Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon

Publisher: Awaken Realms

Developer: Awaken Realms, Questline

Platforms: Microsoft Windows, Xbox Series X/S, Playstation 5 (Reviewed)

Anyone standing within two feet of the game industry is familiar with the Elder Scrolls series in passing, at least. Even if you exist firmly outside of these spheres, chances are good you've heard the name Skyrim! Bethesda's flagship fantasy series has been the gold standard for open world RPGs for just about as long as the series has been around, but it exists in a realm all its own. There simply aren't many developers out there with the confidence to even attempt a project with an Elder Scrolls scope, and there are even fewer publishers willing to shell out the money it would cost to produce such a game...and you know what? That's ok. We've all seen how this industry loves to ruin everything it touches, and we've all seen the desperate copycattery that publishers love to engage in. They would for sure miss the point of an Elder Scrolls title (exploration and roleplaying) and churn out generic fantasy slop with microtransactions up to the brim. So, I'm not complaining that there aren't many entries in the "Scrollslike" genre.

That being said, Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon makes me just the slightest bit more optimistic about what might happen if more developers tried their hand at the formula. If you've been seeing the buzz this AA title has gotten recently, I'm here to tell you that it's true....all of it. Warts and all.

Evidently based on a Tabletop RPG, Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon is a dark-fantasy take on Arthurian legend a couple hundred years after the events we're all familiar with. You are a prisoner in the clutches of the Red Priests, who are performing cruel experiments in order to find a cure for a plague that is starting to spread throughout Avalon. Besides the plague, there's also a nondescript natural force of evil called "the wyrdness" that corrupts the world at night and creates monsters. And yes, that means you'll hear people speaking seriously about something pronounced "the weirdness." 

Anyway, after being released by a mysterious benefactor, you somehow take a piece of King Arthur's soul into yourself...and it turns out, you're now part of a plan to retrieve the remaining pieces of the once and future king's soul from across the land. Whether you're doing so to restore the king or to destroy him for good is up to you, but that's the premise. It's serviceable, and the moment-to-moment plot is uninspiring at best and uninspiring at worst as well. But that's par for the course in Elder Scrolls titles, so it's not too much of a distraction. 

Equally loyal to the game's influences are the characters and the writing, both of which are weeeeeeeeeeak. The writing isn't exactly a straightforward thing to describe: it isn't "modern" in the sense of quips and memes, but it is modern in the sense that it feels incredibly out of place without doing anything noticeably wrong. An early example I can remember is a dialogue option where you ask something along the lines of "what even was I let out for?" Do you see what I mean? Maybe? It's not what I would call "modern," but it's still off for this setting. 

And characters...they're just there. You'll see character models re-used over and over again, which doesn't help, but even if that weren't the case, they'd just be little bits of cardboard to get you from A to B. Even King Arthur himself isn't much to write home about, because he suffers from the single most creative game plot point out there: amnesia. Again, not exactly surprising for something shooting for an Elder Scrolls experience, but I do feel like I at least ought to enjoy Arthur Pendragon of all characters!

Anyway, with combat there are more moving parts than you might expect given the clear budgetary constraints. You have your standard weapon fare (magic, one/two-handed weapons, bows) as well as throwables and wands to increase magic effects. I ran a magic build, which is odd, because I never do that...ever. The tradeoff of having to wait for mana to regenerate always makes the prospect unappealing to me. This time, however, I got the sense that this was going to be an Olde English take on the setting (which is ultimately correct), so I wanted to roleplay as a druid. Lo and behold, this may be the first RPG I've ever played where the magic has felt worthwhile enough to center a whole build around! For all but the most intense spells, mana costs are reasonable, so you'll be running out of mana far slower than in other games. That's about all that makes it unique, but it's a not-insignificant plus!

Outside of the magic, I can't really report on anything. I tried pairing a one-handed weapon with the magic for a little while, but after seeing the benefits of carrying a wand in my off hand, I decided to dedicate myself fully to spellcasting. But from what I've seen, there's plenty of quality of life stuff to be found in the other gameplay styles as well. 

There is, however, one glaring flaw with the gameplay that will undoubtedly take away some of my gamer cred: it's simply too hard. I ended up needing to turn the difficulty down to easy, and even then, this was a brutal experience. If you're at a good level, you can deal respectable damage, but it seems like no matter how well-prepared you are, enemies end up knocking off a lot of your health. You have the ability to do short dashes to avoid damage (which comes in handy if you don't have a shield), but this isn't exactly reliable since enemies have an uncanny ability to instantly reach you if you dodge slightly too soon. If you think that some soulslike enemies can close distance rapidly, I challenge you to try dodging out of the very first enemy's way in Tainted Grail. 

But anyway, as you level up, you gain more health, more damage, etc. Eventually, you'll get yourself into a good enough groove where you're able to defeat enemies pretty quickly and take damage less frequently. When you do, you'll likely believe you're finally over that early-game difficulty curve...until you move on to the next of the three areas and the difficulty curve resets. Elder Scrolls titles are known for scaling with you as you level up to (in theory) keep challenge consistent without becoming overwhelming, and this feels like a misguided attempt to do something similar. So instead of coming up against progressively harder enemies are you grow stronger, you simply get dropped into the next tier of difficulty when you transition to the next major area, regardless of how strong you are. The obvious-seeming answer would be to drastically over-level in one area before moving on to the next...but it's not like somebody is going to know that on a first run-through!

