Rude Awakening From An Arthurian Dream
HIGH Excellent worldbuilding. Engaging combat. Fantastic art direction.
LOW Frequent crashes and freezes, slow loading screens. Sparse, unpopulated areas.
WTF The way Vrann says “faces” sounds an awful lot like “feces.”
From the moment I stepped foot into my first dungeon, I was fully immersed in Questline’s Tainted Grail — a dark fantasy take on what can best be described as a “Scrollslike” due to its Elder Scrolls-adjacent gameplay with lore that borrows concepts, places and characters from the Arthurian mythos.
The adventure begins on the Island Asylum. It’s a vast, cavernous compound run by Red Priests who treat their inmates much as inquisitors would heretics, subjecting them to the rack and other means of torture as well as experimenting on them with an otherworldly force known as the Wyrdness.
Once the player finishes creating their character from a disappointingly short list of customizable features, a guard will approach the cell and ask them a series of questions to determine how they landed themselves in the dungeon. The player’s class is based on how they choose to respond. For instance, responding with “I was hunting” granted me the Ranger class, deadly with a bow and arrow.
After the player has been freed from their cell by a mysterious NPC, they’re free to explore the linear but dynamic dungeon where they’re presented with many opportunities to lockpick or crawl through tunnels. Along the way, they’ll encounter cells containing inmates afflicted by the Red Death (a plague with mysterious origins) who share some juicy lore bits with the player. There are also back rooms where they can beat down Red Priests and acquire loot before finally escaping and boarding a ship bound for the shores of Avalon.
This process of effectively rolling a character followed by the trope of escaping from a dungeon and setting out on the main quest will be familiar to longtime CRPG players. The similarities between Tainted Grail and The Elder Scrolls series in particular are countless, but more significant are the similarities in gameplay, worldbuilding and level design — and arguably, it improves on all three.
The gameplay is largely the same (first-person ARPG with the option to toggle third-person on and off) but the movement in Tainted Grail is surprisingly fluid and responsive, even on mouse and keyboard. The inclusion of mechanics like parrying and dodging, as well as a wide variety of interesting spells and powerful weapons — all equipped with light, heavy and charged attacks — make combat equally challenging and rewarding.
Things like upgrading weapons, using skill and ability points to buff the player’s build and gaining passive XP (the player can boost their agility level just by running) all manifest in a similar way to Scrolls but there are enough differences to function as quality-of-life updates to the formula established by Bethesda.
Being able to chop wood, dig for treasure, fish, mine for ore, forage for mushrooms, cook various dishes and brew potions (as one can also do in Scrolls) makes the resource-gathering aspect of Tainted Grail a bit more lifelike, although the places where one can handcraft weapons and armor or chop wood on chopping blocks were a little too rare.
The open world aspect of Grail was also a significant strength, as I felt like I could look at practically any distant point on the horizon and eventually be able to make my way to it. There always seemed to be a new path to explore, whether tucked away in a forest, in a cavern, or hiding in plain sight. If I got frustrated with an area, I could easily fast-travel somewhere else.
The level of creativity that’s gone into the art direction is remarkable, from the Giger-esque Archspires to vast highlands that rival the verdant beauty of Scotland. Speaking of which, it’s apparent that much of Grail is influenced by ancient Celtic culture — hence the presence of druids.
The druids were easily my favorite NPCs because of their many idiosyncrasies, such as one named Therrov who dabbled in alchemy but consistently botched his potions with one particularly humorous result: I had my PC imbibe one of his potions which caused his speaking voice to sound like a chicken until the effect finally wore off.
I felt rewarded by their change in demeanor as they went from being hostile to warm and appreciative once I helped their comrade in a quest, and I also admired their fierce loyalty to each other (mostly) in the face of total annihilation, as they were hounded by both the Red Priests and a certain Knight of the Round Table. Some of their lines of dialogue doubled as compelling lore dumps and heart-wrenching soliloquies about genocide, thanks to Grail‘s excellent writing and exceptional voice acting.
Though it was satisfying to continue to meet NPCs, explore the world and fill the map in, there was a point at which I felt Grail start to lose its magic — and partly, it was due to technical issues.
The concept art featured in the loading screens is gorgeous and horrific in equal measure, but one can only look at it for so long before the length of the load time erodes any enjoyment of the piece — and Grail‘s loading times are long. I would watch the clock as seconds turned to minutes, the pause in gameplay long enough to make me want to check my phone, and even after looking at emails and such, the game would still be loading.
Worse, nearly every time I tried to boot Tainted Grail up, it would either crash or take a lifetime to verify the integrity of its files. On a recent attempt, I had to download the latest patch (which took only a minute or two to install) but then had to wait for almost a half an hour for the integrity of the files to be verified before it finally started… and then immediately crashed.
The developers are clearly trying to address many of these issues by fixing bugs and adding slight changes and modifications, but the patches never seemed to do quite enough. Even after downloading the latest patch, I would run into weird glitches such as the afterimage of my short sword cutting in and out after sheathing it to enter dialogue. There’s also often stuttering in higher-density areas and sometimes combat will cause the game to freeze, which is especially frustrating during a boss fight.
All this leads me to say that I think that Tainted Grail could have benefited from more time in development even though it had already been a couple of years since the demo dropped. Though it often stumbles over the technical weight of its own creative ambition, Tainted Grail has the makings of a phenomenal RPG — but readers just might want to hold off until that weight has been lifted.
Rating: 8 out of 10
Buy Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — PC
Disclosures: This game was developed by Questline and published by Awaken Realms. This game is currently available on PC, PS5 and XBS/X. It was obtained via the publisher and reviewed for PC. Approximately 10 hours were devoted to the campaign mode. The game was not finished. There is no multiplayer mode.
Parents: This game is not yet rated but it’s a dark fantasy RPG so one can expect a high level of graphic violence and gore, foul language and disturbing imagery.
Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.
Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game has subtitles for dialogue but no visual cues to warn the player of incoming attacks from the side or from behind, which makes it not fully accessible.
Remappable controls: The controls can be remapped.
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