Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon
Developer: Questline
Publisher: Awaken Realms
Platforms: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S (Reviewed), PC
Release Date: Available Now
Price: $44.99 USD – Available Here
Overview
When it comes to legends and fables, very few have been tackled quite as many times or in as many ways as anything related to King Arthur. Anything relating to Arthurian legends and the knights of the round table have long been seen as prime material ripe for the picking for all manner of game genre, some flipping things around with Artoria in the Fate franchise or sticking as true to legend as possible with various tweaks to Arthur and Merlin’s legends. Arthurian legends have been dabbled in long before video games were created but that doesn’t make them ripe for the picking now and Questline and Awaken Realms have done just that by putting perhaps one of the darkest and most expansive offerings of Arthur’s legacy that fans could hope for in Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon. After spending two years in early-access and now being given its full console release, is this twisted take on these familiar legends worth delving into?
Story
Roughly six hundred years have passed since the great King Arthur perished, leaving his subjects in the land of Avalon with only the Knights of the Round Table to lead the way and guide the people. Over these hundreds of years though things have only grown more disastrous, between wars breaking out among the tribal folk and those loyal to Kamelot and the ever encroaching Wyrdness that permeates the land, twisting anything it touches with dark magics beyond most’s comprehension, many have turned to even darker rituals and attempts to try and cure the land of what ails it, even if it means purging everyone who may have had any influence or taking part in brutal human experimentation that would sicken even the hardest of stomachs.
The player wakes up in one such location, having been discovered by the Red Priests and imprisoned in an island asylum where they commit unspeakable acts in an effort to understand and perhaps cure the Red Death plague that has recently begun sweeping the land, killing anyone unfortunate enough to be infected by it and at worse turning them into an undead monstrosity. Stricken with the Red Death yourself, the player is saved from jail by a mysterious man who, after giving players a chance to explore and discover just how dark and twisted some things have become in this world, leads them to a potential escape route only for it to be a path to an otherworldly location containing none other than King Arthur’s soul. Or at least a part of it. This fragment of King Arthur, the long deceased king, attaches itself to the player in hopes of regaining his true form once again and reviving, but perhaps that might not be the best thing for the people of Avalon?
Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon doesn’t hold back its punches when it comes to showing off how brutal things can be. The entire first hour or so of the game (depending on how much players want to explore) can be spent reading into, talking to, and discovering various aspects of how far the Red Priests have been willing to go on this island asylum and experiment with both the dangerous Wyrdness and the plague victims themselves, something that no one in their right mind would sanction. Even once players finally leave the island and land upon the shores of Avalon in the Horns of the South things aren’t much better. Bandits run amok, the Wyrdness comes out every night to possess those caught in the open and spawn monstrosities, and locations that may have seemed like refuge once now are horrific shrines to good intentions gone horribly wrong.
The environmental storytelling in Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon is exceptional, what with horrific giants impaled into rocks or sunken giant statues, and when combined with the side-quests that often accompany many of the places players will explore it is made all the more clear how talented the writing team at Questline happens to be, especially when it comes to variety. One mission may have players trying to track down the remains of a sunken ship set to have a mysterious Wyrdness defying relic onboard only to discover the gruesome truth when found while another may involve helping an entitled woman find her husband and deciding to let him run away and escape his marriage, choosing to woo the new “widow” themselves, or even simply spend time chopping wood to repair the ramshackle parts of the refugee town to make lives a little better for those fleeing from the horrors beyond what few safe walls still remain.
These side-quests and environmental storytelling serve as wonderful side-dishes to the main storyline itself that features a wide variety of ways that players can often tackle some objectives. One of the first major goals players can have is to reach Excalibur, and while there is an expansive questline filled with many choices and unique encounters that expand greatly upon the game’s backstory and how dark Kamelot really is, it is also entirely possible to draw Excalibur without any help whatsoever, as long as players are ready for the challenge and choose to skip what would otherwise give the player aid. That being said, the main storyline of Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon is exceptionally well-done and players will need to make a number of meaningful choices throughout the game, especially at pivotal points, to help shape the fate of Avalon and its people.
