Press Start may receive a commission when you buy from links on our site at no extra cost to you.
After the Ghostrunner duology, I was eager to see what One More Level would do next. After the sequel’s open-world and bike sections felt like flat spots to me in a game that, otherwise, had a focus on breakneck speed, the prospect of Valor Mortis, an enormous departure from their other works, is tantalising.
Billed as more of a first-person Soulslike and set in the midst of the Napoleonic wars, your death in the Little General’s name is only the beginning as you stir awake on a corrupted, plague-ridden version of the Europe you laid your life down for.
Ghostrunner isn’t exactly a walk in the park, but Valor Mortis feels like One More Level turning things up to eleven when it comes to difficulty. It has all of the characteristics of a Soulslike, but it frames its action uniquely through the eyes of William, a fallen soldier of the Eternal Guard, who wakes on a battlefield to find his brothers in arms either dead or in a state of mania, turning their guns on each other and you.
Perhaps most interesting is the fact that the omnipresent voice of Napoleon, performed by the venerable Vincent Cassel, a French actor known for his roles in Black Swan and The White Lotus, is communing with you and guiding you through battle.
I don’t know much about Mr. Bonaparte except for the fact that “at Waterloo, Napoleon did surrender,” oh yeah. Framing him as this malevolent dark artist in an alternate history is a bold step, but it creates an utterly perfect tone for the game. It trades Ghostrunner’s pulp cyberpunk world for one that is grave and full of horrors.
One thing I should put on the table for all to see is that I’m not particularly fond of Soulslike games, speaking generally. I’m far from an elite gamer, and I struggle to perfect parry windows, and I loathe runbacks because, put simply, they’re a waste of time. Valor Mortis is still going to rock a lot of players, and, at the end of the day, that’s a skill issue, and I accept that persistence and “getting good” is the road I’ll travel there, but what I love is that Valor Mortis is quite liberal with its checkpoint placement. Equivalent to bonfires in Dark Souls, players can take a knee here and spend their upgrade points and plant a respawn flag in the ground at the expense of having all of the area’s enemies respawn again.
The game’s first chapter, which is geared at onboarding, has a handful of rest stops along the main path, but what I appreciated most was having one right outside the boss’s ominous fog curtain. I loved this because, quite frankly, I’d done the work, and it allowed me to focus on learning the patterns without the grim spectre of losing several minutes of progress each attempt. So, big tick there.
While it comes at the sacrifice of full battlefield awareness, though the game does have enormous danger indicators that would be impossible to miss, there’s an immersion that comes with first-person, which had me locked in. In terms of how Valor Mortis handles, it actually reminds me of the Dishonored games. Of course, the period might have a lot to do with this, but the similarities are there. For a chunk of the level, I carried with me a sword and gun, though completing the traditional three-legged stool of offensive options late in the stage was a flamethrower that you shoot from your hand.
If movement was Ghostrunner’s thing, combat is going to be seen as Valor Morris’s bread and butter, and it’s engrossing at full flight. Brutal timed hacks split Eternal Guard soldiers in two, while the pistol is useful for shooting lambent blisters on enemies that do a good chunk of damage. As is the case for all Soulslikes, success will hinge on how well you’re able to adapt to the parry timing, which I feel does have a bit of a learning curve, but when you nail a perfection it hits like crack.
You’ve really got to pick your moments in Valor Mortis, and I found impatience was my biggest enemy. The thing I struggled with most was going in overeager with a sword strike, being unable to cancel the animation to parry, and having the guardsman beat me to the hit. I would have died half a dozen times from my own inability to wait. So, if nothing else, I think Valor Mortis teaches patience and, although I didn’t end up beating the boss in my session, I did improve every run.
As strong as combat is in Valor Mortis, I think it’s the aesthetic that spoke to me most of all. It feels antithetical to something like Ghostrunner and its bright lights and sharp edges, Valor Mortis emphasises the ugliness of disease and death through its confronting depictions of a battlefield littered with the dead. I have to doff my fancy Napoleon hat to whoever headed up enemy design, specifically the commander you find at the end, who has fused with his wailing countrymen to form a grotesque, rat king-like abomination.
With a demo available now, I implore you to take up arms and wage war against the Eternal Guard. Valor Mortis is shaping up to be a stunning entry in the Soulslike genre and a likely contender for the year’s best for me. It’s challenging, effortlessly cool, and offers up novel ideas as a first-person game in a genre dominated by games that are anything but.