The Games for Poland booth is always a weird mix of titles, but I love that it’s purpose is to bring teams that probably couldn’t make it on their own to PAX West. This year, the titles I was most excited for were a pair of brutal first person adventures, and a pixelated romp with fantastic vibes.
Valor Mortis
Valor Mortis caught my eye at a showcase earlier in the year, so I was really excited to get my hands on the demo at PAX West. You play as a Napoleonic French soldier who has been reanimated as your compatriots mutate into relentless undead things. Outside of the first-person perspective, a lot of the core game play here will feel familiar to Souls fans.
Creeping through the spooky atmosphere of a twisted forest, you’ll fight groups of enemies with weak and strong attacks, dodges, and carefully timed parries. Eventually you’ll find yourself a gun, which is useful for countering certain attacks and for popping giant, glowing weak spots.
The sense of familiarity in the game play made the new perspective pretty easy to work with, even if seeing a grotesque monster right in front of your face is way more stressful than looking at one from over your shoulder.
Another step away FromSoftware’s template is that this seems to be a much more linear game. From my chat with some of the team members, it sounds like this is closer to level based structure, but with lots of opportunities to revisit areas to unlock new paths and secrets.
I’m really looking forward to diving in to Valor Mortis when it launches, but the recent open playtest made me pretty sure I’ll be playing this one on a console rather than Steam Deck.
Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon
Eagle eyed readers might have noticed that my PAX West coverage is waaaaay late this year, and Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon takes a huge part of the blame. This demo was set up right next to Valor Mortis, so while I was waiting to play I was watching both of them. Like Valor Mortis, this is a gritty, dark world that you explore from a first person perspective. However, this game is borrowing much more from the Elder Scrolls camp to tell a story steeped in Arthurian lore.
While I have had a blast with Souls games over the years, I am much more of a story forward gamer, so seeing people crawl through the opening dungeon of Tainted Grail really caught my imagination. I played it on the floor and loved it, and then was surprised to find out both that the game actually launched earlier this year and that the team had sent over a code for me to check it out.
I have been playing so much Tainted Grail, y’all.
Unlike Valor Mortis, this game runs perfectly fine on the Steam Deck. Well, its at least playable, even if I had to crank the settings way down to play it.
The combat in Tainted Grail is way more interesting than typical Elder Scrolls fair, with a quick dodge for dashing away from or around enemy attacks. Unfortunately, the combat is also surprisingly tough, so I have ended up playing on easy to take away a bit of the stress (and to avoid the load times after dying).
It’s a shame that this game launched so close to Avowed, because they are both playing in a similar space. If Obsidian is out here making double-A version of Bethesda games, Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon feels like an ambitious indie version of an Obsidian Game.
SacriFire
SacriFire wasn’t on my radar at all until the host of the Skeleton House Podcast asked me to check it out while I was at the show. At a glance, SacriFire looks like either a convoluted Metroidvania or an RPG inspired by the Tales series, depending on when you look, but no matter when you look it always shows a gorgeous take on the HD2D art style.
In the demo, I explored some sort of steampunk underground tower as I looked for a way to the roof for reasons that are probably very emotionally resonant in the actual game. For me, this was totally game play forward, and I dug it.
Like Arkham Origins Blackgate, this feels like it was designed on a completely flat 2D plane, but then rendered out into a fully realized 3D space for the player to explore. That means that along with moving between rooms, you often find yourself moving forward or backward to different spaces within a room in order to find just the right MacGuffin to open new doors to new rooms with new nooks and crannies to explore.
The blend of 2D game play in a larger 3D space did mean I got lost a few times in the demo, so I’m hoping that waypointing and the map get a little more love in the final development stretch.
Then, whenever you run in to an enemy you load into a battle where you can run around an open arena where you battle enemies in real time. Combat got pretty chaotic, with me dodging to avoid attacks from enemies on multiple sides, while also balancing resource management between my own melee and magical attacks.
Both sides of SacriFire were interesting and captivating, and this went from a game I had never heard of to one I am itching to play more of.
Final Thoughts
There were lots of other great games at the Games from Poland pavilion (including a roguelike delivery game called Truckful that I'm keeping an eye on), and the amount of variety on display is what makes me love this booth every year. The video game industry manages to be both a economic juggernaut and also representative of a niche hobby, so it's really cool to see a community come together to help developers without the means to promote their work internationally.