REVIEW: ‘Tainted Grail: Fall Of Avalon’ Brings Dreamy Darkness

Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon, published by Awaken Realms and developed by Questline, is a sublimely bleak and dour first-person RPG. Set in a world of twisted Arthurian legends, it lets players freely explore its world, piece together a set of gear, and build their abilities from a variety of skills and perks. While it does not innovate within the genre and lacks the polish of other recent releases, it offers a solid and imaginative adventure in a wonderfully dark setting.

Like so many games in this genre, Tainted Grail begins with the player in prison. After making a character with a relatively basic character creator, the player defines their starting skills by answering questions from a guard about their past. Then, a mysterious figure kills the guard and lets the player go free, leaving them to fight their way out of the prison.

But the player quickly learns that they are not being held in a typical prison. They are being held in a housing facility for the victims of the plague ravaging the land, where strange and terrible experiments are performed on them. The prison acts as a handy tutorial as the player explores and kills off evil scientists one by one.

As the player explores the prison, they start to see just how dark and twisted the world of Tainted Grail is. The scientists perform heinous experiments on their prisoners, desks are covered with chunks of brains and blood clots, and the scraps of writing spread throughout the place speak of incredible horrors and suffering. It serves as a great microcosm of the world the player spends the rest of the game exploring.

Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon’s combat is simple but satisfying.

The game’s world is its strongest selling point. Tainted Grail is set in a world of ruin and disease, and goes much darker than most games of its ilk. It doesn’t go dark in the way of trigger warnings, but rather in the general sense of death and misery that permeates every part of its dream-like world. This is not a world that people believably live in, it is a world where the corpses of faceless giants strung up on rocks serve as landmarks and giant stone hands are scattered across the landscape. Exploring this world is exploring a dream in the final stages of a terminal disease.

Apart from its setting, Tainted Grail offers relatively standard offerings for its genre. For combat, players can equip weapons or spells in both of their hands with the standard assortment of swords, bows, and whatever else. Stealth can be used to deal additional damage to unsuspecting enemies, blocking within a particular window parries the attack, and players have to manage their stamina usage to avoid running out and being left vulnerable. It does not bring anything new to the genre, but it is fun and satisfying throughout the entire playthrough.

Tainted Grail also puts a lot of effort toward enabling the player to approach combat however they wish through its leveling and gear systems. As players use skills, they improve them for the future, and when the player levels overall, they can increase their basic attributes and unlock perks from several trees.

Increasing your attributes allows you to equip better gear, and unlocking perks carries numerous effects like increasing damage with a type of weapon, improving spells, or giving the player bonuses while dual-wielding. There are enough synergies to make it fun to build out a character and keep leveling up, feeling rewarding.

Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon is dedicated to absolute player freedom.

The game also feels rewarding thanks to its dedication to absolute freedom. After finishing the tutorial, the player is free to explore the world in whichever direction they please, finding hidden gems and playing through the stories scattered throughout it.

Tainted Grail excels in empowering the player to explore what appeals to them and always offers rewards for the effort. Some of the storylines are better written than others, but its crown jewel is undoubtedly its dark and original main questline with its twisted take on King Arthur and his legacy.

Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon is a very ambitious project from a young indie studio. It has traveled a long road in early access to reach this point, but it was well worth it. As it stands, Tainted Grail is an extremely strong RPG filled with a unique personality well worth exploring all on its own and a rewarding structure that makes it a consistent pleasure to see what is around the next corner.

Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon is available now on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.