When it comes to main storyline choices, many of these simply involve doing one task or another, but players can also come across a number of other random dialogue options as well in quests that can result in unique endings or possibilities as well. For example, players with enough spirituality stats may be able to convince the local necromancer that is causing havoc that he should go into healing the sick, rather than simply running in and stabbing him through with a spear. Many of these dialogue choices will state that the player may not have enough of a certain stat to select the option while others will give a percentage of success and these are true percentages of success and failure, not guaranteed ones. Of course, this does mean that save scumming for the best result is always an option but a welcome one.
Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon really does manage to hit that perfect blend of twisted darkness and near hopelessness with the player character and a few others being the last shining lights in the dark trying to strive to help as much as they can. Ironically, players can also choose to make things much worse in some cases between dialogue choices and main storyline ones. This creates some rather interesting dynamics in an already expansive story that players can easily sink well over sixty hours in and that isn’t even if they are exploring everything. What makes things even more interesting is the fact that Arthur’s fragmented ghost is along for the ride and often is chatty with the player around the campfire, wanting to talk about the various things that they’ve come across and done. Giving players a stark comparison to how things may have seemed in his time and how twisted they have become since his passing or the harsh reality of events that have been lost to the past. Those really wanting to delve through every cave, forgotten shrine, hatch a strange looking axolotl-like pet that does nothing but look cute, and much more will find well over that amount awaiting them within the Wyrd infected lands of Avalon.
Gameplay
In a general sense we tend to avoid making direct comparisons to other titles, especially in the case of an up-and-coming developer’s major release but it is extremely clear that Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon has, at the very least, drawn inspiration from The Elder Scrolls when it comes to creating an expansive open world explored in first person where players will wield medieval weaponry and magics to defeat their foes. This is far from a bad thing, if anything it actually happens to work quite well and it is interesting to see where Questline has managed to deviate from the blueprint and create their own unique little mechanics and elements here and there. First and foremost, it is interesting to note that combat is extremely customizable thanks to the way players can not only manage numerous loadouts at once, quickswapping between four different possible sets at need, but also the way weaponry is handled.
Sure, there are tried and true staples such as using two-handed weapons like large polearms, giant maces, greatswords, or wielding a bow and arrow or simply going “sword and board” with a sword and shield but single-handed weaponry is where options open up greatly. This is because spells can be equipped to one hand while a blade or melee weapon can be equipped to the other, allowing for players to work a spell-blades, dual-wielding swords or daggers to unleash a flurry of attacks, or even dual wielding two different spells at once and firing away at foes with all different kinds of elemental attacks. Every magic spell has a light cast and a heavy cast variant, each performing a different variation of the spell and costing different mana. There are even summon spells within the game with an entire skill tree based around summoning up to six magical creatures (or people) to fight at the player’s command.
Keeping these units summoned does lower the cap on the player’s max mana but it also means that players can, in my particular instance for quite some time, summon five wolves and sic them on a group of bandits only to quick-swap to a bleed-inflicting spear, allowing me to stab away at enemies and inflict statuses and damage from a distance. This then evolved further as more powerful weaponry and summons became available throughout the game and this is only one of many possibilities that are open to players in combat. It is odd to note though that sometimes summons can glitch out in a variety of ways. One time saw a summon remain permanently draining MP despite being dispelled, with a reset being the only way to banish it, and another saw the summons randomly attacking a non-hostile NPC and downing him, though thankfully it appears that most non-hostile NPCs cannot be killed unless players “execute” them on the ground. Along these same lines, it is worth noting that the criminal system in Tainted Grail is quite rudimentary. Players can pickpocket by sneaking and, if successful, will never be noticed. Similar to picking locks with an extremely familiar lockpicking mini-game. If caught, players are simply given the option to pay the fine, go to jail, or resist but unless players are careless they’ll likely never even notice a punishment for any thefts.
