RPG here: a multitude of creative races, lore dispersed within scraps and books, quests tied to rumors, and NPCs with problems only you can solve (or make worse). Quests are open-ended and, according to the game’s Steam page, offer options involving “mercy, violence, compromise, and deceit.” This probably sounds like a lot of RPGs you’ve played before, but Laughless Saint wraps these elements around a game with mechanics that are meant to be abused and broken. In the trailer, we see the protagonist learn a spell that catapults them 5,000 feet into the air — and then immediately die from that hubris — an experience that many Morrowind players will surely remember.
The developers also continually emphasize their desire to make Laughless Saint a fundamentally strange game. The trailer mentions things like fungus wizards, vulture gorillas, and lizard men; the RPG’s Steam page makes note of an illiterate giant toad and an ancient skeleton who wants to swim. The game’s low-poly graphics add to the bizarre ambiance as well, because the game can only render ugly little guys.
Another thing that sets Laughless Saint apart is that it is a co-op game, a fact that developer NerveLabs introduces in the trailer by mocking Bethesda. Really, the tone throughout the latest trailer is audacious — yet undeniably effective.
Topping all of this off is that Laughless Saint aims to release in 2026. Given that The Elder Scrolls 6 is currently at a stage where builds of the game are only starting to consistently run well, I’m guessing that we won’t be playing Bethesda’s RPG anytime soon.
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