YAR: Forgotten Throne takes Slavic myth’s answer to Gothic from Steam to PS5 and Xbox

Slavic folklore has always been better at forests than at thrones. Its monsters live in the birch dark and the bog: a witch whose hut walks on chicken legs, a deathless sorcerer who hides his soul inside a needle, a many-headed serpent that guards the edge of the known world. Western fantasy borrowed those shapes for decades, usually filtered through someone else’s map. YAR: Forgotten Throne, the open-world RPG from independent studio Honor Games, takes them home, and builds its whole world around the idea that the land itself is sick.

That sickness is the spine of the game. In the lands of Borea, something is poisoning the forests and the animals that live in them, and the player’s task is to trace the rot back to its source. You arrive as a Warrior, an Archer or a Volkhv, the sorcerer-priest of old Slavic belief rather than a generic mage, and the choice reads less like a stat build than a statement about how you mean to meet a cursed landscape: with steel, from a distance, or by speaking its language.

The new console announcement carries that premise to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, backed by a release-date trailer. The material sent by Axyos Games frames YAR as a single-player dark fantasy action RPG built on dangerous enemies, mysterious locations, demanding combat and hidden secrets, all in service of the story behind the throne of the title.

A corrupted creature with glowing red claws stalks a cobwebbed dead forest in YAR: Forgotten Throne — Image: Honor Games

Underneath the folklore sits a deliberately old-fashioned design. Honor Games lists more than 100 quests, two factions, three large settlements and a thick layer of crafts: alchemy, cooking, blacksmithing, enchanting, fishing and jewellery-making. Koschei the Deathless, the serpent Zmey Gorynych and Baba Yaga all make their appearance. Difficulty runs from a story-focused setting to a hardcore mode that rations saving, a choice that tells you exactly which tradition the studio admires.

Players named that tradition on their own. When the game left early access on Steam, it climbed to second place on SteamDB’s hot releases chart and drew steady comparisons to Gothic, the Piranha Bytes RPG whose hand-built world and unforgiving opening hours shaped a generation of European role-playing games, alongside the inevitable nods to The Witcher. The project began life under the working title Ancient Rus’, and its PC reviews sit at Very Positive, with roughly nine in ten of nearly 1,400 player reviews recommending it.

A warrior faces a red dragon in a lava-lit cavern in YAR: Forgotten Throne — Image: Honor Games

YAR: Forgotten Throne arrives on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S on October 14, 2026. The PC version has been available on Steam since its full launch on April 3, 2026, following an early access period that began in 2024, with full voice acting in English and Russian.

The interesting test is not whether a folklore RPG from a small team can survive the jump to a controller. It is whether a world built around a poisoned forest can still feel strange to console players who have spent a decade wandering through Geralt’s.

Tags: Axyos Games, Honor Games, YAR: Forgotten Throne, open-world RPGs, Slavic mythology