Valor Mortis: the Ghostrunner people made a first-person Napoleonic soulslike

You are William, a soldier of the Grande Armée, brought back from a battlefield grave.

Except the Europe you wake to is not the one you sacrificed for. A mysterious plague is sweeping the continent, and you have returned with its corrupting power in your veins.

That is one of the best opening pages I have read this year, and it comes from the studio I least expected it from.

Who made this

One More Level. The Polish studio behind Ghostrunner.

If you played Ghostrunner, you know exactly what that implies: absurd speed, parkour, and instant death that sends you back to the start of a sequence without ever giving you time to get frustrated.

Take that grammar, and apply it to a first-person soulslike set in a Napoleonic Europe ravaged by a supernatural plague.

That is exactly what Valor Mortis is attempting, and that is why it deserves discussing even where it falls short.

Publishing is handled by Lyrical Games alongside the studio.

What you do

A combat system built on parries, dashes and well-placed finishers, across a variety of weapons.

And the distinctive thing is that the arsenal mixes eras and registers: blades, black-powder firearms, and Transmutations, the supernatural powers the plague gave you. You channel your power to enhance attacks and unlock new abilities.

The parries are described by critics as close to Sekiro's, which is to say demanding and timing-based rather than defensive.

And the parkour is there. Wall-running, grappling, swinging off poles, jumping between shrinking platforms. That is the house signature, and it survives the change of genre.

Each death is a chance to grow stronger, says the store page. The death economy is indeed the soulslike one.

The setting, and it is the argument

An alternate nineteenth century, where the costs of endless war have corrupted the landscape.

You face the plague-ridden abominations of Napoleon's Eternal Guard.

Let me be honest about what draws me: there have been a lot of soulslikes in recent years, and they are set in more or less the same indeterminate gothic kingdom. Choosing the Napoleonic wars means choosing a setting nobody has worn out, with its uniforms, its drums, its military vocabulary, and an imperial mythology that lends itself remarkably well to the supernatural.

Critics note it too: the Napoleonic setting and the level design stand out in a saturated genre.

What the press says, and it is hesitating

The reviews landed today, and the average sits around 78 per cent.

That is a score that tells you something specific: a game nobody hates and nobody defends passionately.

What is praised, consistently: first-person combat, described as responsive and satisfying, and the parkour. Choosing a first-person perspective for a soulslike is flagged as the title's real singularity.

What comes up as criticism is more interesting.

The game loses steam past the midpoint. One critic puts it that way, and another sums the whole thing up by saying it delights as much as it disappoints. That is the most cited flaw.

There are too many mechanics. Several reviewers feel the game attempts too much, and that superfluous systems end up diluting its strengths. I find that credible from a studio whose previous game rested on extreme purity: run, cut, die, repeat.

Enemy variety is limited, which is fatal in a genre where you re-fight the same things for hours.

The bosses are uneven. Not all are of the same level, says one reviewer.

And the difficulty is judged harsh in places, with progression that is not gratifying enough to compensate.

On PC, performance problems are reported.

What I make of it

The portrait that emerges is of an ambitious game that wanted to grow.

One More Level built its reputation on a game of cutting simplicity. With Valor Mortis, the studio adds a death economy, character builds, transmutations, firearms, a historical setting to document. A lot of new things at once, and the critics point at precisely that.

That is not disqualifying. It is the usual path: a studio that attempts nothing never progresses, and a game that runs out of breath after aiming high beats a game that holds perfectly across ten centimetres.

But you should know what you are buying. If you come for Ghostrunner's purity, you will find a heavier, more talkative game, with menus.

So here is my advice, and it depends entirely on you.

If you like soulslikes and are tired of gothic kingdoms, this is the genre's freshest proposition this year. An imperial soldier raised from his grave to face Napoleon's Eternal Guard is an image nobody else will offer you.

If you are arriving from Ghostrunner hoping for the same thing but bigger, be careful. It is not the same thing but bigger, it is something else with the same legs.

And if PC performance worries you, wait for a patch. In a game where everything rests on parries timed to the millisecond, a frame drop is not an aesthetic annoyance, it is a hit taken.

Landed a perfect parry against an undead grenadier? That is a sentence I never expected to write, tell us on the InsertCoins Discord.