Valor Mortis Review: The King of Second Chances
Before the internet settled on calling the French cheese-eating surrender monkeys, they were fronted by the king of second chances himself, Napoleon Bonaparte, a compact cannonball of a man who took Europe apart, lost the whole set, got exiled to an island, got bored within a season, and sailed right back out to start swinging again like a player walking back to a bonfire for one more honest attempt.
That is the exact energy Valor Mortis runs on. One More Level, the studio behind Ghostrunner and Ghostrunner 2, looked at that chapter of history and asked the only question a game developer can ask: what if the little emperor's final comeback ran on plague magic?
The answer is an alternate 19th-century Europe where Napoleon's bargain flipped Waterloo, a substance called Nephtoglobin drowned the continent in corruption, and an English soldier named William Dowsett claws out of a battlefield grave carrying the same rot that turned his old squadmates into things that used to be men.
What surprised me immediately is the pace, because these are the Ghostrunner people, a studio whose entire brand was moving at the speed of a bad decision, and Valor Mortis is a single-player, first-person soulslike that moves like a duel.
Stamina governs everything: light swings, heavy commitments, blocks that chew your resources, dodges, timed parries, posture breaks, stagger punishes, finishers—the whole liturgy, except the camera is glued to your eyeballs so every wind-up and feint happens at nose distance.
Guns exist, but ammo is scarce enough that a pistol shot is a tactical decision, not a playstyle, though enemies and skills drop it. Your off hand carries Transmutations as well, supernatural tricks like fans of fire and time freeze and others, each with many uses.
Lanterns dot the world as your checkpoints, and the intended rhythm is exactly what it looks like on paper: swing the sword into a wave of flame, hot-swap to the handguns, blast what is still standing, collect what's there, upgrade what you have, spend the points where you can, and try to work further into the world.
It lands October 13, 2026 on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S for $39.99, joins Game Pass on day one, and PlayStation Plus members get a 90-minute trial that carries progress forward, which is a genuinely decent way to dip a toe in before the water starts biting.
The Brief What's Valor Mortis
You claw out of a mass grave with plague in your veins, and the first voice you hear is Napoleon Bonaparte subletting space in your skull. No deposit, no notice, just conquest and unsolicited opinions, and you're into a supernatural shitshow.
That's how Valor Mortis says hello. Dead, annoyed, and already being narrated.
It's an at-times gorgeous little catastrophe from One More Level. These are the people who made you a neon katana missile doing 120 down a wall, and for their next act they built the opposite: a single-player, first-person soulslike where every swing burns stamina, every greedy combo invites a beating, and a parry requires the grit of knowing that you're taking the devil's bet and he never, ever plays fair.
Why should you care?
William Dowsett is an Englishman who fought for Napoleon's Grande Armée and died in that service, and Valor Mortis opens with the part history books tend to skip, which is him getting back up.
The same corruption that turned his old comrades into monsters is in him now, a substance called Nephtoglobin, and his resurrection hands him supernatural power along with a list of questions he cannot answer: what exactly brought him back, what force is keeping the Eternal Guard on its feet, and how much man is left inside the thing doing the walking?
Napoleon squats in his mind as a permanent narrator and antagonist, Vincent Cassel purring imperial menace directly into your brainstem, while the Shrike, voiced by Jennifer English, leads resistance efforts in occupied Eastern Europe and gives the march a second front.
The land you march through runs from ruined military positions to hollowed villages to mountains and cities, all of it wearing the aftermath of a conventional war that got supernatural gangrene.
Of Swords and Soldiers
Valor Mortis is, at its heart, a fully Dark Souls-styled, first-person action game, where your travels send you across the empire, fighting all manner of supernatural creatures in your bid to find out what happened. I say styled because, while it is possible to die in a hit or two, it's not as often, so consider it Dark Souls lite.
I knew that going in. But let me tell you about a doorway.
A general doorway, like most doorways in games like this, means it's a murder rectangle. But this was in first person, not third, which means a closer, more kinetic feel.
