Valor Mortis: The Kotaku Review

Napoleon Bonaparte is one of the closest things history has had to a Soulslike protagonist.

After suffering defeat in the War of the Sixth Coalition, the French emperor survived a suicide attempt and was exiled to Elba off the coast of Italy in 1814. Napoleon balked at this forced seclusion and, much like the Chosen Undead resurrecting at a bonfire, marshaled his forces less than a year later to once again seize absolute power in France and threaten the rest of Europe with his aspirations of conquest.

It’s this imposing personality that serves as the foundation of Valor Mortis, a first-person Soulslike heading to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on October 13. After shipping the cyberpunk parkour slasher series Ghostrunner, Polish studio One More Level, which managed its own bonfire revival after Take-Two backed out of a publishing deal with it in 2024, is changing things up. A futuristic setting and wall bouncing have 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 known as Nephtoglobin that paves the way for the game’s supernatural abilities.

Valor Mortis follows William Dowsett, a British volunteer in Napoleon’s Grande Armée, as he navigates a Europe decimated by the emperor’s ambitions. Despite having lost much of his immediate memory when he regains consciousness in a mass grave at the beginning of the game, our hero is in every sense a true believer. William’s early reactions to the horrors he witnesses reveal a soldier whose deep, dogmatic devotion to the emperor has prevented him from truly considering the damage inflicted by the imperial army during his service. The player experiences this steadfast faith directly thanks to the game’s first-person perspective. Every time Napoleon speaks through a telepathic link afforded by the Nephtoglobin, it’s as if the sun itself is encouraging William to continue marching over the mutilated corpses of friend and foe alike.

Luckily, there are plenty of corpses to go around. Almost every environment is littered with the dead mementos left behind by Napoleon’s crusade. They’re the ground on which you walk, the barriers that keep you from stepping off the game’s intended paths, and the monstrous enemies who want nothing more than to rip you limb from limb. Valor Mortis is a story about how war reduces everyone to rotting meat–discarded and nameless at the bottom of artillery craters or shambling through burning cities in mock humanity–told through the eyes of someone slowly shaking off his blind fanaticism to confront the on-the-ground costs of Napoleon’s complicated legacy. And while it can be a little heavy-handed at times, the narrative demonstrates an uncommon alacrity when punching above its weight.

The moment-to-moment gameplay isn’t quite as compelling. Valor Mortis is a grab bag of inspirations, mixing elements of Dark Souls and BioShock with some nonlinear exploration and platforming, but it feels stretched thin with so many different ideas competing for attention. The combat, for example, mimics the dodge-parry-attack cadence of Soulslikes well enough, but lacks the affective heft that makes the genre so thrilling. The platforming sections, while good for breaking up more intense set pieces, might as well have been accomplished via quick-time events for all the impact they have on the overall experience. Valor Mortis is the rare game in which the whole is less than the sum of its parts, with so many features of its gameplay taking up space with mere competence that there’s no room left for any to pursue greatness.

And yet, I still found myself excited for each new session, curious to see what was just around the corner from my last checkpoint. An overlooked strength of good Soulslikes is the way they elicit both dread and eagerness in the player, blending the two emotions together into a slurry of nervous yearning every time one is confronted with an as-of-yet-unexplored, sure-to-be-dangerous locale. Valor Mortis absolutely succeeds in this regard, thanks for the most part to the unsettling atmosphere and creature designs making moments of safety precious, if altogether brief.

Over the course of the dozen plus hours I spent with the game, I withstood peasants transformed into Nephtoglobin suicide bombers, cannon-faced giants screaming in agony with every step, and hideous amalgamations of dog and man prone to vomiting poison as I trudged through rain-drenched hamlets, war-torn fortresses, and pitch-black laboratories. Rather than feeling disjointed, however, every detail is connected by a visual language evoking 19th century Europe and the French military stylings of the era, misshapen by cancerous mutation but still believable as a coherent, living world.

Valor Mortis is frustrating, and not because of the insistent difficulty inherent to the Soulslike genre. On one hand, the game is a persuasive parable on how fanaticism can transform men into monsters, bolstered by some of the best art direction the industry’s seen in years. On the other, it’s a monument to overambition whose disparate mechanics only serve as faded memories of more intentional games. But as unfocused as the gameplay is, I’m glad Valor Mortis exists, if only to encourage other studios to explore similar marriages of setting and theme. I’m very much looking forward to how the developers at One More Level carry the passion presented in this game into future projects.