I didn’t know the game was already out when I downloaded the demo. But I don’t own the full game yet, and I have completed the dang thing, so here’s a short review of Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon demo!
I awaken, Dark Souls-lishly, in a dungeon, dying of plague. My savior tells you to go left to find him, so I go right, and immediately run into a guard station with crude pinups and some r/menwritingwomen erotica. That was yesterday, when I first played the demo, and it left me a little weary of this being another case of Eastern Europeans being at it again.
Nope! The rest of the Tainted Grail demo is suffused with the desperate madness to stop the plague as well as quiet notes of questioning the Arthurian settlement as a colonialist endeavor. This blends with the very Dark Souls topic of the futile endeavors of maintaining the status quo or trying to bring back the past instead of moving forward. It’s this lore that’s one of the most enticing reasons to play further.
As for the gameplay, Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon demo is very reminiscent of Skyrim or other first-person fantasy RPGs. You go around stabbing people, you can dual-wield weapons and spells fairly freely and you can do stealth archery (though enemies get the hint that’s something’s wrong after the first arrow). There are hints of a Souls-like experience with stamina bars for both you and the enemy, and the (potentially iframe-bestowing) dashes existing as their own system. This isn’t a Todd Howard game, so sprinting through the dungeon doesn’t cost stamina.
The combat isn’t anything to write home about, especially since I didn’t see much use in abusing enemy stamina. But that doesn’t get in the way of the dang epic; crafting does. My trek through a madness-twisted dungeon was full of stops to collect mushrooms, herbs, groats and milk. I may have had the turbo plague, but I also had time to cook up some delicious cabbage dumplings that gave me health regeneration.
There’s also mining and digging! In the game advertised by the trailer featuring Maximum Satanist Priest in H. R. Giger’s finest crypt chanting the names of Norse underworlds while a hovering grail spills corruption unto the coffin where Arthur’s corpse rests in amniotic fluid. The devs obviously think this is fine as the post-demo trailer proudly showed fishing and some spell which results in many pieces of cheese you need to pick up individually.
On the technical side, Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon demo felt mostly OK. There was some jank to be felt, and the enemies I faced in combat weren’t the most nimble, but it was bearable (and dangerous). The visuals were serviceable, though they get much better when faraway vistas are concerned. And when it comes to audio, it is good, and the studio doesn’t seem to have gone for the cheapest English-speaking VAs. I’ve always maintained that you’ll know serious project by how much attention was paid to audio!
The dark Arthurian mythos has been a steady genre undercurrent in the previous years and Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon demo shows us one of the biggest games to fit into that lineage. And who knows, maybe I’m the one Wyrdness-spawned idiot who minds crafting being a thing – but I’d play it to find out what’s wrong with Avalon!