Set off into a dark reimagining of Arthurian legend in Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon as you navigate the treacherous open world terrain of Avalon in search of Excalibur and the eventual death of the once and future King Arthur.
Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon was developed by Questline and Awaken Realms. Awaken Realms is a professional board and video game publisher from Poland and the creator of hits like Nemesis and Etherfields.
Awaken Realms started as a miniature painting studio but eventually expanded into game development and publishing. It tends to pay special attention to its tabletop game designs to ensure they are deep, involving, and original. This same concept extends to the PC version of Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, which was first a tabletop game meant for 1 to 4 players.
Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon has an enticing storyline with a dark reimagined Arthurian theme and a detailed, lore-heavy, open world to explore. Of course, before you can go out to kill monsters and explore, you have to sit through a beautifully drawn cutscene. The cutscene details the world of Avalon and brings you to the place your character now resides, the Island Asylum, run by the Red Priests.
Once the cutscene is over, your next step is character creation. While not having a lot of options in terms of body and face, you can still create a character to suit your tastes and standards. While the character design might be quite well done, it’s still far from perfect.
However, the developers made it clear on the game’s Steam page that they did not aim to have AAA-level graphics or that level of polished detail for Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon. Regardless, the game has an almost dark, whimsical style.
After finally creating your character and choosing your difficulty, you awaken in a dark dungeon in one of the jail cells. One of your lovely hosts wakes you up to demand that you give them information as to how you were caught. This plays an important role in the final stages of your character creation, as it will essentially give you passive skill bonuses along with a class of sorts.
Alternatively, you can simply ignore him and only receive a bonus for your Unarmed skill. Unfortunately, your conversation with him will get cut short (Very literally) when Caradoc, your valiant knight in shining armour, comes to rescue you by taking out the guard with a single arrow. A little hilarious since he was mid-sentence when it happened.
Caradoc laments about the fact that the Red Priests don’t really bathe often, while commenting that you don’t really have a choice since you’re stuck in a cell. He gives you the key to the cell and informs you that he is going to scout ahead. You are now able to freely explore the dungeon; the first set of cells will have nothing of interest in them.
Unless you play like a loot goblin that will take anything of any value simply for the sake of having it, then you might find a few worthless trinkets. Heading further into the dungeons, you’ll come across what can only be described as experimentation cells along with a fully stocked laboratory. Though you will discover that it has an alchemy table that you can use to craft basic healing and mana potions.
In Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, crafting benches are a salvation, whether it’s just a cooking station or maybe even a forge. These benches give you the freedom to fully equip your characters with everything they need, provided you have the recipes for it.
Some are discoverable via side quests, and others are only unlockable by finding a book about the corresponding item you wish to create. The lore books you’ll find the recipes in are also well written and fit the writing style of a medieval era, bringing in a little realistic taste for the bibliophiles.
After leaving the laboratories behind, you’ll come across Caradoc once more, who points you in the direction of an escape route. The escape route will lead you through Red Priest-riddled corridors until you finally come across a statue called a Menhir.
This large morbid statue transports you straight into the Wyrdness, an almost chaotic but destroyed realm. Within it, you’ll meet a strange being, although calling him a being can be seen as a compliment, as he is naught but a shard of a soul that once belonged to a Fore-dweller. The beings who lived in Avalon before King Arthur came and conquered it.
The Fore-dweller will give you the ability to slow down time. This is a useful ability, as it allows you to get in close to an enemy for a power attack or retreat from the enemy and create distance in order to heal up or ready an offensive spell.
Finding the rest of the Fore-dweller isn’t as easy as it sounds, though, as you will need to travel into the Wyrdness when it forms large mists of magic and traverse the landscape that is revealed in search of the Fore-dweller’s soul.
Once you leave the Wyrdness to depart from the beach, you’ll have reached the end of the tutorial. You awaken on one of the beaches of the Horns of the South, one of the most hardware-intensive areas in the game. While loading into this area, the game can be prone to crashing.
However, this is understandable since the area doesn’t have the best optimization to begin with. Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon was released on Early Access on 30 March 2023 and is still in development. Even so, the bugs do not detract from the incredible open world you dive into.
Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon has an amazing soundtrack to go with the landscape and scenery; whether you’re trudging through the sunken village or fighting your way across a cemetery, it adds so much to the overall immersion of the game. The sound effects and sound design were fairly well done, lending to an almost dark but whimsical atmosphere for the storyline.
Even though the game is voiced, it wasn’t done completely. More often than not, you will come across a character using an AI-generated voice instead of the voice of the actual voice actors. This does detract a bit from the game, but the game is still in development, so hopefully it changes, and full voice acting is implemented.
Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon introduces a familiar skill system that is reminiscent of other older open-world RPGs, such as Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. You have your main skills, such as perception and endurance, that influence your ability to pick a lock and carry weight.
You also have more specialized skills, such as Stamina Surge or Iron Will. These skills act as a passive buff, whether in combat or out of combat, depending on the skills and how you wish to build your character.
The animations in Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon seem a bit stiff when you’re talking to the NPCs, as their movements will often seem lacking in depth or robotic. However, the combat animations are much smoother, making the transition from sheathing to unsheathing your weapon of choice easy. Even the magic-casting animations are pretty well done when compared to the animations the NPCs have.
Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon has many good points but also quite a few cons. Unfortunately, the game is still very buggy. It can be a bit frustrating, whether it’s just the sound glitching out in certain areas or the game crashing multiple times. Luckily, the game has a report bug function that is accessible both in the game and in the menu, making it easier to report if something happens.
The developers of Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon are also on point with their patches. Not even a day after the game was released, they released a bug patch to fix the issues players were talking about and reporting.
Overall, even with Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon being in Alpha, the game has an intriguing storyline and a beautifully developed environment to explore. While it is not AAA level, and the developers had mentioned that they weren’t aiming for AAA, it might be rough, but there is a jewel underneath the madness.
It will be interesting to see how the rest of the game turns out once it leaves Alpha. But from what is seen so far, the game is set to be an enthralling story about chaos and magic as you set off on a journey across the legendary terrain of Avalon.
