Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon

Unexpectedly great game, the stories first and second act shocked me at how good they were despite decently high expectations, the individual characters varied but in general it reminded me most of kcd 1s quality, the combat stays fresh and fun for the first half of the game but definitely falls off later on. Only other complaint is that the music is so good that its a shame certain tracks only get used once or twice while others become frustratingly common for the entire game. Excited to see what the studios next project.

I have almost 100 hours in Tainted Grail. That probably sounds like a recommendation. It is not. I tend to finish what I start, even when it turns into "grit your teeth and get it over with" instead of fun. With Tainted Grail, the fun mostly wore off after maybe 10-20 hours. After that, the game survived on one thought: "There has to be more to this." There is not. And that is my biggest problem with the game: [b]Tainted Grail is a facade.[/b] The first few hours work surprisingly well. Everywhere you look are systems that seem full of potential: a huge skill tree, cooking, fishing, alchemy, crafting, tons of items and ingredients, armor weight, status effects, factions, choices, exploration and loot. At first it looks like a huge RPG full of possibilities. Eventually you realize that this is basically it. Almost every system has a foundation, but very few are properly developed or meaningfully connected. The developers simply bit off more than they could chew. Five well-designed systems that interact and develop throughout the game would have been much better than ten half-baked ones. A lot of it feels like ready-made building blocks and assets made to work technically, without enough thought about what to do with them afterwards. I do not know what was bought or made in-house; I am describing how it feels to play. Very often the game seems to say: "Look, we have this too!" Okay. Now what? [b]Cooking and fishing[/b] There are tons of ingredients and dozens of recipes, yet very early in Act 1 I already had a simple three-fish recipe restoring 120 HP at base quality. Many hours and exotic ingredients later, much more elaborate dishes are barely better. I ate that beginner dish for practically the entire game. It even scales with cooking quality: the same dirt-cheap recipe went from 120 HP at base quality to 125 HP at +1 and 138 HP at +3. Instead of later recipes replacing it through meaningful progression, the early recipe simply gets better along with you. Fishing is even more absurd. There are 35 fish species, including rare ones, different waters and times of day, and an achievement for collecting them. Yet there are only four rods that mainly make fishing more forgiving and two skills: more rod durability and a higher chance for bigger fish. And what happens to nearly all that variety afterwards? It turns into [b]Fish Fillet[/b]. The developers themselves summed it up in Patch 1.16: [i]"Added more fish species in randomly generated loot (this is only a cosmetic change, as looting them will still grant a Fish Fillet)."[/i] That is Tainted Grail in a nutshell. Why are rare fish not tied into cooking through special dishes, buffs or regional recipes? Instead: fish -> Fish Fillet. Feature implemented. Box checked. Next feature. [b]Skill tree[/b] The skill tree follows the same pattern. It is huge and looks impressive at first, but much of it boils down to "+x% damage", "+x% after a kill" or "+x% under condition Y", sometimes for situations the game barely creates. If roughly 90% of my fights are one-on-one, a bonus after killing an enemy may technically be a skill, but in practice it barely matters. Again, less would have been more. Give me half as many skills, but make them actually change how I play. [b]Loot[/b] Looting becomes tedious very quickly. The same handful of chests, cupboards, sacks and containers are scattered everywhere, usually filled with seemingly random items. One chest might contain an onion and a pair of tongs, the next meat and iron ore. Not literally those combinations, but that is what it feels like. My home works the same way, of course. Bananas and car tires in the cupboard, and one grain of rice in each drawer. Good loot should at least make sense in relation to where you find it. I expect different things in a smithy than in a kitchen, tomb or military camp. Tainted Grail often feels like: "There is a lootable container here, put some random stuff in it." At first you open a chest because you are curious. Later out of habit. Eventually you stop opening them at all. [b]Choices[/b] The heavily advertised "choices" disappointed me as well. A dialogue option is not automatically a choice. A choice needs consequences, big or small. If A only gives me different dialogue than B and both immediately merge back into the same outcome, I have not made a meaningful choice. I have clicked different text. The Red Death questline is a perfect example. The game keeps telling me that I am fighting the Red Death, then gives me a quest that effectively does the opposite, and I explicitly say "No." In my playthrough, the quest stayed in my journal anyway and the associated status effect remained stuck on my character. I could not even properly reject it. I looked up what happens if you complete the questline. The documented rewards are XP, gear and another skill tree. I could find no Red Death-specific mechanic that changes your relationship with the infected, makes them friendly, lets you command them or meaningfully connects your new status to the world. Again, another system without real connection to anything else. [b]The actual problem[/b] Having crafting, fishing, a skill tree, choices or lots of loot is not a quality by itself. Those are just features. What matters is what a game does with them, how they develop and how they interact. Tainted Grail does surprisingly little. It feels like the developers constantly asked "Can we add this too?" and far too rarely asked "Why are we adding this, and what are we going to do with it afterwards?" The game needed tighter focus: fewer systems, ingredients, skills and meaningless items, but more interaction, progression and consequences. Sometimes less really is more. Most quests also follow the familiar formula of talking to an NPC, going somewhere, fetching or killing something and returning for another dialogue. The world feels overwhelmingly static, sitting there waiting to be worked through. I constantly felt like I was standing in front of a foundation, waiting for someone to finally build the house on top of it. [b]They never do.[/b] The dark Arthurian setting and parts of the atmosphere do work for me, but they cannot carry around 100 hours of gameplay, let alone more with additional content, when so little underneath them develops. After roughly 60-70 hours, I ran out of patience. Until then I had deliberately tried to discover things for myself, because that is part of the appeal of an RPG for me. After that, I started looking things up, not because I wanted 100%, but because I no longer wanted to spend another hour finding out that yet another mechanic led nowhere. For comparison, I have over 400 hours in Elden Ring and used outside help almost only for missed locations. I played Black Myth: Wukong through NG+++ and only researched on the final run for 100%. With good games, I do not want to know what comes next. I want to discover it myself. With Tainted Grail, I eventually only wanted to know whether there was anything more to discover at all. The answer was usually: [b]"No. Do not even bother looking."[/b] That is pretty damning. If all you want is a dark fantasy world to wander around in, fight enemies, collect loot and tick off quests, there is some fun to be had here. But after almost 100 hours, scores of 9/10 or even 9.5/10 make no sense to me. Tainted Grail wants to be everything, includes a little bit of everything, and barely develops any of it far enough. Lots of content, surprisingly little depth, very little interaction between systems and an enormous amount of wasted potential. [b]A facade. Half-baked. It bit off far more than it could chew.[/b] [b]5/10[/b]