Tainted Grail: when the legend of King Arthur meets Soulsborne aesthetic

I picked up this game because it kept being compared to Skyrim, but having completed it I got very little Skyrim vibes from it, instead I got a lot of Gothic and a bit of New World from it. 

The game starts with you as a prisoner, and that's where the similarities with Skyrim end. The game gets very dark very quickly. We're on a prison island where the church experiments on people infected with the Red Death, a deadly plague with traits of both Black Death and zombies. Torture and imprisonment of the afflicted. 

The combat felt a bit jank before I got into the pace/flow of things. Same with lockpicking. But once I got higher attributes/better weapons/better armour and I got used to the feel of the game, that jank disappeared almost entirely. 

The prison island is the prologue of the game where you learn the very basics of the Red Death, the church, Avalon, the Fore-Dwellers, and Arthur. You gain a nemesis or an ally depending on your choices and a piece of a soul attaches itself to you. 

Once you leave the prison island you're free to explore the lands of Avalon and as you go you'll find out more about Arthur, the Knights, Kamelot, and how exactly Arthur is The Once And Future King, and it's all so dark. So deliciously grimdark. 

While the game itself doesn't play like a Soulsborne game, it does have some of that same dark aesthetic. The two female characters you meet in Sagremor are perfect examples of characters I could see in a Dark Souls game. 

I love that the stash is accessible on the go. Just throw up a bonfire, feed it some cobweb and boom you can access the stash. Makes my usual quest of LOOTING EVERYTHING NOT NAILED DOWN a breeze and not a game of inventory management. 

The Wyrdknight is a boss and the first big hurdle. In Act 1 he'll just stare menacingly at you from a distance and vanish when you try to get closer, but once you recover the first memory fragment he'll become hostile and usually at that point in the game you'll be nowhere near strong enough to defeat him. My original tactic was to run as fast as I could to a settlement, which has protections. Once I realised that he was pretty slow coming towards you and there was always a gong announcing his arrival, I soon got the habit of throwing up a bonfire every time the gong sounded and then feed it cobwebs and he'd vanish. I'd then get a few moments outside of the bonfire before the gong would announce his arrival again. This way I could do questing at night time even with the threat of the Wyrdknight hanging over me. 

Having played around with bows, daggers, and magic in the early game, I eventually settled for a dual-wield build focusing heavily on crit and status DoT effects. I had armour pieces and weapons with effects and enchantments which upped crit and added burn, bleed and poison effects. I also used a couple summons as bait. Once I got this build up I decided to go after the Wyrdknight. The first few times I tried he'd either defeat me after I got about half his health down, or the sun would come up and he'd vanish. But I finally managed to defeat him in Cuanacht, and after I had done it once he suddenly wasn't that scary anymore. 

I like how flexible this game is with builds. Unsatisfied? Just drink an Origin Potion to reset your points and remake your build. The potions aren't that uncommon either. I think by the end I had around a dozen of them and I had used two or three. 

I had no issues at all with this game until I approached the end of Act 3. The NPCs I needed to hand in quests to simply weren't around. They had vanished completely. After several fruitless attempts to make them spawn by reloading, resting, zone-swapping, restarting my entire computer, validating the game files and a few other things, I decided to join the Discord server. They gave me some tips to try, but nothing worked and eventually we resorted to unlocking the dev console and force spawn the NPCs. I could finally continue the game. I only had a couple hours left. 

The main menu theme is so fire too. I was happy to just sit there in the menu and not start the game at all xD I added it on Spotify because it's just that great.

I also want to point out how much I loved all the Monty Python references in this game. In Act 2 there are a lot of knight deserters and sometimes when fighting them and their health starts to go low they'll say "Tis just a scratch". The first time I heard it I burst out laughing. And then there's also the white rabbit which will pretty much insta-kill you if you attack it :3

Once I completed the game I immediately jumped into NG+. I'll do another run at some point. Aside from that one weird bug I really enjoyed every aspect of this game.