‘Valor Mortis’ Game Review: A First-Person Soulslike in a Historic Napoleonic Era
War has always been a rough foundation for stories about suffering, ambition, and the collapse of humanity, but in Valor Mortis, it is something more. The game takes those ideas, twists their meaning, and makes them much darker. Valor Mortis is set in an alternate Napoleonic era of France in a nineteenth-century world where soldiers, the military, and the empire are changed to fit the dark fantasy theme of this world. Every parry, desperate dodge, and close encounter has a meaning and feels personal.
What makes the game particularly interesting is the setting in the XIX-century apocalyptic dark France, with numerous supernatural elements added to this world. Napoleonic warfare has already been featured in games. It’s very frequently associated with human sacrifice for ideas, expansion, and abuse of political power, and the devastation left behind. Valor Mortis adds a twist to this world in the form of a plague that changes the dead and corrupts the living.
[Warning: Spoilers from this game are below. I played the PC version of this game.]
Valor Mortis focuses on the damnation of Napoleon’s Empire, a mysterious plague, and getting William’s memories back
The main hero in the story of Valor Mortis is William, a soldier of Napoleon Bonaparte’s Grande Armée who mysteriously comes back to life after dying on the battlefield. His resurrection is shown as a second chance, but the Europe he returns to proves it is something else.
A mysterious plague is spreading across the continent, leaving devastation and transforming and mutating people into horrifying, dark, bloodthirsty creatures. What is left of Napoleon’s army has become part of this supernatural catastrophe, and William soon discovers that the power keeping him alive is connected to the same plague that is threatening humanity.
Napoleon’s presence in the story is one of the most important plot points. His presence serves as an establishment of what loyalty, obedience, and the consequences of being prey to your ambition mean in this world. William is a soldier who once served under a powerful leader, and his resurrection forces him to confront a world in which the ideals he fought for are now those he fights against.
Valor Mortis has several intriguing mysteries, and they are connected to both William and Napoleon. William’s story is also really rough throughout the playthrough, as his post-mortem life and morality are really well-written and have a much more profound meaning in the larger perspective. As a resurrected soldier without any understanding whatsoever of the events that occur around him, he gives a natural and shocked perspective through which we can discover this alternate history.
His first hours of the story get interesting with each boss defeated. This is because a lot of his memories are missing; therefore, he mixes ideals, moments, and relationships, just to find out in the end that everything he knew and believed in was something else.
A unique first-person Soulslike that mixes genres to create a unique gaming experience
Combat in Valor Mortis focuses mostly on the Soulslike formula. What’s different from the other games in this genre is the full-time usage of the first-person perspective as the main camera perspective. Enemies attack you from different sides to create confusion, and weapons have different animations or behaviors to make the camera react differently. There is a significant difference between fighting your enemy when you see almost everything and when you have a limited field of view. The combat system demands a lot of patience, concentration, and an understanding of enemy behavior.
Parrying is one of the most defining and life-saving mechanics. Blocking an incoming attack in the correct moment can interrupt an enemy’s attack and create an opening for a powerful counter with a lot of damage. The overall kind of masochistic satisfaction from this game comes from learning the schemes, rhythms, and behaviors of enemies.
The first-person camera adds a lot to this experience and the satisfaction after fights. In a conventional third-person Soulslike, we can control our character’s movements in a much easier way while maintaining a relatively clear view of the surrounding battlefield. In Valor Mortis, we sacrifice a lot of this awareness to create an experience that is unique to the genre and one that will cause us a lot of stress.
When it comes to the fights, some sequences require a lot of concentration to make precise jumps and carefully timed parries and uniques. This is especially enraging in moments when we think we finally found some joy in a crazy, brutal, and almost impossible to master gameplay, and then, boom, we have to learn everything once again.
Boss encounters are actually the most enjoyable parts of the game—not because they are easy, but because they are so unique that when you finally defeat one, you feel like you conquered a world.
Defeating a particularly difficult opponent is satisfying because victory depends on learning and using those lessons to create your own style of playing, using which you can progress through the story. Some encounters also use environmental elements and complicated mechanics, which prevents turning every single battle into a repeat of the previous one or something that will not fit the theme of the game.
Valor Mortis game rating and final thoughts
Valor Mortis is a fascinating example of a game where developers attempt to take an existing popular genre and set it somewhere you would not expect it to work at all. Parrying is satisfying, supernatural abilities add useful tactical options and are fun, and the setting in the Napoleonic Era provides an atmospheric tension and interest designed for this kind of adventure.
It really is an exciting direction for the Souls-like games, especially since it’s fully in first-person mode. We get to learn perfect parries, study enemy behavior, and explore creepy, dark environments. The game’s most successful moments are memorable enough to make it fantastic. Starting with a casual Napoleon-centric story, finishing with bosses who are almost like dark magic puppets who want to kill you brutally.
Valor Mortis is a really great game that redefines the meaning of Soulslikes and changes the rules to fit its agenda. The game is now available on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S/X.
