Developer One More Level is proficient in making gameplay feel smoother than a stick of yellow butter, as it exemplified with cult hit action platformer Ghostrunner in 2020, but I wasn’t convinced I’d be interested in its upcoming title Valor Mortis during Summer Game Fest 2026, when I first had the chance to try the demo now available during Steam Next Fest. But Valor Mortis’ first-person Soulslike combat is so slick, even more silky than a vat of canola oil, the historical horror game easily convinced me to become another one of its loyal zombie soldiers.
I awake on the battlefield in reddish mud, tinted with the blood seemingly oozing from my arm until Napoleon Bonaparte himself commands me to stand, and my wounds miraculously disappear. At this point I think, Who does this Napoleon guy think he is, reanimating me like that… but Valor Mortis is a game about supernatural warfare in an alternate version of 19th century France, so I go with it. Napoleon better have a freshly torched crème brûlée waiting for me if he’s going to wake me up from my eternal slumber, just to serve his selfish goal of building an army that cannot die.
But Valor Mortis protagonist William doesn’t seem to mind. The Foreign Legion soldier is resolute in his love for Napoleon, so I glide over bodies of my fellow blue coat military men like my extremist daddy tells me to, not questioning the glowing turquoise vial of… stuff I now need to crush in my fist to stay healthy. Though, Valor Mortis is made with your death in mind, and I find myself better able to carry out perfect parries each time I’m slain and need to restart from my last checkpoint a couple hundred corpses back.
The entirety of France is apparently sick with sudden zombie disease. I’ve been chosen to slay my former brothers in arms, some of whom are now spending their time mindlessly slicing up their horses, and shooting each other in the head. If I’m not quick about grabbing them by the shoulder for a backstab, or aggressively slashing at their torso until it completely severs in two, I’m the next victim of their mutiny.
So I cut them. And I send rivulets of blood shooting across the grass stars. I push on, scampering around the French forest One More Level has made a lovely, fairytale green – though what I suspect are snowflakes of ash fall softly around me, never letting me forget that for every pretty, upturned tree root I see, there’s at least 10 men slowly bleeding to death. It’s a complex mood, both idyllic in the woods and uncomfortable from the irregularity of the situation, the zombie-ness of it all, and I’m impressed. Valor Mortis is a potent warning, it seems, of how dangerous it can be to let ridiculous men in power feel special.
I also get glimpses of Valor Mortis’ other supernatural elements during my time with its demo during Summer Game Fest, like paths blocked with a yellow goop William says he’s never seen before, trees stuffed with a different, more orange goop I can shoot to knock them down, and shadowy time rifts that tell me army secrets – like a soldiers’ suspicion that Napoleon doesn’t really love all of us children in the army.
By the end of my demo session, I’m having my own, more pleasant flashbacks to the first time I played games like the intuitive Dark Souls 3 and Shadow of Mordor, both of which made combat feel easy to learn and satisfying for me. Like those other action games, Valor Mortis requires a bit of patient strategy with maneuvers like parrying, but it also rewards a flurry of hack-and-slashing – my preferred method of handling Soulslikes. I’m eager to pick the sword back up once Valor Mortis is out in full on October 13, though I really need to set some boundaries with Napoleon first.
The most popular Soulslike in Steam Next Fest makes a very powerful argument for adding a shotgun to Dark Souls.
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