Now, in Valor Mortis, the default parry button is a cumbersome little keypress, so I remapped it, then went and practiced the timing against a conga line of kitted sad fuckers filtering through that small door one at a time like the world's most depressed nightclub.
It's where experimentation turns to expression. So here's the awesome part: I had a skill loaded that boosted my damage after parrying enemies, so I parried the weak one to pump my numbers, spun, and hit the bigger one behind him hard enough to kill him outright.
Comboing off a weak enemy into a strong one, in first person, all off the cuff. That's the moment I sat back and thought, Valor Mortis might be something unique.
The doorway was my homemade tutorial, and in many ways the first words I said right there, "fuck yeah," merged into learning more of Valor Mortis's close-range language of light attacks, heavy attacks, blocks, dodges, timed parries, staggers, counterattacks, and finishers, with every attack eating a bit of stamina.
An unplanned commitment in this game carries a price tag, and first person is what makes that matter, since you're working with a slice of the battlefield at a time and the real threat is always the one leaning in past the edge of your frame, or hiding behind it, or hiding above you—or you're hiding.
Because yeah, stealth actually worked for the most part. Sneaking up behind some Napoleonic soldier who apparently still gets sleepy from time to time and running them through may or may not alert those nearby.
If so, you can switch over to the various ranged weapons, like a pistol you can load up with magic so it breaks enemies' posture, or just fan a load of six shots into his dome, or load it up with special ammo you find or buy.
Managing the space you can't see is half the skill of the thing, which turns every doorway, corner, and hallway into a question about what's standing beside you instead of in front of you, and the game leans into that paranoia with some seriously unique locations, platforming in the mix, a love for verticality and shortcuts, and more than enough opportunities to slip into and out of stealth.
Okay, first, there is one issue. I said into stealth.
If you're being followed by an enemy, it's hard to lose them in stealth. You can sprint away, and after a while they will maybe give up the chase, but stealth is a bit more of a use-it-till-you're-out deal; then supernatural enemies can see you and follow you like bad credit.
But you also have movement options yourself: run along a wall, swing off a fallen pole, use a magical grapple. It's not new stuff.
It is, however, newer in the Dark Souls style.
The foundation under that moment-to-moment gameplay is, as you would expect, stamina. Blocking eats your stamina and some damage gets through to eat your health, and parries let you try to slash off some of theirs, opening attack windows once you've cracked an enemy's posture.
The more combos you throw, the more stamina you hemorrhage, so greed gets punished if it's not tempered by items or skills.
That unique rhythm flows across your whole kit. Swing the sword, unleash a fan of fire in front of you, then swap out to handguns and start blasting.
Upgrades are where the design gets scary smart, because everything ties into everything else. A gun upgrade might load a special bullet that posture-breaks an enemy, but that bullet costs the same magic you need to set that enemy on fire, so now you're making a real decision: do you build posture with counters and save the magic, or do you go loud early?
The blunderbuss is the poster child for this, because a gun with one awesome barrel is awesome, but two barrels is for sure awesomer, and once upgraded its shots can completely stagger an enemy mid-unblockable attack, which changes how you even enter your next combo.
Then there's the rapier, which frankly sucks at blocking but parries wicked fast, can strike enemy weak spots, and once upgraded restores health on every parry. You take it for the same reason anyone takes a rapier: because if you look awesome, you feel awesome.
The deeper you push, the more the symmetry keeps paying out.
There are dodge skills that add damage to your next attacks, weapon upgrades that slap fire onto a blade and then stack with other skills on the same weapon, elemental buildup you can layer onto an enemy until fresh vulnerabilities crack open, and the whole economy runs on Catalysts and Ambers unlocking abilities while your attributes shift underneath it all.
A pistol shot to a weak point buys you a short opening before the blades come back out, which sounds minor right up until you're in a duel where one clean half second is the difference between a finisher and a funeral. Or the moment you find out that when you deflect bullets, you deflect them directly into your handgun because… well, why not?
