Souls

Here’s a bit of inside baseball: Gamescom is a busy show. More often than not, you’re booked back-to-back for hours on end, zipping from one appointment to the next in a flurry of interviews, previews, and meetings. I pack my schedule so tight I don’t stop for lunch, and playing just 30 minutes of a game at a time can spin you out a bit and make everything sort of blur into one. With all that in mind, I still couldn’t tear myself away from Valor Mortis – the hardcore first-person RPG from the Ghostrunner devs – when it was my final appointment of the day. I stayed at the demo station until I beat the boss. That, in an environment like Gamescom, is high praise indeed.

You awake in a mass grave with your sabre, a pistol, and magic powers infused into your palm a la Bioshock or Dishonored. From there, you have one task: survive. As much as I’m reticent to use the term ‘Soulslike’, you can’t hide from some of the genre trappings: you drop your currency on your gravesite when you die, you have a limited number of health recovery items you need to ration out, attacks come in light and heavy flavours, there’s a dedicated dodge button, and the bosses are sturdy bastards that have multiple health bars. Combat is crunchy and brutal, and if you want to come out on top, you’re probably going to have to learn how to parry effectively.

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But the Dark Souls comparison feels off. Aside from the most obvious thing – this is first-person, not third – the flow of combat feels more important here. Valor Mortis isn’t as much of an ‘immersive sim’ as Dishonored, but the perspective does a lot to evoke Arkane’s influential Bethesda debut. Maybe it’s in the spells you can bind to your right hand, maybe it’s in the dashing, jumping, and blade-plunging you can do that makes you feel more acrobatic than any Hunter or Chosen Undead in From’s catalogue, but Valor Mortis, for my money, is a game that rewards speed and aggression more than holding up a shield and ‘rolling around the big guy’.

The beating heart of Ghostrunner is still very much alive inside this ‘imsim’/Soulslike hybrid; it’s clear the game wants you to be deft and svelte as you tear through the muddy trenches of the Napoleonic frontline. You can see this focus on agility even in some of the mechanical choices that One More Level makes – blocking still causes you to take some damage, so parrying is the game’s preferred method of responding to threats. Some attacks are unblockable or can’t be parried, so dodging and then countering is prioritised. To be uncharitable, you could say it’s all one violent, trumped-up version of ‘rock, paper, scissors’, but that’s fine, because it all feels so damn good.

Not-so-standard bearer. | Image credit: One More Level

If there’s one standout thing about the Ghostrunner games, it’s the feel of GR-74 in your hands: the 74th Ghostrunner feels both dangerous and fairly fragile, making you a glass cannon blasting through the Dharma Tower. It’s a samurai/ninja fantasy, after all. Your avatar here, in 19th Century Europe, is William: more hardy than a cyborg ninja, but still just some guy when all’s said and done. Taking out possessed footsoldiers and mutated dogs in the blasted trenches is easy enough; learn to respond to their telegraphed attacks and how you can outrun them, and they become naught but feckless drones. It’s the bosses where Valor Mortis is going to shine, though, and that’s why I stayed past my allotted appointment time at One More Level’s booth. I needed to kill one.

As you’d expect, the first phase is simple enough. Use your pistol to target weak points, eat away at the stamina bar, stagger the hulking goliath, and dive in for a ‘poise attack’ that deals stupendous damage. Rinse, repeat, onto phase two. By the end of my session, I was clearing the first phase without even touching my potions – nice! – but the second phase is where things started to get muddy.

On your head be it. | Image credit: One More Level

An eruption of Cronenberg body horror and some vague dialogue about ‘power’ later, General Lothaire – or The Eagle Bearer, to use his military moniker – turned into a grafted beast akin to Elden Ring’s Godrick: multiple arms, all wielding flintlocks, a huge flagstaff he could bonk you across the arena with, and the ability to recall dead souls from the battlefield to complicate matters. One hit with his cutlass or flag, and you’d be down past half health. Oh crap. My offensive tactics from the first half of the battle became far more defensive, and I was on the back foot. Suddenly, I became keenly aware that I too had a stamina bar, and more often than not it was running on empty. Scrambling to find the right moments to gauge my attacks and respond to his onslaught was the name of the game here. It took me a good 10 deaths, but eventually I ripped the monster’s bones apart. Phew.

But my 30-minute slot was over. It had been for a while. Luckily, it was the end of the day and the only thing I was late for was a glass of kolsch and some aggressively-mid pork knuckle. But that desire – that need – to overcome this boss is emblematic of how Soulslike sickos will feel about this game when playing at home: it’s compelling, gratifying, and it will get its hooks into your brain and make you think ‘OK, I’m not putting this pad down until I’ve beaten this monster.’ One More Level, indeed.

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