Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon

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• Recommended Posted September 3, 2025 on Steam A couple days after this review, the devs fixed nearly every complaint I had. I'll leave this up, but note that the game is 100% worth buying now. Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon does a LOT right, and unfortunately an almost equal amount wrong. I'm going to make some general comparisons to help new players better understand what they are getting into, and it will be broken down into "Good", "Mediocre", and "Bad". The Good: This game really captures the atmosphere like few games manage to do, and it lets you know right away how the game will be. It is dark and brutal with a dash of humor thrown in, and heavily leans into elements like body horror, betrayal, and morally ambiguous choices. As you'll see in many quests, every action has a reaction. You help one person out, another suffers for it, and it keeps you guessing if you did the right thing. The worldbuilding of Act 1 and Act 2 is outstanding, absolutely packed with lore and points of interests at every turn. For the first 2/3 of the game, you might even be overwhelmed with the amount of places to explore and go (though you'll learn really quick not to venture too far out too early). The combat is also another great thing this game really nails; If you are melee or archer based. I'll get more into magic later, because it isn't that magic isn't viable. Your swings of a sword or axe feel weighty, and watching an enemy go flying from a rag-doll because you hit them with a 2 meter long greatsword is amusing even after 30 hours. As for bows, this game does something VERY few other medieval/Arthurian games do; there are different types of bows. Want a fast-to-draw and light hitting bow that you can rip off arrows with on the move? FoA has you there. Want a massive longbow that you need to sit still to use, but will pin an enemy's corpse to the wall with it's power? Yup, also in the game. Want just a normal bow that works like good 'ole Skyrim? You're boring, but that is also in the game. The combat itself is indeed very similar to a skyrim/soulslike hybrid, but doesn't really fit in either. You can dodge and parry, enemies HURT, you must manage your stamina, but it is very easy to become a powerhouse ripping through the countryside in first (or third) person. Adding to the great feel of combat is the variety of weapons: oh my god there are so many. There is a set of armor and a weapon for any playstyle or build, and the game hands them out like candy for exploring and doing quests *in the first two acts*. Speaking of the first two acts, FoA does a very good job at keeping quests fresh and interesting for that portion of the game. You wont often find yourself simply fetching items and bringing them back; you'll actually go out and interact with the world and it's inhabitants. The Mediocre: Magic. Don't get me wrong, there is an absolutely insane amount of spells in the game, with many of them being quite strong, and others being hilarious. Unfortunately, the magic is held back by the same thing that makes melee feel so great: impact. Many of the spells are what I could only best describe as "Moira suck", for those of you who have played Overwatch, or generic projectiles. Then there are summons. Summons are... something. When I originally started the game, the summons would not attack anything outside of your line-of-sight, nor would they attack anything over 10 feet from them whilst making zero effort to move. Fortunately summons have been fixed in that regard, but they are still... special. They will hit you with their swings or projectiles if you get in the way, they refuse to traverse any form of vertical terrain (anything over a 6 inch drop is a no-go), and they love to get in your way. Normally hitting your own summons wouldn't matter, you can just summon another, right? Well unfortunately, if you hit your summon first while trying to attack an enemy, which will happen a LOT because they dogpile, the hit doesn't register on the enemy. That 2 meter sword I was talking about? Sorry, you clipped a friendly summon to your right, so now you cannot hit the enemy standing chest-to-chest with you. Summons ARE good as bait though, and can be quite tanky with the correct builds. Crafting is another lackluster, but not bad, aspect of this game. Get recipe, get ore, get little rock, enhance or build. That is about all there is to it, and the selection of items you can make from scratch is quite limited, as all of the best gear is gotten from bosses or quests. Another "this could be better but isn't bad" is the leveling system and gear requirements. FoA LOVES to throw gear at you with wild stat requirements