It's fucking cool.
None of these pieces announce themselves as synergies. They just quietly start working together, and eventually you notice your build has become a machine with no obvious off switch, held together with some weird-ass supernatural math, and the level as a chalkboard.
There's even a field surgery skill with the sabre, and I want to explain this for a moment. Shoot an enemy, then hit them with the sword, and William carves the bullet back out of them.
You scoop out the bullet. I've been playing these games for decades and I've never had a combat loop where ammunition is a two-way transaction if it wasn't arrows or just a random couple of bullets in an enemy's horsenutsack ammo bag.
It feeds a larger pattern where every system feeds another system: fire up an enemy, then shoot them for bonus damage, scoop the bullet out up close, dodge away with a skill that pulls magic from the roll, then attack with a skill that returns health. None of it is a complex spiderweb built to stun you with some "yo dawg, look what we got" mentality.
It's casual symmetry, almost lazy in how naturally it loops, and at times it gives off a real Dishonored feeling, that same pleasure of stacking systems until an encounter collapses like a Jenga tower you built yourself.
The boss fights push the same philosophy. Facing one boss, I went back and switched my entire way of attacking and playing, and that did not just work better; it unlocked the idea of trying another way entirely, which led to the humiliating realization that an earlier boss could have gone down much faster had I simply looked.
The genius is that Valor Mortis makes these decisions less about swapping entire swaths of abilities and more about playing differently, changing the steps of a combo, leading with different tools. It's a deft fucking hand.
And I'll admit, finally beating the son of a bitch who had stymied me felt strange in the best way, because after my tenth attempt I started imagining the boss living in his own Dark Souls, wondering how it was possible he kept killing this piece of shit who kept coming back for more. Roles reversed, I was the invader in his world, and he was out of Estus.
It is clumsy, though, no lying about that. A couple of bosses have wide swaths of geometry where you can get stuck and simply not move, which in a Dark Souls-styled game is a genuine goddamned problem.
One enemy loved a jump attack, and I learned quickly that standing slightly behind his landing spot resulted in him perched on my head like a fucking circus performer, and that arrangement was good for neither of us.
The level design deserved better than those moments, because it's better than I expected going in, with shortcuts and secrets and spots where a little exploration keeps paying out.
Lanterns act as checkpoints anchoring the death-and-return loop, the structure is Metroidvania-inspired with wall running and grappling opening elevated routes through old areas, and the game trusts you to remember geography instead of hand-holding you through it.
The lack of a real map also keeps asking you back, which surprised me. Metroidvania gets thrown around like confetti at a trade show, but here it means something specific: the game wants you to notice where a new movement option changes an old route and then actually walk your memory over there to cash it in.
Optional encounters, hidden routes, environmental puzzles, and side passages all sit off the main lines, and they double as breathing room, quieter intervals between duels where the countryside gets to be eerie on its own schedule instead of constantly billing you for blood.
It's interconnected without pretending to be a seamless open world, no giant map buried under Costco-sized activity icons, just geography that respects your recall. Spotting a ledge early that stays out of reach until a later power lands gives you a very specific flavor of smug satisfaction when you finally get to make good on the promise.
And look, the side material is where this game quietly becomes something else. Scattered through the campaign are small investigations and spirit healings, little stories where you patch up the ghosts still living in this poisoned countryside, and I mean that literally: one second you're helping a man tied to a scarecrow pole and the next you're trying to quiet an undead baby.
Be aware going in, it's some dark stuff, the kind of dark that lingers after you put the controller down.
My honest complaint is that I wish the main plot had held me the way I wanted it to. The land and the times are fertile with plot points and ideas, genuinely, and I just found the side elements more interesting than the central mystery they hang off of.
That's a weird complaint to type, because usually it's reversed, but here the main road is the least interesting road on the map, and the map has an undead baby on it.
