If you travel in video game circles enough, a term you will undoubtedly hear when people attempt to genrify games is “Soulslike.” A Soulslike game means games done in the spirit of the mechanics/worldbuilding of the now famed Dark Souls trilogy created by FromSoftware: brutal difficulty, large environments, close quarters combat requiring careful consideration and numerous deaths of the player character. If you travel and speak with game developers, you’ll find a large number quite proudly ascribe their titles to be done in a Soulslike manner. It’s become a big bucket term that often may not be appropriately used. But there are occasional games that take the notion of the approach and make something really wild. Enter Valor Mortis, a Soulslike romp through a fictional, alternative version of Napoleonic Europe made by One More Level.
You play as William, a solder in Napoleon’s army. This game cements the alternative narrative historical fiction of what if Napoleon had not lost the Battle of Waterloo in 1815? What if perhaps Napoloeon Bonaparte did something beyond words awful unbeknownst to his country and his soldiers and that “infection” caused them to horribly come back to life and mutate? In Valor Mortis that is seemingly the situation. William wakes up in a battlefield strewn with dead and immediately finds other recently deceased soldiers having arisen as well, only without their humanity. William bounds forth cutting down these undead soldiers with at first a rapier, and then shortly later, an era-appropriate flintlock pistol. The further William progresses, the more deformed the opponents become and he must carefully consider his parries and slices. One enemy was an undead soldier running around on all fours like a dog. Others featured bulbous pink growths in various unsightly places.
Naturally, we died at a few intervals. But even as the game’s publicist assured us the game was really hard, this was less challenging than other games in the same spirt we encountered over the Summer Game Fest Play Days weekend. Each death becomes a waypoint of sorts, an endless series of lessons with a bonus for when you return to that last held moment after resurrection. William progresses through the carnage eventually earning another attack, a ferocious supernatural ability where he can spew fire directly from his left hand. With enough burn damage, he can set the enemies ablaze. All the while, an ominous, disembodied voice of Napoleon can be heard telepathically communicating into William’s head. The demo concluded with a look at the game’s first boss, a grotesque combination of a multitude of risen corpses, most recognizable to fantasy monster fans as an abomination. This was a wild and rightfully challenging first boss battle. Even a full round through the combat, the abomination close to death, he used an ultimate ability to fully revive his health coming back an elongated, massive hand allowing him even greater attacks. Valor Mortis may have just the right combination of thrill, difficulty and play balance to thread the needle of engaging but not frustrating for a game in this style. This one will absolutely be worth a full look when the game comes out on September 24th.