that force you to constantly be building towards being able to use a new cool weapon, only to get an even stronger weapon by the time you finally reach the requirements for the first one. For example, there is a sword in the starting area of the game, right outside your first "town", that requires you to have around 12 levels perfectly allocated to wield it. Unfortunately, by the time you are level 12, you're more than likely pushing act 2 with an entirely different build. The level system is a slog and really railroads you down a single specialization. You can absolutely try and do a jack-of-all-trades, just do not be surprised when you can't use 80% of endgame items. As for music, it is a good albeit VERY limited soundtrack. Within the first 2 hours, you have heard every orchestral, and it gets mind-numbingly repetitive. I found myself seeking out combat to get away from the ambient music of exploration frequently. Finally for this part: Enemy Variety. If you break it down to a per-species or monster basis, there are not very many types of enemies in the game. Sure, there are 15 types of bandits, but they are still bandits, and it results in this game suffering from a similar plight to Skyrim in the realm of enemy variance. The bosses are cool though! The Bad: Act 3. I'm not going to go into detail or post spoilers, but Act 3 feels like an entirely different dev team made it. NPCs vanish, quest markers bug out and also vanish, key NPCs lack voiceovers, every quest is fetch and return, and the environment is incredibly annoying to traverse. From both my experience and others I have spoken to who have played this game, you are LESS likely to completely finish the multi-part quests (not gonna spoil it) than you are to experience a quest-breaking bug and have to skip it entirely. Or, if you are me, do 8 hours of the quest for it to break in the final part. Speaking of quests! Quest Rewards in the latter part of Act 2 and all of Act 3 are bad to say the least. Sometimes you wont even get a reward, sometimes you'll get a rock and some arrows, and other times you get a cool endgame item. Obviously the former two are much more common, which is why this falls under "the bad". Another segue, arrows! Arrows are all that is sold by blacksmiths in Act 3. Seriously, that is it. No weapons, often times no crafting components, just arrows. It's made all the more annoying by the fact that where are 5+ merchants in Act 3, and they ALL have barren stock. Next up is the story, and this one is my second biggest irritant. Up until the end of Act 2, the story is fantastic, fun, mysterious, and dark. Once you enter Act 3, there is no longer a story. That's right. It's gone. Instead, the devs give you the fetch quest to end all fetch quests, ending with a final boss fight. Finally, the thing I hated the absolute most in the game: The enemies of the final dungeon in the 3rd area. I won't state what they are, only that they are a spongey and slow slog to fight. They aren't particularly deadly at this point in the game, just ridiculously tanky and INSANELY loud. Like, gives a loud verbal feedback on EVERY HIT against them loud. Fights with these enemies drown out the music as you sit there for 5 minutes wailing on them, and in return they deafeningly yell over, and over, and over, and over.
• Recommended Posted December 6, 2025 on Steam Act 1 and 2 are great, act 3 is far weaker by comparison, it felt like the devs ran out of time/resources here, you'll see why when you get there. Overall the story is very interesting, far more so than any main story of an elder scrolls, it reminded me of cyberpunk in many ways. The story isn't perfect but any game that has the depth to get me to continue thinking about it after its done is very satisfying in my book. The combat is really good too with the amount of build variety. The levelling system and items are great. Exploration is top notch and probably the best part of the whole thing (alongside the story). If you just rush the story without exploring you will be dissappointed. Definitely would recommend, we don't get many games in this genre and even less that can for the most part competently execute on their ideas. The devs could've almost certainly created a masterpiece here if they had the time, money and manpower of larger studios, but still what they achieved here is extremely impressive.
• Recommended Posted April 6, 2026 on Steam I feel like this game is a big hidden gem that still hasn't been fully discovered and that is a real shame. If you enjoyed Oblivion or Skyrim, you'll enjoy a richer story with more atmosphere and heavy dark tones. The developers put a lot of love into this and continue to add on to it, I'd say if you are a fan of Oblivion or Skyrim, give this game a go you'll thoroughly enjoy it.
