Valor Mortis Review - A Savage Soulslike Action-RPG!
I may never find a genre I both love and revile as much as the soulslike. On one hand, its games include some of the most visceral, intense melee combat I’ve ever seen, with a brutal level of difficulty that makes every new beast you best feel like an impossible victory. On the other hand, and I’m going to get a lot of crap for this but I’m going to say it anyway, too many entries in the genre wear bad game design like a badge of honor - wasting the player’s time with long, tedious runbacks to bosses, deliberately obscuring crucial mechanics from the player in the name of avoiding handholding, and setting checkpoints so far apart at times that every game over screen might as well tell you to go fuck yourself while it’s at it. For me, it’s always been a tale of these competing qualities fighting each other to the death, often leaving me interested for a decent chunk of the campaign before sheer fatigue drives me away. I speak as someone who’s not necessarily bad at these games - I got 2/3rds of the way through Sekiro, but then didn’t even get stuck as much as exhausted. I wasn’t having fun anymore, so I stopped.
But as the genre has gained popularity, something tremendous has happened - developers are listening. The design is getting better, the runbacks are getting shorter, and in some cases, more accessible difficulties are added for the sake of getting more players to give the genre a shot. Knowing that Valor Mortis doesn’t have these accessible difficulties left my hype in tricky territory - as a massive fan of developer One More Level’s prior titles, the Ghostrunner games, and someone whose interest is quickly piqued by unique concepts and settings, the idea of them making a first-person, parry-focused soulslike set in an alternate history where a mysterious supernatural substance is transforming Napoleon's army into grotesque, aggressive monsters… well, it’s hard not to pay attention to a concept like that. And so I decided, despite my reservations for the genre, Valor Mortis deserves a go. And I am very glad that I did. Not only is Valor Mortis my favorite soulslike I’ve ever played, with perhaps only Perennial Order able to go toe to toe with it, but the way it treats its genre’s innate difficulty removes just about any reservation I could have had about it. I can recommend this one to soulslike lovers AND soulslike haters, believe it or not, with some caveats, of course.
I might as well hit the most obvious point first, which is that Valor Mortis’s presentation is quite possibly the best I’ve ever seen for this genre, with phenomenal art direction that’s both disturbingly dark and oddly beautiful. You play as William, a former soldier of Napoleon’s army in a bizarre alternate history where you’ve risen from the dead with strange powers and discover that a supernatural plague is spreading. It’s a premise that’s pretty ambitious even in talented hands, and yet everything from the game’s gorgeous, varied environments to its stunningly grotesque variety of enemies and bosses to the vicious body horror surrounding you at any given moment tells me that the art direction over at One More Level is at a level most AAA publishers can hardly dream of. On even a broader technical level, Valor Mortis is astounding to look at. I know Unreal Engine 5 is controversial with some, but the results here really speak for themselves. This is a disturbingly well-realized world and an intensely immersive one, even though I did experience Unreal Engine 5’s trademark stuttering during my playthrough, usually when waking up after death or loading into a new area. This rarely affected the gameplay but oddly got worse as my playthrough went on, and was supplemented by the occasional crash. I’ve been assured by the developers that this is actively being worked on for launch, so the version you play might have a smoother technical state - I just have no way to know at the moment. Rounding out the presentation is sound design that makes the most revolting enemies often heard before they’re seen, and making both their attacks and yours feel punchy and powerful. I don’t have much to say about the soundtrack, but that’s not inherently a good or bad thing. It does a great job of matching each moment, but probably won’t be up for any awards. This is fine.
Let’s hit the second most obvious point of discussion, or at least one I’m pretty sure many other reviews will bring up. Valor Mortis is explicitly advertised as a soulslike, and nothing about that is misleading - it’s absolutely a soulslike with nearly every soulslike feature you can think of. Even basic enemies can do massive damage if you let them. There are lanterns that function like Dark Souls’ bonfires, allowing you to level up and rest while respawning all non-boss enemies in the game world. You’ll have to pick up your collected experience from the place where you died, or risk losing it all if you die again along the way. And items you use in battle don’t replenish themselves if you die and respawn. But despite ticking all of the right boxes expected for the genre, Valor Mortis is… how do I say… much less irritating than any soulslike I have ever played. It feels like a near-perfect combination of genuinely difficult combat that requires quick reflexes and careful attention and just enough carefully curated design to prevent that combat from becoming too frustrating. And I want to break this down in detail for any soulslike skeptics, like myself, who don’t believe me that they might actually love this game.
For one thing, Valor Mortis’s first-person perspective, arguably a first for a soulslike, keeps the focus mostly on the combat and less on movement. There’s no dodge-rolling here. There is a dodge button, and it will need to be used to swiftly dash out of the way during a red-highlighted unblockable attack, but the ability to focus mostly on reading your enemy’s moves and less on where you are and what’s around you is helpful to make the perspective work. And this makes sense, because reading an enemy’s movement, especially if that enemy is taking up most of the screen, is more difficult in first-person than in third-person. Even so, I found enemy moves to be very well-choreographed, rarely feeling like they got a cheap shot in. The only exception is the occasional case where you may have enemies both in front of and behind you, and controlling your position can get challenging fast. But this is rare, and usually avoidable if you’re being careful with your encounters and not rushing past fights that will literally catch up to you.