Beauty in the Blight
I have seen better graphics. I have seen worlds that make more sense.
God forbid someone try to figure out how some of these enemies physically got into some of these rooms, because the level designers clearly didn't lose sleep over it. And yet here's the thing that shouldn't be possible: there's no map, none, and I never got lost.
Not once.
The trick is that the areas are visually distinct in ways your brain latches onto, a crawling tunnel here, a double leap there, so you're always paying attention, always building the map yourself. Even in the most complex location, probably a series of salt mines seeped to the gills with supernatural soldiers glowing with gelatinous globs of gore juice, I always knew roughly where I was.
Which is incredible, and I say that as someone who has gotten lost in games with a map, a compass, and a quest arrow screaming at me.
On the raw tech side there are some rough textures, but the game runs nice and clean with every vendor's upscaling running, frame gen on both FSR and DLSS, and ray tracing toggleable on and off. This is Unreal Engine 5 doing the Nanite, Lumen, and Niagara thing for dense geometry, moody lighting, and plague effects, and it mostly lands.
The designs themselves are unique enough to be genuinely intriguing, a bit weird at times, occasionally very weird, but weird in the way that keeps you squinting at an enemy trying to figure out what it used to be before the goo got it.
The setting is doing heavy lifting in the looks column too, and I don't think the game gets enough credit for how legible its apocalypse is. This is a world assembled from formal uniforms, cavalry-era blades, battlefield debris, artillery remnants, and villages that still wear the receipts of occupation, and the plague doesn't erase any of it; it grows straight through it.
Weather rolls over damaged architecture, Nephtoglobin bulges out of the stonework in unnatural growths, and the darkness reads less like mood lighting and more like contamination you can see coming.
The best horror trick in the whole presentation is that the military identity stays visible beneath the mutation, so you're never fighting anonymous goo monsters, you're fighting what's left of a regiment, and somewhere under the wet red math there's still a uniform button and a nation that issued it. That's a specific flavor of dread, the historical kind, and it cuts deeper than a jump scare ever could.
There's honesty in how slow first person makes this place feel next to the studio's own back catalogue as well, because where Ghostrunner had you ricocheting through neon at terminal velocity, here scenery and threat share the same visual plane and you're forced to actually look at what the war left behind.
The camera lingers because you linger, and the game knows it, filling every ruined position with things worth squinting at.
Listen or Lose
Audio in a first-person soulslike is not decoration, it's a sense organ you play with, and Valor Mortis knows it.
Steel, Shot, and Spatial Awareness
The combat sounds sell the hits. Guns sound like guns being fired, swords sound like steel meeting meat and steel, magic has that proper occult sizzle, blocks land with a thunk you feel in your teeth, and dodging out of the way of a shot has its own satisfying whoosh of near death.
The 3D channeling is excellent for the most part, footsteps and growls placed around your head with real precision, though there's some fuddling here and there, especially when you're passing between open areas and closed-off ones, like the audio can't decide which room it lives in. That same wobble shows up in voices sometimes too, more on that below.
What makes the fiddly bits sting is how much work the game hands your ears in the first place. A third-person soulslike has a camera for an early warning system; first person strips that away, so the audio stack becomes the radar, and Valor Mortis loads it like it knows.
Footsteps carry weight and direction, growls arrive before their owners do, and the spatial placement does enough work that you can hold a doorway against a filtered conga line mostly by ear, tracking each sad fucker's arrival through the wall before he ever pokes his head in.
The wobble between open and closed spaces matters precisely because the instant the mix loses track of which room you're standing in is the instant you need certainty most, planted at a threshold deciding whether to commit.
When it locks in, the game plays like surround sound was a design pillar rather than a checkbox in a settings menu, and when it drifts you feel like you lost a coin flip you didn't know you were flipping.
The Sound of Something Coming
The score is very discordant, very dark, and very nasty, and I mean that as a compliment. The nastiest trick it pulls is the proximity ramp.