• Recommended Posted October 30, 2025 on Steam I’ve played this entirely on a Steam Deck. If you wish there was another Morrowind, Oblivion, or Skyrim, then this is probably the closest thing you can get. It seems a bit more Oblivion-ish because it isn’t quite as overdone as Skyrim, and it’s also a bit more “old school” in the sense of not being too easy and dumbed down to attract a larger audience. Technical implementation: I didn’t really have any performance problems but I was using a steam deck which is hardware the game is specifically targeted for. The only FPS problem happens when you summon 3-5 wolves. It seems like a problem specifically with wolves for some reason. Other people sometimes have problems but these are usually solvable by reducing 2 graphics settings like vegetation quality. The game is built using Unity but you can’t really tell when playing it. Combat is a bit more difficult and action-oriented than Skyrim and Oblivion, though not complicated. The main thing is that you have dash (dodge), block, and parry as defensive options and parry rewards you for exact timing. The design of the game mechanics seems pretty good and it seems like they addressed some of the weaknesses in Skyrim especially. Like in Skyrim you can get sneaking to the point where you’re practically invisible. In this game you can’t do that. Backstabbing is sometimes possible but not usually very practical. Sniping things with a bow from a distance can handle mobs maybe 80% of the time. (But beware that there are required “boss fights” where you are locked into an arena, so you have to be able to handle melee or short range combat.) Unlike Skyrim, 2H (two-handed) weapons aren’t completely useless compared to just dual-wielding 1H weapons. You can parry and block with either loadout, and both equally prevent you from using a shield. Daggers have their own skill tree and are focused on speed; they’re not just some thing for extra backstab damage and they don’t usually give you a huge backstab advantage. (Generally speaking, the sneak attack damage bonus is about the same for all weapon types.) So all of this stuff is balanced out a lot better with no obviously useless or superior weapon types. Magic is pretty simple and you don’t really have “schools” of magic other than summons vs direct damage spells. There are only four magic skill trees and the other two are wands/cubes (magic weapons) and a general tree for mana point bonuses and such. Due to the lack of requirement for magic specialization, a ‘spellsword’ (referred to as a “battle mage” in the game) type character is more practical than usual. There are still some weaknesses to the game which I think are mostly in the content; - I think the game could use more side quests. There are a decent number, but only maybe 1/3rd of what Skyrim has, for example. (Skyrim is a bit overloaded with them compared to everything else though.) - The character system is classless, but like similar systems you’re going to have to focus on two main skill strategies to be effective. This is fine, but there aren’t really any side quests dedicated to specific skill areas. Like there’s no “mage guild” or “assassin guild” or similar quest line that requires the use of certain skills to get associated rewards of some sort. The only ones kind of like this are for alchemy and crafting wyrdstone, but they’re rather underwhelming. - Most of the “dungeons” seem too small and too few to me. The ones in Skyrim seem much bigger. - The overland areas are divided into three maps instead of one big overland map. So it’s not really 100% open world. It’s more like 33% open until you unlock the next region, then it’s 66% open until you unlock the last region. This isn’t really that big of a deal though. - The overall game scenario of “King Arthur needs to save Avalon” and such is a bit too closed to further expansion. It’s a bit difficult to imagine how a DLC for this game would work, and if I were developing a content add-on mod it would be difficult to fit anything into the narrow lore. Basically the world is too small and simple to allow for much creative expansion. - There are a few awkward consistency errors. These are hard to entirely avoid where player choices make all permutations of choices hard to test, but they might have done better if they had some sort of dedicated continuity checker. There are fewer bugs overall than the average Bethesda game. So in short, this is not the “be all end all” FPS RPG and it doesn’t blow everything else away, but it’s pretty good given its limitations and I’d still recommend it even though I wish the world was bigger with more side quests and such.
• Recommended Posted April 20, 2026 on Steam If you want to play blind, but want one tip here it is: Get your merchant sell price up early on. That's it. I avoided news and discussions around this game so I could go in (almost except for above tip) completely blind. It paid off. 100% would recommend. Anyone who ever thought about how they wish they could play their favorite open world RPG for the first time again, consider this your chance. Do not look up any damn wikis or YouTube guides for stupid Xp / gold farm / quick loot start. Play it blind, look around, explore. This game is good for blind starts. Just use your eyeballs, be curious, have fun. Gear & equipment is crafted, but also found tucked away. So exploration is more than scenery in this and it's cool as hell.
• Recommended Posted December 20, 2025 on Steam Imagine Skyrim, but instead of power fantasy you get moral ambiguity and constant dread. Every decision feels important, every victory feels temporary, and the vibes are so dark they might absorb light.