"Valor Mortis," a first-person soulslike set in an alternate 19th-century Europe ravaged by a supernatural plague, launched October 13 on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S — and immediately split the gap that often opens between critics and the players actually buying a game.
The game casts players as William, a soldier of Napoleon's Grande Armée resurrected into a Europe his sacrifice didn't save, now wielding the same plague that killed him as a source of combat power. It comes from One More Level, the studio best known for the fast, parry-heavy "Ghostrunner" series, publishing alongside Lyrical Games.
Critics Cool, Players Warmer
IGN's review, by critic Travis Northup, landed at 7 out of 10 — "good," in the outlet's scoring language, but short of a rave. Northup praised the game's setting, from torn-up battlefields littered with horse corpses to a harbor of naval ships hoisted unnaturally into the air, and said its hybrid of genres mostly delivers on a strange premise.
Valor Mortis is what you'd get if a truck filled with used copies of BioShock crashed into a GameStop warehouse filled with used copies of Dark Souls. The result is something that's refreshingly unique despite taking clear cues from both, though it doesn't always nail the execution.
Travis Northup, IGN
The review's bigger complaint was technical: hard crashes, missing environment pieces, and platforming sequences — surprising, Northup noted, given the studio's pedigree with "Ghostrunner" — that felt "unpolished" rather than merely difficult, a distinction that matters in a genre built around punishing-but-fair combat.
Players have been more forgiving, at least so far. On Steam, where the game lists for $29.99, user reviews ran "Very Positive" in the day after launch, with 84 percent of roughly 290 reviews recommending it — a gap between critical and player reception that is common in launch-week soulslikes, where early adopters often weigh atmosphere and combat feel over the bugs that reviewers flag first.
Whether that goodwill holds will depend largely on how fast One More Level patches the issues Northup and others have logged. The soulslike genre has grown crowded enough, in the decade and a half since Dark Souls popularized it, that a rocky launch week can bury a game's momentum before word of mouth has a chance to build — something the studio's next few patch notes will likely decide.