When an enemy is nearby and you can't quite tell where, the music starts swinging uptempo, and now you're torn between two instincts, straining to hear footsteps over the score and trying to ignore the battle tune in case it's lying to you.
It's nerve-wracking in the exact way a plague-ridden occupied Europe should be, and the first time you realize you've been holding your breath listening to a hallway, the composer has won.
An Emperor in Your Ear
Vincent Cassel plays Napoleon and clearly understood the assignment, all silk and menace. James Alexander does good work as William, carrying a bit of actual gravitas for a guy who spends the entire campaign puzzled about why he's suddenly fighting undead Napoleon soldiers, which is the correct tone, because that situation deserves perpetual low-grade confusion.
There are also way more NPCs than I expected, with voices, and honestly I didn't know going in, so the settlements and outposts feel peopled rather than haunted by mute quest dispensers. Overall the voices fit their characters well, with a couple of oddities in the mixing where someone sounds like they recorded their lines from inside a different building, but nothing terrible.
One More Try
I enjoyed the shit out of parts of this game. The parkour is a rough kind of system, leaping and climbing and swinging your way around, and let's calibrate expectations properly: it's not Mirror's Edge, it's more first-person clumsy, reminiscent of old 3D platforming moments, interspersed with awesome.
But it works well enough, and it gets you where the fight is. Exploration in games like this is so difficult to get right.
We've watched it fail over and over, usually because the crux of the entire design falls on poor presentation of its character, and the world buckles under the weight of missed jumps or hard-to-understand expectations.
First person plus Dark Souls structure is rare, and rarer still is it done right, and while Valor Mortis carries real clumsiness, somehow it comes through the other side. I adored fighting the bosses and figuring out their plans while facing them down in the up-close viewpoint, learning a monster's tells with my nose practically touching its teeth.
First person also forces you to utilize sound more than ever, and the game rewards it.
Case in point, one boss is a giant sphinx-like dog creature with delayed attacks that slowly fall to the ground and erupt into huge areas of damage, and those attacks telegraph with a loud electrical thrum, so by listening to the sound, and specifically how loud it gets, you can actually time your defense off your ears alone.
It's a game that works due to its approach options, and opening a fight by dropping onto a soldier from a route the poor bastards never thought to check is a genuinely different pleasure from dueling them politely at the door.
Some of my favorite stretches were the quiet ones, poking at an environmental idea or sliding down a side passage that broke up the pacing, letting the plague countryside be ominous on its own time instead of constantly demanding a duel. Or camping out at a sacred lamp to grind away a couple dozen enemies, try out a new skill, and get some experience for skills.
The boss learning curve stayed fun even while it was kicking my teeth in, because every attempt felt like gathering intel: learn the tell, catch the rhythm, notice the arena, come back and execute. That loop works well enough.
The game does just enough to keep you coming back to your anchor, a destroyed old church with a couple of NPCs with actual voices and useful upgrade stations. It gave you reasons to loop back through old ground, and since some abilities let you find or get through environmental hazards on earlier maps, going back and exploring was less a sigh and hope and more a swing and hopping over the dead.
Just fun. Add the smug little victories of finally reaching a ledge you marked mentally hours ago, and the fun held up hardest in the exact corners where I expected it to sag.
Worth Coming Back For?
One More Level swung from cyberpunk speed to Napoleonic plague and mostly connected, and that sentence shouldn't be true but here we are.
The combat loop of steel, shot, and Transmutation magic—fire and time freezing and elemental buildup, all funded by Catalysts and Ambers and paid out through posture breaks—is one of the most internally coherent upgrade ecosystems I've played in a while, a game where the answer to being stuck is rarely a stat and almost always a new approach.
The main story underdelivers next to its own side content, the geometry occasionally eats you during a boss fight, an enemy will use your head as a balancing beam, and none of it stopped me from thinking about the doorway combo a day later.
The game isn't perfect, but it's goddamned fun, and for $39.99 it's for sure a game I would say to buy if you like this stuff.
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