Valor Mortis

About this game

The demo destroyed me. Not in the "this game is bad" way - in the way a good soulslike demo is supposed to, where you die five times in the same corridor learning what the game actually wants from you, and then on the sixth attempt everything clicks and the encounter becomes almost elegant. The parry window feels tight and unforgiving, the stamina punishes aggression, and the mobility - grappling hooks, wall-running, the fluidity that One More Level clearly carried over from Ghostrunner - makes fights feel genuinely fast when you're playing well. I put the demo down with sore thumbs and an immediate desire to do it again. September 24, 2026 is the date for the full release, landing on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC via Steam, with day-one Xbox Game Pass inclusion. Published by Lyrical Games and developed by the Kraków-based One More Level - the team behind both Ghostrunner titles - Valor Mortis is a first-person soulslike set in a supernatural alternate-history retelling of the Napoleonic Wars. That sentence has enough going on in it that it takes a moment to fully process. A soulslike. First-person. Napoleon. Supernatural plague. And somehow the studio that made a cyberpunk parkour game about a cyborg ninja is the one building it. The premise follows William, a British soldier in Napoleon's Grande Armée, who wakes up in a battlefield grave - resurrected. The same grotesque plague that is consuming 19th-century Europe pulses through his veins, which is both what killed him and what brought him back, and also what grants him his new supernatural abilities. Napoleon Bonaparte - voiced by César Award-winning French actor Vincent Cassel in what is frankly an extraordinary casting choice - guides William as a disembodied voice, and the central question the game poses is: what would you sacrifice for power? Whether you trust that voice is another matter entirely. The world you move through is ravaged by a continent-wide corruption - sprawling battlefields, fractured mountain passes, European-inspired cities swallowed by plague and rot. The Eternal Guard, Napoleon's plague-ridden soldiers turned monstrous, are your primary enemy alongside the grotesque creatures the corruption has spawned. The metroidvania-style structure encourages backtracking through interconnected environments as William unlocks new mobility and abilities - the Ability Required to Proceed design that the demo showcases clearly, with a grappling hook shot needed to cross a chasm and a fire ability required to burn an obstruction before a second area opens up. Combat is precision-stamina-skill in the soulslike mould: William's primary weapon is a cutlass, supplemented by a rapier, flintlock pistols, and muskets, all of which can be dual-wielded and mixed with supernatural abilities. Blocking costs health. Parrying at the right frame deals devastating damage and is the skill ceiling you're constantly working toward. Dodging handles the unblockable attacks. Every death is the game teaching you something specific rather than punishing arbitrarily, and given One More Level's history with Ghostrunner's one-hit-kill design philosophy, the fact that Valor Mortis is considered the more forgiving of the two says something interesting about how they calibrated the difficulty. The score is composed by Arkadiusz Reikowski - the man behind the Silent Hill 2 Remake soundtrack, The Medium, and both Layers of Fear games - alongside in-house composer Oskar Bała. The atmospheric horror audio identity that Reikowski built across those titles is something he brings into a completely different historical setting here, and the contrast of Napoleonic-era brass and strings against genuinely disturbing supernatural horror soundscaping is one of the more unusual musical combinations I've heard pitched for a game. The demo was already updated post-Xbox Showcase with a new level, additional weapons, new enemy types, and a Shield Transmutation ability added. It's free on Steam and worth every minute of the punishment. Arriving the same day as Control Resonant and Silent Hill: Townfall, September 24th is going to be a brutal week for the wallet and the free time. Valor Mortis is absolutely one I'm not letting slip past.

Trailer

Screenshots