Review of Valor Mortis: A Starry Spirit, But Not the One You Know

Valor Mortis plays it a bit sly. For a while it keeps things straight, seeming to say 'yes': 'I am definitely a ghost. Look at my fires, my healing flasks, my corpse runs, even the early feints of my impossible bosses. Look at my cautious approach, my fog gates, the cruel melancholy air hanging over these fields of mud and blood.' But jump ahead a few hours, and here you are.

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Ghostrunner Studio One More Level is back with the alternate history Napoleonic Soulslike that combines fluid sword and gunplay with exciting parkour and it's fun.

Valor Mortis plays a bit of a trickster. It keeps it straight for a while. It seems to say "yes"; "I'm definitely a ghost. Look at my bonfires, my healing flasks, my corpse runs, even the early appearances of my impossible bosses. Look at my cautious action, my mist gates, the oppressive air of melancholy that hangs over these fields of mud and blood." But skip ahead a few hours, and there you are: first-person wall-running, swinging, slicing a par or two, parrying a ball. Fast-firing, bullet-jumping shotguns in slow motion, exploding in the face, it's fair to say, this isn't your typical Souls.

Availability: Releases October 13th on PC (via Steam), PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S.

Of course, maybe I shouldn't have been too surprised. Valor Mortis is by One More Level, the studio behind the brilliant and equally insane Parkour and Swordsman Ghostrunner. But as protagonist William Dovet, a soldier in Napoleon's Grand Armée, digs his reanimated body out of the mud at the beginning of Valor Mortis—the corpses of his comrades piled around him on an unnamed European battlefield—early signs point to a more traditional ghost-like form. Granted, most Soulslikes don't intermittently interrupt the action, so Napoleon's disembodied voice can send imperial glories straight to your brain, but the rhythms of first-person swordplay are familiar.

At least for a while, your only means of offense and defense is your swordplay, and combat is initially played out in that classic soul dance of focused observation and patient trading of blows. You swing your sword to attack and block to limit damage, a successful follow-up to restore any health that may have been drained. Some enemies have powerful, unblockable attacks that require nimble evasion to avoid. Get the timing right and you'll be rewarded with an opportunistic slow window. Defensive maneuvers drain your stamina, which takes a moment to recover. Approaching enemies quietly from behind exposes them to a vicious backstab. And since this is a post-Skyro world, well-timed plays will eventually break the enemy's position and create an opportunity for a powerful counterattack.

It's familiar stuff, sure, but it's beautifully crafted, combining weight and fluidity with viscerally satisfying pursuits that cap every successful encounter with grisly head-snapping and cartwheel-twisting limbs. And the novelty is not lost. There isn't a minute in Valor Mortis' 20-hour runtime that the basic thrill of swordplay is lost. Still, it's a nice beat for Soulslike fans, plus the usual ticks of the genre are at the ready - bonfires (here hourglass lanterns), healing flasks, abandoned souls (catalysts) that serve as lost currency for leveling and upgrades. But then comes the gun.

Valor Mortis' gun blade combat setup may suggest a touch of Bloodborne, but once you start controlling things, the pace becomes far more furious. At any time, you can raise your pistol and aim freely without slowing down. Headshots are fine, but hit an enemy's glowing red plague pustule (their exact location is randomized with each replay, so you can't get too complacent) and you'll break through their defenses and deal significant damage. We're not exactly in traditional FPS territory, given the relative lack of bullets, but this extra layer of longer-range attack makes combat feel fluid at times breathless. You'll soon find yourself adopting a gun-running rhythm for encounters, taking a few close-range shots - perhaps to deal initial damage or knocking out gunners with a break - then following it up with fleet-footed swordplay.

And One More Level nicely expands your options over time: Shotguns are powerful, but their long reload times are dangerous when an enemy is down for another melee attack. The two-handed rifle is useful for thinning ranks at long range, but leaves you vulnerable to close-range attacks. Sword Meanwhile, fans will soon be able to swap out their starting saber for a rapier, swapping out slower swings for a series of aggressive strikes. It's also a dream to separate, which causes severe damage to posture with every deviation, albeit with one catch: it can't be blocked. This makes it a bit risky if you're not sure of your timing, but I found the parry window to be generous enough - and the benefits significant enough - that the rapier was my weapon of choice for most of the game. And indeed, while I wouldn't call Valor Mortis easy, it's more forgiving than you'd expect, and closer to "challenging" than "severe punishment."

All this, and I haven't even mentioned the small but effective consumables at your disposal - grenades, molotovs, temporary ability boosters - and your naphthoglobin-powered magical abilities (this, in case you haven't already noticed, is an alternate history of the French Revolutionary War). A morph turns your hand into something like a flamethrower so you can inflict the burn condition on enemies. Another recession freezes them to the point. And the catalysts you farm throughout can be swapped out for incremental upgrades—more health, stronger melee, etc.—even a fancy new trick. For example, you can unlock the ability to slow down time when you draw your weapon in the air, adding more cinema to combat.

Together, it creates a refined toolbox with powerful combat potential, coupled with enemy designs that encourage experimentation as you adapt to each one's distinct rhythms: pitchfork-wielding villagers with erratic thrusts, ultra-aggressive axmen with a flurry of unblockable attacks, lean elite soldiers with ferocious clay swings or speedy dual swords that will really test your father. But when things start to click, it's surprising how quickly you can knock out enemies with the old headshot, dash-dodge, postule-pop, parry-posture-break trick. Glorious soul-like rhythms melting away.

