Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon

I'm doing a positive review now because I know that when I finish this, it'll still be positive. But I will update this review a lot later, this is just to get the positive out the gate. Let's start where the game starts. The character creator. My favourite bit in any game. This one is decent, it's not lot's of sliders to shape everything and eventually wind up with a monstrosity because you slid something and sliding it back doesn't seem to do the job. You can play as male or female, you can change whether they have defined muscles or not. Choose skin colours and then get into the more defined details. There's choices to choose for face shapes, rather than fine tuning. There's choices for tattoos, not just on the face but the body as well. It's a lot for a first person game. (There is a third person button. Z by default.) If you want to be a bald man with a beard, a woman with a ponytail, or a pale grey man with bright pink hair and a bright blue beard. You can do that. You cannot be a woman with a beard. I don't personally mind, but I know people who would've liked that. Then you choose your name, which for me, takes anywhere between 5 and 20 mmmm....onths. (There's a website, fantasy name generators, I usually use that and merge like 3 names together, cuts those months down to minutes.) When I first started this game, waking up in a prison cell and someone commenting on how I was waking up. It felt eerily familiar. But that's where most of the familiarity stops. The gameplay, while similar to skyrim. Feels more polished. There's still the occasional bug. But for the most part, the game plays well and wants you to play it. I say this, as someone who loves Skyrim, I have over 3000 hours in Skyrim, I had better bloody like it, right? This game is better than Skyrim in a lot of ways... but it's not Skyrim. Do not go into this game thinking "It's just Skyrim but." This is it's own game and it does a really good job of differentiating itself. I like the combat, but the biggest issue I've found is that regardless of melee build, you're going to need stamina and lot's of it. You'll run outta that ♥♥♥♥ right quick. Early game magic is very bad, but it can get good later. Archery is great, but again, you're gonna need stamina. You don't need stamina to sprint while out of combat, which quite frankly, I'm really upset more games don't do that. I've only played roughly 8 hours. And most of that was trying different builds with different characters. I'm barely out of the starting area. Enemies get real strong real quick. So definitely focus on combat skills and stats before you focus on improving your fishing. (That wasn't smart of me...) Stealth is okay, not amazing. But if you can get up behind someone with a knife, you can take them down extremely fast. By default, walk is holding caps lock... I hate that, so I set it to toggle and on G. Out the way enough, AND IT DOESN'T MAKE ME SHOUT AT PEOPLE RANDOMLY. Combat overall for me, I typically go for sneaky stabby builds first. Not sneaky shooty like most people. So I can avoid the bulk of a fight if I get a good stab in. But the actual fight itself tends to be dodging to get behind someone. I typically dodge through them when they run at me, quickly spin round mid dodge and slash them in the back. This works extremely well in this game. (Minus the stamina issue, I really should get more stamina, much more.) I'm really bad at timing parries, my instinct tells me to dodge. I did try the parries and I was really bad at them... as usual. But I'm really bad at them myself, so I can't tell you if this is everyones experience. You'll get a feel real quick out the gates for whether or not the combat suits you. Some of the first enemies are slow, zombie like things. So you can backpedal and shoot, or run around them, or whatever. Play with them a bit, practice with them. They're zombies, they're not going anywhere less you kill them. The quests are phenomenal. I don't want to spoil things, but even small side quests feel important to do. If you pick up and read a letter, it'll give you a quest. Which can feel just like, Oh, I just have to deliver a letter... But that opens up so much more in time. And seriously.... read the letters. Read everything. Read it out loud and put on voices like I do. The people writing dialogue and text in this game really put their soul into it. You should too! That's about it for now. I am just at the start of the game. But I really wanted to get some words out. I will update this, promise! <3 Thank you for reading, or skipping to the end. Have a lovely day.< 3

Constant freezing/stuttering. shader cache for it does not exist in my system for me to reset it. uninstalled, verified, reset everything. put on lowest settings with everything turned off with no change. game is super bottlenecked. even installed the mod to help with it. this game is just very unplayable. ive heard before a couple friends played with no issues but that was a way while back. Now this game is just unplayable. Seems like a super fun game though, if it ran.

For only 40ish dollars, and your own self respect, yes! You too can pretend this game is better by using AI/ content generation in even supposedly innocent parts of the creative process! Why scrutinize? Why take your time with art? Why inject your pedantic opinions about the human experience into thoughtful and layered artistic expressions that may genuinely resonate with an actual fellow human; when you can just generate meaningless, **** in the wind within seconds, right? Why try to fight it? Why think? Cant you guys just shut up? They pay their artists! Golly gee they even give out bonuses! They even hire new ones from time to time! They are quite literally the only company that pays artists their just due! Name one other company that does that?!? Just let it happen! Its easier to accept change than to fight it! Lifes way, way too hard to fight for something like this! They are only using it to optimize the artistic pipeline in the beginning! That is definitely not a concerningly corporate bias being projected onto the humble side of the gaming industry! It is most certainty NOT the most disingenuous corporate vagueness of all time! Of course, let it be known! me-me big-big dum-dum and this is not the most pathetic display of corporate jargon there is. Me luuuuuuuvvvvvv content! Me would like to thank all the uncanny valley, generated famous people getting yp to absolutely HIGHLARIOUS AI shenanigans, the Loony Tunes generated bible for me religious inspo, and the demi god esque leadership at Awaken! They are here for us, dont you see? Every so often we even get a few new free ai weapon content packs slightly edited for us dillusional, dopamine deprived, content obsessed pigs to eat up! Yum! Keep up the good work, Awaken Realms! Bravo Vince, and Questline too!

Decent but flawed, the game's lore and main story are really good, but the game suffers from poor balancing and the choices in most quests seem rather weak, most quests you are forced to help while there is little choice to do stuff through skill checks, there are but way less than expected. Performance is ok, game should run way better for how it looks, some of the areas are beautiful and the art direction is really good, both the lore and the art direction carried the game for me. Worth grabbing if you enjoy the lore and/or the genre if you dont mind a bit of jank or unbalanced combat.

The storytelling seems pretty good, but I just couldn't get over how bad the (early game?) combat is.

Arthurian fantasy, but can't even pronounce Tintagel correctly... Ugh. Clearly a labour of love, and with some great lore details lashed into the endless stream of somewhat mandatory flavour text collectables, but... damn if it isn't dull. Doesn't land the ARPG combat at all, doesn't carry any immediate sense of immersion, and the 'moody' environment just devolves into a drab mire that you wade through, looking for the next container to press interact on. I really wanted to love it, and the initial plot hook is pretty cool, in a 'King Arthur meets H.R.Giger' kinda way. But... Likely would have made a better visual novel, tbh. Just not for me.

This is the best game I've played since BG3, which isn't to say it's comparable; that's just my personal taste. I started off as a crappy mage wondering why I did more damage with a dagger than my spell, running for my life most of the time. Now in NG+ I'm zooming around in a Jester's outfit with a hat on that looks like a demon got stuck in a beehive, flinging fireballs left and right and melting everything. At my side, a hilariously cute pet and an assortment of undead knights having mental breakdowns. This game has fascinating lore, a creepy, dark setting, secrets and hidden quests, references to music and literature, and a healthy dose of humour. It can be a bit glitchy; I had to use console commands to retrieve some items that got eaten by the Wyrdness, but other than that it's a 10/10 from me.

The game uses undisclosed AI art and text.