Update: A few hours after I posted this, One More Level announced that Valor Mortis is delayed from September 24th to October 13th. I'm leaving the rest of the article as it was, even though several of its jokes are ruined.
I thought I was pretty up to date on Valor Mortis, the Napoleonic first-person fencing soulslike underway at Ghostrunner devs One More Level, but it turns out I’d missed the four seconds of flesh magic hook-grappling in this prior trailer. As such, the swinging and wallrunning elements of the new, much-expanded demo ambushed me like British archers ambushed the French at Agincourt. Yes, I’m aware I’m about four hundred years off that simile being applicable.
Also, there’s another new trailer, and a release date: September 24th 2026. Hang on, that’s the same day as Control Resonant. And Silent Hill: Townfall. And one only one day before Onimusha: Way of the Sword. Which I’m not as interested in as the other two, but still, man.
Anyway, Valor Mortis: I liked the first demo, and I like this one. It still speaks parrying as a first language, which I’d understand if anyone – not just soulslike masochists – is getting fatigued by, given how often games now prefer you to deflect attacks over making them. But the saberfighting here focuses very, very tightly on the kind of tense, up-close, almost understated humanoid duels that I typically prefer over slashing aimlessly at moon-sized demigods.
This particular demo also shows how Valor Mortis makes effective use of its first-person perspective, as opposed it simply being a soulslike USP for the Steam blurb. Next to, say, battling an Omen in Elden Ring’s sewers, there’s a much keener sense of its diseased, unnaturally stretched-out Grande Armée boys towering over you, the fear of their strength and reach advantages piercing deeper in your gut. There are also several moments where you’re forced into the narrow, infested confines of some poor dead sod’s house, a classic tension-raising move that might’ve struggled to comfortably accommodate a third-person camera.
I do find the freerunning stuff, at this stage, a slightly odd addition, though I’m willing to give it a chance to prove it’s not just an out-of-place power fantasy flourish in a game where you spend half the time getting your lungs run through. It does appear mostly separate from the combat, for one – the demo has a couple of opportunities to grapple up to musketeers’ nests, but the wallrunning is more for linear traversal than Titanfall-style arena manoeuvring. Besides, the French invented parkour, so who am I to deny them this tradition?
There’s also the matter of the One More Level’s Ghostrunner hertitage. Few studios possess as much institutional knowledge on pleasurably smooth-flowing freerun moves, and while Valor Mortis’ versions are ickier in texture, they’re functionally identical to the cyborg leaps of the studio’s previous work. It would therefore be incredibly funny, to the extent that I a now choose to believe it will happen, for Valor Mortis to pull a Deathloop and climactically reveal that it shares a silly alt-history timeline with the far-future Ghostrunner. Make it happen, OML. Delay into a different week to Control, if you fancy.