Like a Jenga tower on the verge of toppling, the evolution of the roguelike genre recycles the ideas of each entry prior, constantly putting its new, most improved addition on top. Given this strategy of rapid growth, developers bear the weighty burden of knowing that there will always be a product ready to surpass their title’s gameplay and design decisions, thereby threatening typical industry ideals of longevity, value, and identity. Thanks to a healthy dose of situational awareness under these suffocating circumstances, Soul Stalker, created and developed by Radhood, usually finds the ability to be empowered, rather than threatened, through scope and focus. While its moment-to-moment gameplay doesn’t nearly measure up to the overachieving excellence of other roguelikes, Soul Stalker is a decent time due to its distinct art direction, comfort in simplicity, and affordable asking price. By allowing itself levity and independence from the penthouse pursuing competition of the genre, Soul Stalker is a safe, if inconsistent, piece of the roguelike tower to pull out and play.

Playing With Paper

The Soul of Soul Stalker exists primarily in its visuals, where the Paper Mario series’ hand-crafted and colorful artistic influence is evident to the extent that its admirer sheds any inhibitions or shyness towards the connotations of direct imitation. While some may see the replicated style as nothing more than an identity crisis when separated from their favorite plumber, I was charmed to discover the artistic direction outside of the Mushroom Kingdom. These expressive efforts aren’t always a homerun, however. While the character design supplies enough quirky and cute concepts to crowd a sheet of stickers, the world these personalities inhabit is disappointingly hollow. Although the three-dimensional backdrops emphasize the two-dimensional beings with an endearing display of divergence, using impressive lighting and a bold outlining effect to accentuate the look, this doesn’t supply a reason for the unimaginative and dull environments not to receive equal attention in artistic efforts. Curating a world reflective of these characters’ creative designs would have gone a long way in enveloping me in the aesthetic, but I was often left only imagining the papery possibilities. For similar reasons, Soul Stalker’s soundtrack and story left me disappointed. Paying attention to either half-hearted artistic avenue contributed very little to the atmosphere, leaving the world empty in ways it deserves better than.

Existing Outside of Evolution

Describing Soul Stalker’s gameplay leaves little to the imagination. Any gamer modestly experienced in roguelikes is sure to find another title as a frame of reference to draw upon. Whether describing the core loop as a bullet heaven, a horde survivor, or an auto shooter, the reason these descriptors exist and are applicable is that Soul Stalker isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel. With each run, the player navigates a map, collecting new weapons and traits to improve their ability to automatically slash or shoot at enemies and, most importantly, increase their likelihood of surviving the run. This familiarity is far from a bad thing, and I appreciated the haste of being able to pick up on a game proudly restrained in scope. Variety and content come in a few forms. Twenty-one characters, differentiated by stats and traits, are unlockable through specific tasks. A collected currency allows the player to purchase traits and weapons that they can start their run with, providing direction in their builds. These additions offer variety to the primary Journey mode, which consists of levels with increasingly difficult drawbacks. For a more unpredictable set of conditions, the Jobs mode provides three constantly changing runs with randomly selected characters, weapons, and trinkets. 

The Price to Pay

Regardless of the mode you choose, Soul Stalker contains a few caveats that shouldn’t go unaddressed. Small stage sizes, technical issues, and unpredictable hit boxes occasionally interrupted my experience, leaving me feeling defeated due to factors beyond my control. Most prominently problematic, however, were the balancing issues of certain builds, funneling me into specific ways of playing. The only compromise to this problem was to artificially challenge myself by ruling out traits, characters, and weapons that proved to be objectively better than others.

While Soul Stalker is undoubtedly flawed, its price point feels like a recognition of its imperfections. For less than the price of a fast food meal, the title provides enough familiar fun to frame itself as a worthwhile investment against a genre where every game is determined to move upwards and remain unprecedented in quality. I can see myself launching Soul Stalker for a few runs every once in a while, and when so many roguelikes exist, eternally vying for attention, commitment is one of the best compliments I can give such a game.

Alone and weak, you wake up in a prison with hardly a thing to your inventory. Anybody who has RPG experience knows this situation is nothing to fear; it’s not long before a guard is asking you for a backstory, portioning skill points, and constructing a character beyond a blank slate. What is even more apparent is that building such a character would serve no use between metal bars, so it’s hardly surprising when an answer to this predicament arrives in the form of a timely savior. As this mystery man helps you escape, your character, who has only just found a story, is quickly caught up in a spectacle more significant than any prison cell setting.

Seem familiar? In many ways, Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, developed by Questline and published by Awaken Realms, is counting on that recognition. Much like the explosive appearance of the soulslike genre following From Software’s formula in recent years, Tainted Grail has no qualms existing in the shadow of its incredibly popular older sibling, The Elder Scrolls. By forgoing the evasive, self-conscious state of manipulation seen in many cases of mimicry, the title embraces the empty space of a series that hasn’t seen a new addition in over thirteen years. With so many fans left yearning, Tainted Grail’s predictability is far from a bad thing. Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon is their answer, a scrollslike, and a solid one at that.

