It’s always fun when a developer surprises you. After two Ghostrunner games, a series that I appreciate from a distance but don’t fully vibe with, One More Level has released Valor Mortis, which appears to be a wild departure.
Gone is the hyperkinetic cyberpunk action, replaced by a first-person soulslike set in a horrifically twisted alternate history setting. Even with the massive changes in structure and setting, you can definitely see that the team is iterating on what they learned in Ghostrunner, taking the core of deadly melee combat and dynamic movement abilities and putting it into a more encounter-and-exploration-based game. It’s a bold move to try to build a soulslike in first person, but the end result is a flawed success.
Valor Mortis immediately sets itself apart with its unique historical setting. At the start of the game, you are resurrected on the battlefields of Europe, brimming with supernatural power as the voice of Napoleon himself speaks to you directly in your mind. Not only do you have to face the horrors of war, but also the horrors of the mysterious Crimson Plague that has corrupted the landscape, turning soldiers into monstrosities.
We have obviously seen plenty of strategy games that explore the Napoleonic War era, but to see a horror-focused game like this set during that point in time feels rare.
A Beautifully Twisted Battlefield
The time period does give it a bit of a Bloodborne vibe, but it’s focused more on rural villages and bloody battlefields. Despite some repetition in the various locations you’re going through, they each have their own personality that makes them stand out from the others. Some of them were a bit drab, like the caverns early in the game, but some of them felt alive in their grimness, like the late game university full of experimental horrors like a Resident Evil setting.
The rampant infection has also caused strange organic growths to erupt from the land itself, shattering buildings and lifting the debris into the air. It’s a unique looking game that’s beautifully rendered, setting itself apart from other soulslikes, which traditionally have a dark fantasy vibe.
While the visual design of the areas is strong, the actual level design of these spaces was a bit more of a mixed bag. Several places, particularly in the early game, were elegantly laid out, with the subtle hand of the designer guiding you while still giving you space to explore and discover secrets. Other areas would be more confusing, either because they doubled back on themselves in ways that didn’t immediately make sense or didn’t have enough visual variety to let you know you’d backtracked. I’d always eventually find my way, but there were times when I had to do a loop a couple of times before I saw the correct pathway forward, leaving me irritated when I should be feeling a sense of discovery.
Much like other soulslikes, you have a save point you rest at, in this case a lantern, and as you explore you’ll unlock shortcuts back to a specific lantern so that you can respawn there and be closer to forward progress. Unfortunately, this would happen so much that if I stepped away, I would have trouble remembering which of the pathways near the lantern would lead me to the ‘furthest’ point I’d been so far. Perhaps some of this would have been solved with a map of some sort, but Valor Mortis sticks closely to the conventions of the genre by not providing you with one (even though more recently successful soulslikes such as Elden Ring and Mortal Shell 2 have given you one).
First-Person Soulslike Combat Is Thrilling—and Frustrating
Even though it’s traditionally very hard to pull off, Valor Mortis makes a valiant effort at making soulslike melee combat work in first person. In your right hand, you can equip one of a few different swords, and swinging your sword with the attack button, which can also be charged up, uses stamina. Your sword can also block, which also uses stamina, and a perfectly timed block will parry, doing posture damage to the enemy. Break their posture, and you can do a critical attack that does massive damage. Perfectly timed dodges are another tool in your defensive arsenal, which give you a nice little bit of slowdown to turn the table on your foe.
These mechanics are all pretty traditional to the genre, but putting it in first person makes it all feel very visceral and immediate. Everything feels so much more desperate as the monsters are bearing down on you, getting right in your face, setting it apart from other soulslikes. Unfortunately, being that close to the action also comes with problems. Not having a third-person view of things removes some of the situational awareness that is often necessary for these types of fights, particularly when taking on multiple enemies at once.
Bigger monsters can also be challenging up close, as their windups are harder to read without a wider perspective. Given how much I was dodging around enemy attacks, I had trouble getting caught on objects in the environment, as I wasn’t able to keep track of the space around me as much. While I enjoyed the effort put into attempting these combat mechanics from a novel perspective, I found myself thinking that it was getting in the way of itself more than improving the genre.
To mix up the melee attacks, you can also make attacks with your left hand, which can either have a gun or magic power. This was the strongest part of the combat for me, adding in different ways for me to gain the upper hand. Many creatures have big weak points that can be shot for massive damage, and that was always a fun way to kick off a battle. The different firearms each have their own range, damage, and individual ammo type, so keeping track of everything is key to success. The powers all run on a resource called nephtoglobin, which pops out of enemies when you hit them in their weak point. There are three powers, with the most useful combat power being the fire spell that can light monsters on fire, giving them damage over time while also doing a bit of crowd control with its wider range.
You’ll also have an array of items that can be used, which range from special bullets that do status effects to nephtoglobin refill potions to hand grenades, giving you limited use options to deploy when the going gets tough. It was a ton of fun when you’d get all these parts of the combat working in conjunction, blasting an enemy in its weak spot, hitting it with a grenade from a distance, showering it in flame as it runs towards you, then parrying its attacks to finish the job with a critical strike.
Memorable Creature Designs Elevate Every Encounter
Creature designs are all strong, with a great selection of mutated soldiers that are visually distinct from each other and can be read from a distance. Given how intense the combat can get, knowing what enemies you’re up against at a glance is so important, and their silhouettes communicate tons of information about how they behave quickly and efficiently. There are certain ones that are definitely harder than others, so you’re always able to spot the emergency enemies and focus on evading or taking them out right away. Some of them are downright creepy in their look, with my favorite concept being the soldiers that contort and warp their bodies to look like horrible dogs.
