Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon Review – Future King
The Tainted Grail IP began its life as a crowdfunded boardgame in late 2018 from Polish publisher Awaken Realms, a company that has successfully launched several tabletop videogame adaptations like S.T.A.L.K.E.R and This War of Mine. Awaken Realms also happens to own Questline, the subsidiary game developer responsible for bringing Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon to PC, Xbox and PS5, this time a digital adaptation of its cardboard namesake and an interesting reversal of their usual business model. Following three years in Early Access, it finally launched in mid 2025.
Fall of Avalon is a Western-style open-world RPG which reimagines Arthurian legend to create a dark fantasy world reeling from the Red Death, an unexplained sickness spreading whilst the old Empire splinters. Arthur as its uniting force is long dead, the many crumbling settlements and ruins once ruled by him and his Knights now in the hands of unworthy descendants. Those well versed in real-world Arthurian and Celtic history will be right at home with many of the references herein, while the plot setup will be familiar to any fan of the genre – you’re a prisoner who must escape their place of captivity – before taking on a fragment of the legendary King Arthur’s soul, compelling you to reunite the other missing fragments to save humanity from the multitude of sinister forces at work. Cliché perhaps, but the writing is often enough to save the experience from becoming subpar. Even at the outset, Tainted Grail has a lot of what made me fall in love with Morrowind and that style of first person WRPG over two decades ago, encouraging exploration by populating its respectably sized world with points of interest, exciting items and quests off the beaten track.
Tainted Grail isn’t overly concerned with holding players’ hands – some might even describe it as obtuse. Rather than tutorialise and highlight every mechanic, many occur organically given the player obtains the right equipment. Sketching, fishing, mining, excavating treasure and much more is possible with the proper tools in inventory, but it can be quite a while before a quest will require these actions of a player. Organic discovery is one of the things I enjoy most in videogames and Tainted Grail leans into it hard much to its benefit. Rather than a map littered with markers and arrows pointing in every direction, most side quests and tasks will never appear unless the player is engaging with the characters in the world or exploring parts of the map that don’t fall under the purview of the main quest. NPC’s offer a lot of fully voiced dialogue which builds the world and more often than not gives players the choice of doing some dirty deeds, how dirt cheap they’re done dependent on the players inclination. Tainted Grail doesn’t muck about with its dialogue trees and takes player choice seriously, many key points in the story having long term consequences. Various factions pull the player character in one direction or another, swearing that only they can be trusted, unlike their opposition. What makes this aspect of the storyline and questing so engaging is that more often than not, neither party seems egregiously ‘evil’ but rather justified from their own point of view. This provides a good amount of replayability, as some quest lines lock out completely as characters’ refuse to talk to you (or are flat-out dead) after some moral and philosophical choices are made via dialogue. Certain characters’ prejudices might colour their view of things and quite often the player is asked to pledge their allegiance to a cause without having all of the details. There are even quests which can’t satisfactorily resolve unless unprompted logic and exploration lead to the discovery of more information or a key item that will allow for an alternate conclusion. Even if much of the gameplay boils down to some rote loops and quest types like kill X or find Y, there are enough subtle twists and strength in the story here that compelled me to keep going where a lesser game might have fallen by the wayside. It doesn’t hurt that frequently Fall of Avalon is quite lovely to look at.
You might think I’m cracked looking at some of these screenshots, but I don’t mean lovely in the sense of ‘4K realism with 120FPS VRR and Ray Tracing’, but in the off-kilter design choices, surrealist landscapes and some inspired colour direction. For every brown or grey dreary cavern, there’s a dreamlike vista with odd towering shapes, gnarled trees and half-buried statues which reinforce just how far Avalon as a world has declined. Each of the three larger areas bring a distinct look, from fairly bog-standard high fantasy to the more fantastical and finally frosty and isolating. While increased fidelity and a more stable framerate at 4K would be agreeable, I didn’t find it impacted my experience of Fall of Avalon and in some ways found comfort in the fact that many times it made parts of the game more ‘readable’ – that is, important elements often stood out against those with lower detail. I can’t overlook absolutely everything, however.
The aspect of Fall of Avalon I found least satisfying when contrasted against the story and world exploration is sadly a huge component of both; the combat. Floaty and imprecise, the rush of dashing, dodging and parrying was counterbalanced by the turgid turning and a first-person camera which struggles to deal with multiple enemies head on, let alone from multiple directions. Whether I was wielding spells, arrows or a giant sword it never quite felt weighty which is a shame given Fall of Avalon’s propensity to reward careful exploration or sequence-breaking with some absolutely killer weapons. Just in my first handful of hours alone I found a hugely OP axe hidden in a treasure chest – which was outside my single handed build focus – but nevertheless wasn’t stat restricted so meant I could obliterate enemies with a strike or two – as I worked though side and story quests, my trusty rusty friend started to slide towards useless against higher level enemies and I quickly needed to invest some time and energy into procuring a more suitable weapon. Fortunately, exploiting a particularly dumb Knight’s pathing alongside some Blood Magick and a shortbow gave me a both an excellent sword and a fantastic set of armour, albeit one I had to respec slightly for. Respeccing in Fall of Avalon is a breeze, and cheap enough that it’s a worthy practice to defeat some of the trickier boss encounters in the second and third map areas. When my easy cheesy gear stopped cutting the mustard, I had other weapons on deck to step up, which again required a respec and some stat shifting to make the most of it. Fall of Avalon comes with a few difficulty settings, so for players who really don’t want to engage with combat or some of the systems that support it like alchemy and cooking, adjusting it in the first few hours might be the way to go. One more slight bugbear has to do with crashes and bugs which I ran into a number of issues with quests and crashes, the worst of which lost me close to half a dozen hours of progress. Despite numerous patches being deployed which have significantly improved the performance of the game and reduced swathes of issues, I’ve still faced the odd crash but thanks to some generous autosaving and some manual saves on my part, any setbacks are now a matter of minutes of progress, not hours. It’s not ideal, but it’s also easy to forget how often these sorts of things go with expansive first person RPGs for their first three to six months following release.
Despite some aspects that didn’t quite work for me, Tainted Grail is an enjoyable RPG that is fundamentally what I want more of in the game industry; respectable dev times with more economical visuals. I didn’t need cutting edge graphics to find the world immersive thanks to excellent art direction and styling, much the same way I don’t need level scaling to ruin any chance of a power fantasy. As a diehard Morrowind fan who feels the Elder Scrolls series lost its way quite a while ago in favour of reaching a broader audience, I’m glad to see some more obtuse elements and discoverability woven throughout Tainted Grail. It’s an exciting first outing for Questline that shows a lot of promise and I can’t wait to see what their next title is.
Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon was reviewed on a PlayStation 5 console with code kindly supplied by the publisher.