While the emergence of a scrollslike genre may seem like a no-brainer given the stagnant state of its source series, the surprise release of this year’s The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion remaster shifted the simplicity of Tainted Grail’s situation. With Oblivion fresh in gamers’ minds following a remarkable makeover, is the product of a smaller, unproven team capable of going toe-to-toe with its renovated relative? Thanks to self-aware design choices and an unexpected ambition in storytelling and style, Tainted Grail measures up to the competition. When the game isn’t crashing, that is.

Following in the Footsteps of a Giant

Tainted Grail’s world and narrative surprised me thanks to its efforts toward exploring Arthurian legend in a bold, stylized way. From the start, the influence of dark fantasy and H.R. Giger depict the title as a distinct retelling of a period otherwise rooted in a singular visual perspective. It wasn’t just artistic deviations that challenged and recontextualized my preconceived notions, however. The narrative’s creative liberties with Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, and more construct a dense, morally complex state of affairs where a choice-based RPG can thrive. Because Tainted Grail’s lore draws on a board game of the same name, it contains confident, thought-out world-building that respected my time, a trait out of reach for many of the overbearing, context-heavy genre. 

The best stories of open-world role-playing tend to stem from the person holding the controller stumbling across one-of-a-kind, unexpected, and unscripted moments. While this frequently held true within my playthrough of Tainted Grail, Questline’s ability to write great characters and dialogue challenged this notion. My favorite anecdotes and characters arrived with a noticeable intention to test the borders of taboo subject matter. Topics such as religion, gender, sexual temptations, and suicide weren’t just briefly mentioned but factored into conversation choices in noteworthy ways. That’s not to say the writing is always profound and pensive. Tainted Grail also surprised me with its strength in humor, surfacing just enough to strike a comfortable balance with the title’s more hefty moments.

Each character, faction, and force within the realm of Avalon, split across three regions, contain their own motivations, agendas, and personalities. The story moves forward with enough instantaneous motivation to make each quest rational, and the ability to skip dialogue never seemed attractive to me outside of occasionally rough voice acting. Thankfully, the narrative’s leading stars aren’t among those affected, and I genuinely wanted to hear what they had to say, even if straying off the beaten path would threaten my retention of story beats carried from conversation to conversation. While it is far from a genre staple, I consistently longed for a feature similar to Final Fantasy XVI’s Active Time Lore to exist, allowing me to easily recount the who, what, where, and why of Avalon’s dense worldbuilding.

Doing the Unstuck

Tainted Grail’s combat is impressive until it stumbles over the unequal attention given to its systems. The swing of a blunt weapon lands with a satisfying, bone-rattling impact. Summoning an explosive ball of poisonous magic sizzles and spews, polluting those unfortunate enough to exist where it lands. Dashing out of an enemy’s heavy-sword swing provides the rewarding feeling of calculated reaction time. The attention given to designing these individual mechanics is a step above the competition, which only makes it more frustrating when they matter so little in the grand scheme of how battles play out. Enemies are spongey and inconsistent in behavior, soaking up any reason to approach combat tactically. These exchanges instead force the player to spam weapon swings and spells, wait for their stamina and mana meters to recharge, and then spam some more. This unwieldy approach reduces the gratification inherent in each individual combat maneuver, exhibiting conflict as an unflattering representation of what could have been.

It’s easy to be angered by the missed potential of Tainted Grail’s fighting, but at least the ambition shines through on a mechanical level. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for the host of other problems Tainted Grail is stained by. For a game that so keenly understands what makes open-world RPGs work, oftentimes responding to and capitalizing on the genre’s elements, it dramatically misses this mark when it comes to having any response to technical issues. Across my twenty-five-hour playthrough, I encountered twelve crashes, a wildly inconsistent frame rate, and relied on the menu’s unstuck button more than one should.

Technical issues aside, Tainted Grail also contains a plethora of design issues I questioned throughout my time spent in Avalon. The lack of a mini-map, combined with the absence of any sort of map while within indoor spaces, hindered my progress more often than it encouraged me to explore. The campfire system, where you can access many resources necessary to your adventure, is only deployable under certain conditions, leading many dungeon expeditions to be short-lived just so I could leave, cook a few meals for health regeneration, and then return to my objective. The biggest of Tainted Grail’s issues, however, is in its unreasonable enemy scaling. Failing to meet the combat ability necessary for progression led to side quests acting as a mandatory means to gain experience. While I enjoyed my time spent with these secondary stories, it felt somewhat deceiving to angle optional experiences in such a way.

The Symptoms of Scale

While it may seem as though technical and design snags have trampled my former compliments towards Tainted Grail, that is far from the case. Even if the experience doesn’t measure up to its idolized peers in terms of pure content, presentation, or popularity, the game’s efforts in occupying a similar philosophy to all-time greats is an aspiration often avoided by smaller studios. Not only this, but the unique storytelling, tone, and writing of Tainted Grail invested me in ways that many RPG staples never have. Even if bugs bound me to a choppy, imperfect experience, I more often than not found myself lost in the world of Avalon and what it had to offer me. Above all else, rolling the credits left me excited to see what is next for Questline.