TheRetroArcade
Veteran
Posts: 11,999
Joined: Feb 2026
Joined: Feb 2026
Blood bon
Valor Mortis is a simpler kind of Soulslike, even in first-person, but clashy, quality combat and 19th-century horror keep it sharp.
Well, I say "freshest." In its ickily up- vision of Napoleonic battlefields, swapping the boring old bubonic plague for a fleshy, pustulating necro-blight, Valor Mortis is as horrid and grim as a standard Soulslike rulebook would compel.
At the same time, One More Level’s first-person take on campfires and attack-pattern combat does feel like a game striking out on its own, and not just through its unusual choice of perspective. If anything, there are decisions here that might have FromSoft purists calling for the guillotine. Yet it’s almost all in service of an intentionally tighter, more intimate kind of supernatural action, which – while lacking the immaculate complexity of Souls masterworks – serves up enough tense sabre duels to see the whole thing through.
Also, it begins with a Vincent Cassel-voiced Napoleon forming himself a cape of purple plague meat, which isn’t the dullest way I’ve seen a game start. In Valor Mortis’ history, the Petite Corporal won at Waterloo with the aid of this funky ooze, which reanimates fallen militaires at the acceptable cost of turning them into eternally loyal monsters. You yourself get off lucky – your only real mutations are the ability to unlock BioShock Plasmid-style powers to aid your sword and pistol moves, and a tendency to wake up next to glowing lanterns after carking it once more. The rest of the Grand Armée aren’t so fortunate, becoming hostile drones at best or fused-together bone mountains at worst. Special commiserations to the grenadiers now joined together at the hip, chest and shoulder, the 'Volunteers' who attack in flurries of unnaturally stretched-out limbs, and the cannon operators who melted into their own artillery.
It’s a respectable menagerie of body-horror foes, whose unholy designs contrast nicely with the orderliness of their blue coats and fine fur hats. One of the benefits of the FPSoulslike approach is that you get to admire their revolting visages point-blank, which serves both to make 1-on-1s feel a little more personal – whatever light is left in those eyes, you will see go out – and to give the taller monstrosities even more of a physically imposing gravitas. I also found pre-release fears of the perspective limiting battle effectiveness to be largely unfounded; there are a couple of bosses where getting right up in their undead grills will push their telltale swinging motions offscreen, but Valor Mortis’ emphasis on parrying and posture-breaking means it’s usually smarter to keep a measure of distance anyway. Some astute level design also keeps most encounters head-on, so it’s rare for someone to get behind you for an unseen backstab. I can think of perhaps two or three occasions, throughout the whole game, where I truly needed the (sacrilege!) damage warning indicators for out-of-view attackers.
Not every first-person pitfall is avoided. Literally: I’ve backstepped off cliffs and into unescapable corners far more than I suspect I would have, if I could see my legs. But generally, it works, especially as environments – as well as enemies – have clearly been built around the eyeball view. There are moments of claustrophobic unease here, inside narrow cave tunnels and blindspot-rich villages, that either wouldn’t be possible or wouldn’t present as effectively with a third-person camera. Nor would it be so easy to appreciate, as with Napoleon’s revenants, the grisly detailing of these spaces: agonised faces trapped in petrified deathgunk, scattered belongings left by fleeing peasants, torturous medical implements lying around hidden laboratories. Vividly gruesome stuff, for which you are afforded no distance.
Quick notes on performance – Valor Mortis ran well on my RTX 5080 at 1440p, averaging around 110fps with max graphics, ray tracing, and DLSS on Quality. I appreciate that’s not exactly a PC of the ti...Read more: Full article on www.rockpapershotgun.com
What do you think about this?
Valor Mortis is a simpler kind of Soulslike, even in first-person, but clashy, quality combat and 19th-century horror keep it sharp.
Well, I say "freshest." In its ickily up- vision of Napoleonic battlefields, swapping the boring old bubonic plague for a fleshy, pustulating necro-blight, Valor Mortis is as horrid and grim as a standard Soulslike rulebook would compel.
At the same time, One More Level’s first-person take on campfires and attack-pattern combat does feel like a game striking out on its own, and not just through its unusual choice of perspective. If anything, there are decisions here that might have FromSoft purists calling for the guillotine. Yet it’s almost all in service of an intentionally tighter, more intimate kind of supernatural action, which – while lacking the immaculate complexity of Souls masterworks – serves up enough tense sabre duels to see the whole thing through.
Also, it begins with a Vincent Cassel-voiced Napoleon forming himself a cape of purple plague meat, which isn’t the dullest way I’ve seen a game start. In Valor Mortis’ history, the Petite Corporal won at Waterloo with the aid of this funky ooze, which reanimates fallen militaires at the acceptable cost of turning them into eternally loyal monsters. You yourself get off lucky – your only real mutations are the ability to unlock BioShock Plasmid-style powers to aid your sword and pistol moves, and a tendency to wake up next to glowing lanterns after carking it once more. The rest of the Grand Armée aren’t so fortunate, becoming hostile drones at best or fused-together bone mountains at worst. Special commiserations to the grenadiers now joined together at the hip, chest and shoulder, the 'Volunteers' who attack in flurries of unnaturally stretched-out limbs, and the cannon operators who melted into their own artillery.
It’s a respectable menagerie of body-horror foes, whose unholy designs contrast nicely with the orderliness of their blue coats and fine fur hats. One of the benefits of the FPSoulslike approach is that you get to admire their revolting visages point-blank, which serves both to make 1-on-1s feel a little more personal – whatever light is left in those eyes, you will see go out – and to give the taller monstrosities even more of a physically imposing gravitas. I also found pre-release fears of the perspective limiting battle effectiveness to be largely unfounded; there are a couple of bosses where getting right up in their undead grills will push their telltale swinging motions offscreen, but Valor Mortis’ emphasis on parrying and posture-breaking means it’s usually smarter to keep a measure of distance anyway. Some astute level design also keeps most encounters head-on, so it’s rare for someone to get behind you for an unseen backstab. I can think of perhaps two or three occasions, throughout the whole game, where I truly needed the (sacrilege!) damage warning indicators for out-of-view attackers.
Not every first-person pitfall is avoided. Literally: I’ve backstepped off cliffs and into unescapable corners far more than I suspect I would have, if I could see my legs. But generally, it works, especially as environments – as well as enemies – have clearly been built around the eyeball view. There are moments of claustrophobic unease here, inside narrow cave tunnels and blindspot-rich villages, that either wouldn’t be possible or wouldn’t present as effectively with a third-person camera. Nor would it be so easy to appreciate, as with Napoleon’s revenants, the grisly detailing of these spaces: agonised faces trapped in petrified deathgunk, scattered belongings left by fleeing peasants, torturous medical implements lying around hidden laboratories. Vividly gruesome stuff, for which you are afforded no distance.
Quick notes on performance – Valor Mortis ran well on my RTX 5080 at 1440p, averaging around 110fps with max graphics, ray tracing, and DLSS on Quality. I appreciate that’s not exactly a PC of the ti...Read more: Full article on www.rockpapershotgun.com
What do you think about this?