Valor Mortis: The Kotaku Review

A restless atmosphere and authentic world-building help rescue a soulslike whose whole is less than the sum of its fractured parts.

An unsettling atmosphere and original world-building help salvage a soul-like experience whose sum is less than its disjointed parts.

Napoleon One Level More Soulslike Valor Mortis

Napoleon Bonaparte is one of the closest things history has to a ghostly hero.

After suffering defeat in the War of the Sixth Coalition, the French emperor survived a suicide attempt and was exiled to Elba on the Italian coast in 1814. Napoleon refused this enforced isolation and, like the chosen dead rising in the fire, mobilized his forces, and less than a year later, threatening his absolute power in Europe, he once again regained his power in France. conquest

It's that majestic character that's the foundation of Valor Mortis, a first-person Soulslike coming to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on October 13. After releasing the cyberpunk parkour-slasher series Ghostrunner, Polish studio One More Level has managed to follow up with the re-release of TakewoT. 2024 will change everything. A futuristic, wall-hopping setting has been abandoned for a game that instead imagines an alternate history where Napoleon not only won the Battle of Waterloo after returning from Elba, but continued to expand his empire with the help of a mysterious substance called Nephtoglobin, which paves the way for the game's supernatural abilities.

A few bugs in the back half, jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none gameplay.

PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S (played on PlayStation 5).

Between 12 and 15 hours to reach credit is the best estimate. My console dashboard says I only played for 20 minutes and there is no way. Maybe I was delusional.

Valor Mortis follows William Dowsett, a British volunteer in Napoleon's Grand Armée, as he navigates a Europe ravaged by the emperor's ambitions. Despite having lost much of his immediate memory when he wakes up in a mass grave at the beginning of the game, our hero is a true believer in every sense of the word. William's initial reactions to the horrors he witnesses show a soldier whose deep and dogmatic devotion to the Emperor prevents him from truly considering the harm inflicted by the Imperial Army during his service. The player experiences this steadfast faith directly thanks to the game's first-person perspective. Each time Napoleon speaks through a telepathic link provided by naphthoglobin, it's as if the sun itself encourages William to continue parading over the mutilated corpses of friend and foe alike.

Fortunately, there are plenty of bodies to go around. Almost every environment is littered with dead relics left over from Napoleon's crusades. They are the ground you walk on, the obstacles that keep you from going off the game's intended paths, and the monstrous enemies that want nothing more than to rip your limbs off. Valor Mortis is a story about how war reduces everyone to rotting flesh—discarded and nameless at the bottom of artillery craters or the shambles of burning cities in sham humanity—from the eyes of one who slowly sheds his blind prejudice to confront the earthly costs of Napoleon's complex legacy. And while he can be a little heavy-handed at times, Narrative shows that he shows unusual acumen when it comes to punching above his weight.

The moment-to-moment gameplay is not that interesting. Valor Mortis is a grab bag of inspiration, mixing elements of Dark Souls and BioShock with some non-linear exploration and platforming, but it feels thin with too many different ideas competing for attention. For example, the combat closely mimics the dodge-parry-attack of Soulslikes, but lacks the emotional weight that makes the genre so exciting. The platforming segments, while good for breaking up the more intense pieces, might as well be done through quick time events for all the impact they have on the overall experience. Valor Mortis is the rare game where the whole is less than the sum of its parts, with so many gameplay features taking up space with mere merit that there's no room for greatness.

And yet, I was still excited for each new session, curious to see what was around the corner from my last checkpoint. An overlooked strength of good Soulslikes is the way they instill fear and passion in the player and mix these two emotions together. Each time one encounters a dangerous and yet unknown area, they become a slurry of nervous excitement. Valor Mortis is quite successful in this regard, mostly thanks to the unsettling atmosphere and creature design that makes moments of safety precious.

In the dozen-plus hours I spent with the game, I held my own against peasants turned into naphthoglobin suicide bombers, cannon-faced ogres who scream in agony at every turn, and terrifying dog-human fusions prone to vomiting poison in laboratories, war villages, and rain-soaked villages. Instead of feeling disjointed, however, every detail is connected by a visual language that evokes 19th-century Europe and the French military styles of the era, disfigured by a cancerous mutation but still believable as a coherent, living world.

Valor Mortis is disappointing, and not because of the persistent difficulty inherent in the Soulslike genre. On the one hand, the game is a compelling allegory about how bigotry can turn men into monsters, bolstered by some of the best art direction the industry has seen in years. On the other hand, it's a monument to over-ambition whose disparate mechanics serve only as fading memories of more deliberate games. But as unfocused as the gameplay is, I'm glad Valor Mortis exists, if only to encourage other studios to explore similar relationships in context and theme. I'm very much looking forward to seeing how the developers at One More Level carry the passion presented in this game into future projects.

Ghostrunner developers explain why their Napoleonic Ghost-like Valor Mortis character is only $40: "Fall is in full swing and there's a huge demand for your time and money."

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