The bosses, though, are outstanding. As wonderfully imaginative as they are, they're a joy to fight. The first—the only one I'll spoil when you come across it early—is a sad sight: an army general is mixed up with his battalion. Tortured faces and clenched arms sticking out of his clotted flesh. He still wears his rank uniform, a chipped tricolor for savage close-range swings and a sword that he uses to command his subordinates, detaching themselves from their flesh and emptying their guns. And while there aren't many bosses, One More Level makes them count. A left turn stands out through the swirling sand, and the follow-up is wonderfully weird - a breath-taking farce with a second half of hilarious guitar parkour action - which Valor Mortis follows hard on. And yes, parkour.

The first hint of Valor Mortis might not sound like your average ghost comes very soon, when William—needing to cross a traitor. A crevasse rising at the edge of a ravine—launches himself into a tree branch, swings with all the confidence of a man raised in the circus, and then lands with unexpected grace. It's not long before you descend the ledges to reach the shore of a vast lake at the base of a naphthoglobin-blasted railway bridge, and from there the parkour becomes steadily more prominent. You'll bound across platforms, dodging incoming fire and unleashing devastating bullets as you close the gap, or launch yourself off ledges for a powerful aerial attack. It gets wilder later, as wall swings and grapples are enthusiastically thrown into the mix, albeit only in fixed locations. And when you get the ability to activate parkour points—creating ledges and ledges timed for a few seconds to maintain your momentum—Valor Mortis feels as much Soulslike as it does platformer. And the levels are built to encourage this type of play.

The world of Valor Mortis - with all its death and decay - is often breathtaking. Bucolic cottages nestle amid fields of lavender, tranquil lakes drench pastoral forests beneath snow-capped mountains, and misty forest paths wind lazily over hewn logs and up hills. Yes, its beauty is diminished by the burning flames and rotting corpses, but it's gorgeous nonetheless. And while the main locations are separated by loading screens, the individual areas are huge, full of ingeniously designed paths that snake circularly around themselves, doubling up to unlock surprising shortcuts in classic Soulslike fashion (the mid-game mining level is a real highlight, far more complex and rich in ideas than it initially suggests). As you navigate through the dizzying mine of white geometric shapes, you'll cross walkways and wobbly beams. Wind through the burning buildings and bound from the roof to the eaves. Wander through the wheat fields, where unseen horrors lurk, as the rain falls and the mournful birdsong echoes through the dark sky. And yes, there is even a poisonous swamp.

Progression is also typically marked by larger pieces. Some of them have an air of mystery and other encounters are heavier than the enemy. It usually offers multiple paths around (and over) a busy intersection of patrolling mobs if you're dedicated enough to look - perhaps avoiding the encounter entirely, or offering a cheeky vantage point. Sometimes, too, exploration brings a decent bonus - say, a solitary cannon that you can use to thin the ranks in an enemy-heavy area - while little secrets and unbreakable quests along the way give more reason to explore and prevent the largely linear progression from feeling claustrophobic. There's even a light touch of Metroidvania in the structure of Valor Mortis, with many levels featuring paths you can't take until you've acquired the necessary abilities, often revealing their own secrets – challenging fights with members of Napoleon's Garde Eternale, perhaps skill-granting gems. And throughout it all, you're bounding and slashing and shooting with joyous abandon.

camera shake guarantee; field of view slider; subtitles toggle, subtitles size toggle; Automatic lock next target guarantee. Bleeding and decomposition separate volume sliders for music, sound effects, dialogue, player, enemy and environment. Mouse and controller sensitivity sliders, mouse and controller targeting sensitivity sliders. Mouse and controller inversion vertical and horizontal axis toggles, key binding customization, controller dead zone adjustment stick slider.

Admittedly, there comes a point in the latter stages where Valor Mortis's action plateaus, its creativity runs out, and it begins to show its limits - as the same relatively small set of enemies return over and over again in slightly new configurations, and you find yourself wandering through yet another area made up of the same old shacks. Artfully disguised cottages in beautiful settings, yes, but it seems a little predictable.

Its story never quite gets off the ground, either: while it manages to throw in a memorable turn of phrase and has strong voices from the handful of characters that haunt your journey, it can't cut through the obviousness of it all as you dance your way through Are We Bad. and "war is bad" motifs. And frankly, I wish Valor Mortis wasn't quite so familiar with those Souslikes intrigues. It's all there, right down to the hub world that you'll revisit whenever you want to upgrade, and it's a weight that hangs a little too heavy, holding it back from really blossoming into something special.

Minor complaints aside, Valor Mortis is very enjoyable. A gloriously entertaining Soulslike whose fluid elemental combat and cleverly designed enemy encounters are probably enough on their own. But then One More Level goes further: Exciting parkour, an exhilarating sense of movement that shapes everything from intricate level design and memorable bosses to thrilling swordplay and gunplay, elevates it further. Valor Mortis might not be like your usual Souls, but it's a damn good time.

A copy of Valor Mortis was provided for this review by Lyrical Games.

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Matt Wells is an editor at Eurogamer and a founding member of the Birdo for President of Everything community.

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