Another difference from genre norms is in just how forgiving Valor Mortis is. Despite threatening you with lost experience and every new enemy being a gauntlet of tricky parries and dodges to learn, the parry window is significantly more forgiving than something like Sekiro, and probably closer to the latest Onimusha game - it requires skill, absolutely, but not perfection. The level design also does a fantastic job of either placing lanterns at a reasonable cadence to avoid annoying runbacks, or having you constantly opening up shortcuts that can get you around the level faster. You can also actually pause the game (gasp! I know!) and an enemy is never going to straight-up one-shot you with an overly powerful hit. Two shots? Sometimes. More forgiving does not mean easy. Frankly, to me, it just means less annoying. Hallelujah to that.
Combat itself follows a pretty standard soulslike template, Sekiro specifically, albeit with a few interesting twists. You’ll have a choice of swords you can use that have different defensive or offensive capabilities and are genuinely useful choices to have in certain situations. When an enemy attacks you, pressing the block button at the exact moment of their hit will land a parry and fill up a bar much like Sekiro’s posture meter, allowing you to perform a strike with massive damage once the meter is full. That’s just your right hand though - supplementing this in a way evocative of Bioshock or Dishonored is your left hand ability, which can either be one of the game’s guns or its mysterious supernatural powers like spewing fire or freezing the enemies in stasis. This alone adds some variety to how you handle each enemy, allowing you to avoid melee combat with especially annoying basic enemies and shoot them or burn them to a crisp instead. Many enemies will also have oozing weak spots that are worth paying attention to and seeing what a well-placed shot might do. Outside of hitting these weak spots, the firearms are deliberately underpowered and limited in ammunition so as not to turn Valor Mortis into an actual shooter. It does lean further into shooting the more into the campaign you go, especially for one absolutely crazy boss fight that completely relies on shooting and is not worth spoiling here, but it's all more in the service of variety than to abandon its melee combat foundation.
The game isn’t all combat either, and likes to play with its format in ways that clearly show you that yes, these devs made Ghostrunner, and no, they can’t help themselves but to add some of its features here. As the campaign unfolds in a loosely metroidvania-esque style where you’ll gain new abilities to revisit old areas, you’ll be able to wall-run and grapple through a variety of platforming gauntlets that aren’t especially difficult, but get the blood flowing nevertheless. It's one of a few ways that the game tries to infuse variety and go the extra mile. There are side missions that can either take the form of enemy encounters down less-obvious paths, or just a short, more personal vignette you can follow, like an especially compelling tale at an abandoned cabin where an artist has hung himself and you trace memories from before his death to figure out why. There’s even a level, on the main path this time, where you ride a minecart and have to quickly manipulate obstacles in your way lest you crash. I wouldn’t say it goes as far as to be campy since a pretty sinister tone permeates the whole experience, but there’s a playfulness in Valor Mortis’s design that managed to keep me on my toes without ever breaking immersion. The only time this playfulness backfires is in the handful of circumstances where you’re placed into instant-death situations that are only easy to react quickly to if you know exactly what to do. A few of these times felt unintuitive enough that they took several tries, though their proximity to a nearby checkpoint never made the trial-and-error too taxing.
Valor Mortis’s unlockable swords, powers, firearms, and traversal abilities create a nice sense of progression through the campaign on their own, but while this is hardly an RPG, there is a skill tree to work your way through with each level you gain, as well as smaller, more linear upgrade trees available for each weapon and ability. It gives just enough flexibility to allow a smidge of build variety while clearly ensuring you don’t have to spend much time micromanaging your playstyle. Personally, while none of the upgrades really wowed me, progression felt tangible enough to keep things interesting.
Given the subpar level of writing and narrative design in the Ghostrunner games, I very nearly wrote off Valor Mortis’s story from the start, figuring this to be a wholly gameplay-focused experience. I’m happy to be wrong, though - Valor Mortis’s story surprised me not only with the quality of the writing and voice acting, but the surprising amount of intrigue in every level and the way it fed into the broader narrative. Levels are littered with memories of their past inhabitants and notes detailing the region’s decline into a plague-riddled hell. And while much of the game’s structure involves William being sent to fetch this, that, or the other thing from one terrible place after the next, the narrative threads connecting each location feel well-justified, and had me genuinely invested in what this mysterious substance is and where it came from.
Overall, One More Level’s pivot into the soulslike genre had me cautiously hyped but decently worried. And in a surprising twist, this is my favorite game from them yet - a soulslike that keeps the genre’s best qualities while discarding its more annoying, frustrating ones and delivering a 15-20ish hour campaign oozing such quality that it feels like it could’ve been a $70 release instead of a $40 AA game. But above all, Valor Mortis has blown me away. It’s gorgeous, stunningly creative, well-written, challenging, tense, consistently unpredictable, and quite possibly in competition for the best game I’ve played in 2026 so far. If you’re a soulslike fan, this one is a no-brainer. And if you’re not but you’re interested enough in parry-based combat to trust me that this one is worth playing… well, hopefully I’ve said enough to make my case. Valor Mortis obviously gets the golden genie lamp of approval and is a game I will be talking about enthusiastically when it's time for year-end awards. Don't miss it.
Pros:
Fantastic presentation that feels fully AAA
Art direction is phenomenal and creatively grotesque
Great enemy variety
First-person perspective adds a unique twist to the genre
Clearly designed to be less frustrating than the average soulslike
Excellent level design that consistently rewards exploration
Surprisingly compelling story
Cons:
Some sequences rely too much on trial-and-error
Minor technical issues
Who’s it for:
Soulslike fans looking for something unique
Parry lovers
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