A great opening to a grippingly weird new fantasy RPG
I didn’t like Starfield for many reasons, but the two biggest were how safe and bland the futuristic world of Bethesda’s latest RPG is and, also, just how dull its opening is. The Bethesda magic of old just isn’t evident in my eyes in Starfield and jumping back into one of its former greats in Oblivion Remastered has confirmed that to me. Oh yeah, this is what Bethesda RPGs used to feel like!
Which is why I’ve been so drawn in and impressed playing the free demo of The Fall of Avalon: Tainted Grail, a dark new fantasy RPG that feels in many ways like a love letter to great Bethesda RPGs of old, such as Morrowind and Oblivion. And, what’s more, Tainted Grail does so while also addressing my two biggest problems with Starfield, being both wonderfully weird and immersing me muchly out of the gate.
As our The Fall of Avalon: Tainted Grail review highlights, this game is a dark reimagination of Arthurian legends, with the game picking up in the aftermath of the legendary King Arthur’s rule and death. His island kingdom of Avalon has been encroached on and corrupted by the ‘Wyrdness’, a chaotic primordial force that alters reality and leaves terrible monsters in its wake, and it is into this weird world that you step. Only first, just like in the opening to Oblivion, you need to escape the fortress prison that you have been held in.
Even in this freaky, experimentation-filled fortress prison, though, aesthetically the world of Tainted Grail is rather unique, a punchy hybrid between traditional dark fantasy medieval and HR Giger, he of Alien fame. There’s a conjoining of stone and metal with bone and organic weirdness that, along with the permeating mystical Grimdark vibes, really grabs your attention and holds it. It’s like a darker, more corrupted version of Oblivion’s Shivering Isles, which again hangs a lantern on the fact that the game’s maker, Questline, is both massively indebted to Bethesda but, also, showing us a bit of what has been lost with its more recent RPGs. This world is far from dull, visually or in terms of lore, and the opening to it is an old-school masterclass in immersion.
Your character can be specced in a variety of ways and, while you can’t level up many times in the demo to put more complex builds into practice, there appears to be plenty of freedom to mix and match specialisms as you want in the full game. On Tainted Grail’s Steam page characters such as an ‘alchemist-berserker’ and ‘mystical blacksmith-mage’ are detailed, for example. In the demo, I leaned into my go-to in these first-person RPGs, a sneaky stealth type, and immediately benefited from enhanced lockpicking (the lockpicking mechanic is, gloriously, the same as Fallout) as well as archery. But with multiple customisable weapon loadouts available at any one time, I found myself switching between dagger and shield and bow and arrow as the situation, which is done with a single button press.
Part of Tainted Grail’s immaculate old-fashioned first-person perspective RPG vibes also come from its engine, which—speaking plainly—is dated compared to the Unreal Engine 5 beauty of recent FPP RPGs such as Avowed. Indeed, this is a DirectX 11-only game and the system requirements to run it are, by modern standards, low (the recommended system spec is only an RTX 2070 Super, 16GB of RAM, and a 13th gen Intel Core i7 CPU). As such, my RTX 3090 Ti system absolutely crushed it, with a locked 60fps and 4K resolution. But, if anything, the fact that the game can’t rely on the latest graphical rendering effects just highlights what a great job the art team has done on Tainted Grail, as environments in particular are chocked full of flavor.
So, yeah, if you’ve been jonesing for a more old-fashioned Bethesda-vibe fantasy RPG then I recommend heading on over to Steam forthwith and grabbing the free demo of The Fall of Avalon: Tainted Grail, which has a good hour or more of gameplay on offer including full character creation. I honestly kept expecting the demo to end sooner than it did; developer Questline really lets you get a flavor for Tainted Grail’s world, its gameplay mechanics, and its potential for character customization, so I think you’ll know if it is for you by the demo’s close for sure.
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