Can a first-person soulslike work? Playing Napoleonic parryfest Valor Mortis suggests oui

I’ll say this for Valor Mortis, One More Level’s first-person, sabre-swishing soulslike wherein Napoleon Bonaparte’s men mysteriously become abominations of melted undead meat: the Ghostrunner devs are probably the team for the job. While that series is all about cyberpunk katanas and zippy wallrunning, its punishing, trial-and-error combat should resonate with anyone who spends most of their time respawning at campfires. I’ll also say this for Valor Mortis: I’ve played it, and would like to play more.

This, of course, is not the first time that soulsy horrors have been fought from a behind-the-eyes perspective. The entire genre was built upon FromSoftware’s experience making King’s Field games, which have in turn inspired more recent FPP dungeon crawlers like Lunacid and Dungeons of Blood and Dream. Yet, with its warmly lit safe spots, suite of hot-swappable offhand powers, and heavy emphasis on parrying, Valor Mortis does feel like the first big attempt at a first-person melee fighter to play the soulslike hits as they’ve been codified in modern times.

That said, the perspective can be as much of a limit as an innovation. I only played an extended tutorial and the first boss fight, but it seems like there’s little chance for the more elaborate acrobatics and spellcasting that you can experiment with in, say, Elden Ring. The lack of peripheral vision does make positioning important, to avoid flanking manoeuvres by the Little Corporal’s disgusting henchmen, but then that’s a common consideration in third-person games as well.

Still, being right there in the muck does add a certain je ne sais quoi to the swordfighting. Parries, for one, are both tactically important (successive deflects will open foes up for powerful crit strikes) and aurally gratifying, but they also feel more potent for the fact that the other blade is bearing down directly upon your face. There’s a degree of added tension, too, when you can’t keep eyes on enemies as easily as in games where the camera is dangling behind you. My demo played on this directly, tasking me with charging through a trench covered by an elevated rifleman who would quite happily put a lead ball through my skull if I spent too long peeking out at him.

The first-person view also gave me a nice (horrible) look at Valor Mortis’ monster design. I mostly fought man-shaped men with just a few giant pustules to worry about – disfigurements inflicted by a strange, fleshy blight that appears to have interrupted a conventional battle and given everyone wounds with the consistency of a pulled-apart grilled cheese sandwich. But there’s some properly icky blokes here and there, like one poor sod whose arms and spine have snapped backwards, turning him into a rabid dog-like quadruped. Or the Grenadier, a bomb-tossing miniboss formed by two unfortunate lads fusing together under the corruption. The introductory boss is a further escalation of the goop’s influence, a towering general who’s absorbed enough bodies to sprout multiple flintlock-toting hands out of his shoulder blade. A cousin of Godrick the Grafted, perhaps, though even Godrick never had the gnarled faces of his limb donors pushing through his skin.

Like in any good soulslike, there’s a clear sense that you’re individually duelling these guys instead of just batting them aside. It’s all about watching for movements and tells, pressing the attack during openings, and dodging or parrying when they take the initiative. Especially parrying – that general took my regular attacks like a slab of frozen cow, but after switching to a more defensive strategy of well-timed blocks, I could vapourise his stamina and go for critical hits far more reliably.

I wouldn’t mind a slightly weightier feel to the sabre, mind. In the demo it had a very similar, swift-but-light sensation to Ghostrunner, where it worked better by virtue of inflicting one-hit kills on most bad guys. Here, where everyone can endure multiple cuts, there’s less of a sense of power, at least outside of crits and canned finishers.

I also wish I could’ve seen more of what you can do with your non-sword hand. It sounds like this is where most of the offensive variety lies: after finding a mundane revolver, I eventually gained the power to shoot a cone of flame from my palm, BioShock-style, and could switch between the two depending on whether I wanted to snipe weak points or control a crowd of infantry (or burn through to a secret pathway). Like much of Valor Mortis, it was a bit derivative but competently executed, though if there’s potential here for some truly exciting offhand capabilities, the closest I got to witnessing it was the youngest sprouts of a skill tree.

In fairness, there is a lot left to see. A One More Level rep told me that, at the very least, the linear shitpits I’d been fighting through would eventually expand into much more open, explorable areas, so hopefully that physical freedom comes hand-in-hand with more fightin' toys. And it’s not like I disliked the core swordplay either – after getting a feel for the parry timing, I definitely enjoyed its flow, regardless of the lightness of my swings.

In other words, there might be something in this first-person soulslike malarkey, so I’ll be keeping an eye on Valor Mortis as it shuffles towards its vague "2026" launch. If nothing else, I like the idea of Napoleon as the (possible) villain of a body horror action game; hopefully we’ll fight him, distorted flesh oozing from beneath a bicorne, as he rides the reclaimed bones of that horse we stole.

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