Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon review

The setup is this: you're an escaped prisoner who gets wrangled into defending the war-torn isle of Avalon from an impending otherworldly force called the "wyrdness." And also the soul of the centuries-dead King Arthur has hitched a ride on your subconscious. After centuries of imprisonment, he wants to take back his kingdom, and you just happen to be the most ideal vessel for this task.

There's a sense of confidence in Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon. You can see it in the world design, feel it in the colorful cast of characters. 'Skyrim but you're also haunted by the ghost of King Arthur' is a concept that demands ambition.

But developer Questline is an untested studio, and fumbling the ball was always going to be a strong possibility. After dozens of hours, I’m happy to report that we have a genuinely fascinating open-world first-person RPG experience on our hands.

It's not without blemishes, though. Yes, Tainted Grail is sure of itself, but for every moment worth celebrating there's also a frustrating enemy encounter or a confusing UI feature to endure. The resulting game can be summed up in one word: inconsistent.

Setting the Round Table

Tainted Grail is a dark fantasy take on Arthurian legend set in the same world as the popular board game; in fact, it came to be thanks to the wild success of the 2018 Kickstarter campaign for the tabletop game.

Being a first-person open-world RPG, Tainted Grail invites comparisons to genre mainstays like The Elder Scrolls and Kingdom Come: Deliverance, and it unabashedly leans into those influences—it even opens with an Oblivion-style prison break.

You'll level up skills as you use them, rewarding whatever playstyle you happen to be rolling with at the time; I tended to favor a battlemage-style build with a magic spell in one hand and a sword in the other. Each cast grew my magic power, each swing made me stronger with one-handed weapons. I've always been a big fan of this system in the Elder Scrolls games, and it's used to good effect here.

There are traditional skill trees, too. More than 20 of them, in fact, offering more substantial upgrades to your abilities. I felt overwhelmed in the early game when deciding what playstyle to try out, but skill points are plentiful enough that I felt free to experiment.

A wyrd wide world

The world is also a lot of fun to explore. The realm of Avalon is divided into three different hub regions, each with their own storyline and biome. The environments are very pretty and loaded with points of interest to explore, like caves and abandoned villages. I found something useful—a new piece of armor, a new crafting recipe—almost everywhere I looked. There's very little filler space in the game's large maps.

During your journey, you'll make several forays into the "Wyrdrealm," an alternate dimension populated by spirits and otherworldly monsters. The design of this realm is filled with character, from huge statues of eldritch creatures to a skyline of crumbling towers. Trips here were always full of surprises and I often looked forward to the next mission that took me to the Wyrdrealm.

For me, though, Tainted Grail shines brightest with its characters. Every NPC has something worthwhile to contribute, and most of them offer side quests that add new wrinkles to the larger story. They can also be surprisingly funny: you'll help a nobleman fake his death to get out of a loveless marriage, uncover the lair of an undead chef chasing the next great meal, assist a woman who accidentally turned her husband into a pig, and more. That sense of humor extends to gear too, with a haunted chest piece that screams in agony as you take damage and a magic spell that can turn enemies into cheese.

The larger story is a lot of fun too. Awaken Realms and Questline have presented a unique take on the tale of King Arthur, steering it into dark fantasy territory. There are a lot of clever twists on familiar tropes, like the roles played by Arthur's closest confidants, including Galahad and Merlin.

Tainted Grail is ambitious and grand in scope, so it's surprising that it's as technically sound as it is. Games of this scale tend to come with a bunch of bugs and glitches, but I experienced very little during my 40-plus hours; the most glaring hiccup I encountered was a few dropped lines of dialogue. It's likely that the game's two years in early access on Steam played a large role in this technical feat.

Sword in the groan

There's a lot to like about Tainted Grail, but Questline's ambition runs ahead of its execution in myriad small ways: little quirks here and there that don't amount to much individually, but, taken together, lessen the immersion and lead to some frustration and monotony.

My biggest complaint here is with some of the worldbuilding. I don't want to disparage the work of any voice actors, but it feels like many of them weren't briefed on some important bits of lore. For example, Cuanacht, the name of the second region of the game, is pronounced at least four different ways. This is true for a handful of other proper nouns, too, like "Dal Riata," and "Osbryht," and it makes the world feel less cohesive. (This could have been a way to differentiate between cultures, but I didn't notice any in-game reasons for the different pronunciations.)

Some more variety in enemy design would have been welcome as well. You can only kill so many bandits with the same face before it becomes rote, and the liberal use of palette-swapped monsters makes the world of Avalon feel smaller than it is. The upside is that boss encounters feel novel and unique, such as a Davy Jones-type squid pirate, or a deer spirit that can clone itself. With boss designs like that, it's a shame the intervening chaff feels so repetitive.

There are some design decisions that I'm not too keen on. Being limited to only four weapon loadouts was a bit disappointing, and having to menu my way back to the weapons screen got tedious every time I wanted to experiment with something new. By and large, though, the first-person combat feels smooth—sword swings have weighty impact and spells explode in showers of sparks and ice. However, there are a couple difficulty spikes that caught me off guard. There were times when I'd breeze through most of a dungeon's monsters, taking them out with just a couple spell casts, only to come up against a boss that may as well have been a brick wall for all the damage I did. This didn't happen often but it was discouraging when it did.

Exploring the world's dungeons and caves offers worthwhile rewards, but the design of these places is often disorienting. Pathways twist and turn, crossing over themselves in maze-like tunnels. I got lost more than a few times in these labyrinths, and the lack of a minimap was very much noticed. Confusingly, you can't seem to be able to access the full world map inside dungeons either.

There's a lot to like about Tainted Grail, and the good outweighs the bad by a fair margin. In a genre largely dominated by Bethesda and Obsidian, it's good to see a new developer making its mark, and Questline is punching above its weight.