While fighting most enemies one-on-one worked fine, even if there were certain enemies like the aforementioned dogs that were more irritating to deal with, encounters became a problem when multiple creatures were engaging you at the same time. Even with little UI notification along the side of the screen to indicate enemy positions, it still felt like you were missing a lot of the incoming attacks because you weren’t fully aware of your surroundings.
Dodging around multiple enemies at once while trying not to accidentally box yourself in a corner was particularly tricky, making some encounters harder than they should be. Late in the game, there was a small room full of crates that had you facing off with five dogs, including one extra strong one that was on fire, which was harder than many of the game’s boss fights, simply because I kept dodging into a corner and wasn’t able to keep up with attacks from all around me.
There’s a slight stealth mechanic in the game, in the sense that enemies will patrol until they spot you, and it always felt great to sneak up behind them and deliver a critical strike, which was often a one-hit kill. Some areas were even set up a bit like an immersive sim, where you could watch patterns and try to set up traps by using explosive barrels or other environmental traps. Encounters like these were easily my favorite in the game, as I could often creatively use my powers along with the element of surprise to cleverly pick off the enemies one by one. Overall, the focus was definitely on the soulslike, parry-based melee fighting, but I wish they had constructed more situations that felt like BioShock or Prey, because that’s when the game worked best for me.
The Biggest Battles Lean Too Heavily on Defense
In keeping with the soulslike tradition, boss fights are a large part of the game, and they are Valor Mortis at its best and worst. Bosses were extremely varied and visually stunning, ranging from superpowered humans to hulking beasts, and demanded precision to overcome. Given that the fights were one-on-one, they were the easiest to read, with a wide variety of attacks for you to learn. Defeating them always felt like you had to earn it, making it a satisfying victory when you finally won. As a nice little twist, you’re always granted a small amount of Catalyst, this game’s version of souls, when you lose a boss battle, so that can eventually add up to enough for a level up, preventing you from the need to go out and grind.
The bad part, for me at least, was how parry focused many of the bosses were. Chipping away at them with sword strikes took a while, which meant that the most effective way to damage them would be to break their posture through parrying, which put me in a strangely more passive mode for certain fights. It felt like instead of being on the offensive, the best move was just to sit back and wait for an attack, which made it frustrating when I had trouble getting into the rhythm of a boss’s attacks.
In addition, they seemed to have lots of attack animations with very long wind-ups, which always caused me to jump the gun and block too early. Eventually, your suite of weapons, powers, and items can give you some solid options aside from parrying, but defense still felt like it was the primary focus of most fights in a way that didn’t always work for me, especially if creatures were bigger and hard to read up close.
A Slow Burn Story That Finds Its Momentum
As you progress through the game, you can spend your Catalyst at lanterns to level up, which gives you a choice of perks from a fairly large skill tree. While most of these were simple stat upgrades, there were builds you could craft that focused on specific tactics. I liked to enhance my various powers, taking perks that gave them more damage or allowed for status effects to build quicker. At the Abandoned Church, a location you reach early in the game that acts as your base of operations, you can spend unique crafting materials to upgrade your weapons and powers specifically, with some branching options mixed in with standard damage improvements.
The combat may be the main star of the show, but One More Level took a lot of the movement mechanics they used in Ghostrunner and implemented them here. Eventually, you’ll be given the power to change the environment, allowing you to pull platforms out of the wall, which gets mixed in with the game’s extensive use of wall running and grappling, creating some interesting platforming challenges. While I enjoyed that they broke up the action and made getting around more interesting, these parts didn’t fit as well for me, with the limited perspective making precise platforming a little more difficult. For a genre that’s more known to be slow and methodical with its exploration pace, these sequences felt a little out of place, even if they were mostly entertaining.
Throughout the twenty-to-twenty-five-hour campaign, Valor Mortis weaves a compelling tale, even if it ends up taking longer than it should to get to the good parts. The beginning involves meeting up with the main characters as Napoleon, voiced by actor Vincent Cassel, guides you to reunite with your countrymen, eventually leading you to the church with a fellow soldier and a researcher. As you interact with the various NPCs, there are binary dialogue choices available, which don’t seem to have massive impact on the overall narrative, but allow you to define where your character’s head is at as the plot unfolds around him.
The majority of the first half involves some uninteresting business about trying to find notes for the researcher to see if he can work on a solution to the Crimson Plague, but the story finally picks up when you are sent to the University. It’s a long journey to get there, and on the way, you meet the most compelling figure in the game, a rebel leader known as the Shrike, who starts to plant seeds of doubt in your mind about your leader’s intentions. As you are seeing and experiencing the horrors of his war with your own eyes, you’re left wondering if she’s right or just trying to manipulate you for her own purposes.
To fill out the world, you’ll often run into ghostly echoes of events, playing out as spectral flashbacks in front of you. These will often lead you to side quests, which are helpfully tracked in your quest log. Most of them were fun to do when I ran into them, but I wasn’t going out of my way to complete them, as many of them were fairly simple and didn’t feel essential to the experience.
Despite the fact that I’m not fully sold on the use of the first-person perspective for a soulslike, Valor Mortis is a strong attempt. I loved how much impact you could feel from every strike and parry, but the lack of situational awareness made it hard to read fights with too many enemies. The game actually worked best for me when it leaned into a more freeform structure, allowing you to combine powers and planning to clear out the battlefield cleverly rather than just testing your parrying ability.
Even if the story felt too long and slow going, the back half of the game crafted intriguing drama to match its horrific world. I hope they take another crack at the concept, because with a little more polish and fine tuning, a version of this game that leans into the immersive sim just as much as the soulslike could be something special.
Review code provided by publisher. Valor Mortis will launch October 13 for PlayStation 5,the Xbox Series, and PC via Steam.
