A painted afterlife anchors Prison of Husks

"Whether left behind or wrongly taken," this summer's reel from Glass Head Dolls reads, "discarded bits of pigment can become frightfully lonely." That is an announcement caption written like an item description, and it tells you most of what Prison of Husks is: a souls-like set in a painted afterlife called the Lithos Plateau, where you wake as a doll searching for your beloved and the bosses hoard pigment. A demo is on Steam now with the full game due in 2026, a PS5 version announced, and publisher Wings backing the studio.

The genre tag undersells how strange the systems are. Your dodge is an aggressive dash that closes distance as readily as it creates it, timely blocks refill stamina instead of draining it, and clean play charges an adrenaline meter that raises the damage you deal and the damage you take. Inverse's Robin Bea, in one of the demo's first close reads, called it "a dream about playing" Dark Souls — similar, reference-laden, and inscrutable in its own ways, closer to Ico's haze than to FromSoftware cosplay.

Pigment is not a filter here; it is the loot, the economy, and apparently the loneliness. Killscreen argued back in 2016 that Dark Souls's real inheritance is art history — Bosch, Doré, the whole infernal picture tradition — and Prison of Husks feels like a studio taking that inheritance literally: a game that treats paint as the substance souls are made of, and difficulty as the price of the picture.