I will say there's one silver lining in all this: leveling up is a swift thing. On the Elder Scrolls scale, Tainted Grail is akin to Morrowind in its number of skills to upgrade. It's like no matter what you're doing, you're going to be making progress towards increasing your skill level in something, and these skill levels increase rapidly. In fact, I'd need to go back and check my character, but I believe I maxed out my magic skill by level 20. That, dear friends, is not something that happens in normal RPGs with infinite level potential. Like in the saga this game takes inspiration from, each skill level increase causes progress towards increasing your main level, but Tainted Grail takes it a step further. Not only do skill level increases do this, killing enemies and completing quests also does it. So if you're truly engaging with the world, you're going to be gaining XP from all angles...that's part of why I think I might call BS on the whole "over-level before moving on" idea...I hardly think one could under level if they tried.

Despite how quickly you move through levels, one thing you'll likely notice is that progression itself feels like moving through molasses. This is a true statement, but I think it can be rectified by a change in perspective. Remember that this is largely aping The Elder Scrolls. In those games (outside of Skyrim), there really isn't much beyond leveling when it comes to character progression other than things like 5% damage bonuses when you're attacking with a weapon you have a high skill level in. Tainted Grail is the same way, but it spreads those types of bonuses into something like 25-30 different skill trees. That's 25-30 different skill trees with each branch containing the smallest bonuses you can imagine, and you only get one bonus per level-up. That's the angle you'll likely be viewing things from as you play, and from that angle it may be hard to see the point. But if you take the time to remember that you typically get those bonuses automatically at only specific skill levels (25, 50, etc) in other RPGs like this, you may come to realize that you're actually progressing far faster than you would in an Elder Scrolls title. So, it's not going to feel like you're actually gaining anything for a while...but you are.

Now it's time to talk about what must inevitably come up when talking about this game: the technical fidelity. It's awful. Just awful. One might argue that because this is a AA game with a AA budget trying something on a larger scale than normal, it should be cut some slack...but then I remembered something. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, a 99.9% technically flawless game, was developed by a team of maybe 30 people. I did the research on Tainted Grail and the team is evidently around 300 strong. So...I don't know about that anymore. It's certainly true that the team size is smaller than you might find at Bethesda, but I'm just not sure I buy the AA budget argument anymore...at least not for something this flawed. So, I'm going to go as all-in on this as I intend to go with the next Elder Scrolls game. Here goes.

Firstly, there's the framerate. I've never experienced any framerate quite as variable as this one. I thought for sure that Tainted Grail was locked at 30fps, and it kept on dropping well below that depending on what was happening on screen. But the key word there is "thought," because I once entered a cave and was suddenly seeing 60 frames. Unstable is an understatement.

Then, there's the screen tearing. This is also variable, as it seemed like I'd either have tremendous screen tearing or none at all, depending on the night. 

Then, there are the crashes. I had several, all of the hard variety, and there didn't seem to be any particular rhyme or reason to it. One happened while I was swapping out my armor, one happened when I exited a house, etc. 

Then there are the UI bugs. Every single time I went into an inventory menu for any reason (to swap out armor, to select ingredients for cooking or alchemy, literally anything), the selector would eventually lock up and prevent me from switching to any item located to the right of where the selector currently was. The only way to break out of this was to either exit the menu or move the selector to an item under the current one, then over to the right, then back up. Moving to the left, then back to the right, then to the right again didn't work. I don't think I've ever seen a bug like that before. Beyond this particular UI bug, there were also frequent issues with the quest markers. They would either not appear at all or, at times, appear in entirely the wrong places. 

To put a bow on this a little prematurely to keep from continuing to ramble, there are also some weird shortcuts the devs clearly took. The most egregious one involves enemy AI. Given that I played as a mage, there was a lot of backstepping in order to avoid damage...and I found that enemies have a clear aggravation zone (a certain radius of the map in which they become hostile if they spot you, which they won't move out of). But while other games with slapdashed aggro zones will typically have the enemy just stand at the edge of the zone in a clearly exploitable way, the enemies in Tainted Grail will just start sprinting to their pre-selected starting point in the zone. So, on several different occasions, I would be in the middle of a fierce battle with someone only for them to randomly start running away back to the campfire they were sitting around if I stepped behind the invisible line. In many cases, they would drink a health potion at this point, undoing my progress. Not cool, Tainted Grail, not cool!

Now, let's end this section on a positive note. This is a clear frontrunner for Soundtrack of the Year.......I mean, it won't win because Expedition 33 exists, but it's still a frontrunner. Anyone who knows me knows that European folk band "Heilung" is one of my hyperfixations. The soundtrack for Tainted Grail wasn't written by them, but if you told me it was, I'd believe you. Atmospheric instrumental segments, bone-rattling throat singing, the whole gang is present, and it's glorious. I spent a not-insignificant portion of my time with the game sitting in the Wyrdness-corrupted nighttime just listening to the ambient tracks. That's how great it is.

I've said a lot of negative things about Tainted Grail, but I'm here to tell you that I'm giving it a recommendation anyway. Why? Because of one thing I haven't yet talked about: the exploration. That right there is the reason people go to Elder Scrolls titles, and it's something Tainted Grail does exceptionally well. With the game's clear budgetary constraints, I often found myself not expecting much...only to be greeted by a blood lake out of nowhere, or a cave with an egg that eventually hatches, or an underwater portal to an entirely new area with a castle locked in time, or a continent-sized spectral buck. There's this undeniable sense of wonder that kept me going throughout the deluge of technical issues and other flaws, and this same sense of wonder is ultimately what keeps people going through Bethesda titles. In that way, Tainted Grail does everything one would ultimately want from it correctly. So, if you can handle by far the worst technical package of the year thus far and some truly head-scratching difficulty, I dare say you'll find that Tainted Grail scratches an itch you might not've even known you had.

Let us review:

Weak story/characters - 0.5

Overwhelming difficulty - 1.0

Technical problems (pt 1) - 1.0

Technical problems (pt 2) - 1.0

The final score for Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon is...

6.5/10 - Almost Good

Decent effort, Awaken Realms, decent effort.