Alongside the aforementioned similar lockpicking mini game players will find a number of random crafting systems as well, including blacksmithing random gear, creating potions with alchemy, cooking food, all using basic crafting menus, and even a fishing mini-game that is actually more complicated than simply casting the line and immediately catching something. Players can even get a horse they can summon at anytime but, unless players are wearing the heaviest gear possible which slows movement speed, they are better walking/running everywhere as the horse controls are absolutely awful. That being said, crafting is a bit of an annoyance primarily due to the game’s encumbrance system and inability to use materials from the player’s “stash” to craft. Like many RPGs of this type, players can only carry so much and practically everything is lootable. Trying to loot a table of food might see the player picking up the plate and drink cup before they snag the apples. Becoming over-encumbered means players cannot fast-travel using fast-travel points or their own fueled campfire and having to make sure players always are carrying around crafting materials instead of being able to stash away what they’ve gathered and using the materials from their stash to craft is annoyingly tedious and a strange oversight since players can sell to vendors from their stash.
As players beat monsters or level their skills such as one-handed or thievery or complete a myriad of quests they’ll earn XP and level up with these points being able to be allocated at a campfire. Every level rewards player with an attribute point and a skill point, with attribute points affecting their overall stats and potentially unlocking dialogue options and skill points being able to be distributed to a vast array of options ranging from increasing how much items sell for, the amount of health or damage the player does, and more. Another aspect of using the bonfire is to keep the Wyrdness at bay when resting or avoiding danger at night. As night falls upon Avalon, the Wyrdness runs rampant and can not only enhance the abilities of monsters already in the area, but even summon spectral beings of its own to punish the player. Even human enemies become possessed and deal far more damage and attack more aggressively at night. As such, players can use “Ethereal cobwebs” obtained from slaying enemies infected by the Wyrdness to fuel their campfire to keep it at bay, fast travel, identify mystery items also dropped by enemies at night, and even use it to make alchemical potions. This leads to a sort of risk and reward to battling at night, especially since there are some materials only available from those summoned from the darkness.
Now any open world RPG of the scale of Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon is bound to have bugs with it but there happen to be quite a few throughout our time with the game. Some of these were as simple as being stuck in the geometry and thankfully the game has a pre-built “unstick” option in the menu to help players here but other bugs arose as well. This includes quest targets randomly vanishing and requiring a reload to properly hunt down and slay, meaning players will want to keep frequent saves and make use of the hundred save slots available to make sure not to lock themselves out of progress, aforementioned bugs with summoned allies, dialogue either vanishing or not playing properly, and worst of all countless crashes. Throughout our time with the game we experienced well over ten different crashes to the Home screen at which point we stopped counting and while loading the game up is incredibly fast, having to do so and hope that the last auto-save isn’t too far back is an annoyance.
Audio & Visuals
Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon is something of a mixed bag visually as standard exploration throughout the world can often feature far too many simplistic ruins or vistas that do little to impress or caves that lack any noteworthy detail. On the other hand, stumbling over the next hill might reveal a monolithic horror impaled on a rock or a dungeon filled with unique looking elements that will keep players guessing. That being said, there is still texture pop-in here and there as well as rough looking textures here and there. This is both good and bad since players never quite know whether their next journey will be one of wonder or of simplicity. Enemy models are fairly varied and character models are handled well, though they all feel a bit dated in appearance. One thing that is nice to note is that there is a wide-variety of equipment appearances available, including a large number of unique weapons and armor. That being said, while it is possible to play the game in third person, even the developers trigger a “pop up” saying the game was not intended to be played in this manner as it was developed first and foremost as a first person adventure game.
Nearly all of the dialogue in the game is voiced, with the few lines that appear to be unvoiced likely caused by bugs happening at the time and the performances of the characters are actually handled solidly given the vast array of random NPCs players will run into. Enemy barks do get a bit similar after a short period of time but this isn’t too bad. As for the background music the game’s soundtrack features a decent mix of tracks for exploration and for combat including far more intense sounding pieces of background music, including vocals, that appear during intense boss battles or during important story moments.
Overall
Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon may feel familiar to most fans of the genre but thankfully manages to put enough of its own unique twist on gameplay to make itself feel unique all while giving players perhaps some of the most dark and cruel portrayals of Arthurian legend in games. The core storyline itself is already impressively written and the side-quests only make things even better, it is just a shame that the game is so incredibly buggy and prone to crashing alongside a number of lacking quality of life elements. That being said, Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon manages to deliver an incredibly addicting feeling experience despite its flaws, perhaps due to its fun and varied combat or how players never quite know what’ll be around the next bend, just don’t expect a smooth experience along the way.
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