Unreal Engine 5.2 Burned Dead Forest Demo Looks Hauntingly Realistic With Its Impressive Lighting

A new Unreal Engine 5.2 tech demo is now available for download, showcasing what it is possible to achieve visually with some of the engine’s features, such as Nanite and Lumen.

The new Burned Forest tech demo, which can be downloaded by going here, was developed by Mawi United, the same developer behind other impressive tech demos released in the past few months. This time around, the developer created a 2 square kilometers procedural burned and dead forest using billions of Nanite triangles of custom photogrammetry scanned trees, rocks, plants, and more. While the burning forest demo loses a bit of its impact due to the fire effects, the dead forest demo is quite impressive, as the proper usage of lighting makes it look hauntingly realistic.

Among the first titles that will be powered by Unreal Engine 5 will be Layers of Fear, the reboot of the horror series developed by Bloober Team. The upcoming horror game will leverage the power of the engine to create a haunting experience that is set to be above anything put out by the developer so far, as I highlighted in my preview. If a smaller team like Bloober Team managed to achieve great visuals with excellent performance, one can only wonder what bigger teams will be able to achieve in their games with Unreal Engine 5.

What truly elevates the Layers of Fear experience, however, are visuals and audio. Built with Unreal Engine 5, the game is among the best-looking horror games released to date. Taking advantage of Lumen and dynamic lighting, Anshar Studio managed to make the Painter’s house more haunting than ever. The series’ iconic transitions are vastly enhanced by the new lighting system as well, making the experience incredibly immersive. What’s even more impressive is how smoothly the game ran even in its pre-release state, as my system (i7-10700 CPU, RTX 3070 GPU, 16 GB RAM) had no trouble running the game at 4K resolution with the NVIDIA DLSS quality preset and ray tracing on at an average of 90 frames per second, with none of the stuttering issues that are plaguing most recent PC ports.