Review: Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon (Sony PlayStation 5)

Look, I don’t know who decided that King Arthur worked well with grimdark, but I’m going to convene the Round Table of artists and put a stop to this nonsense. The actual fantasy of King Arthur and his knights should be flowery bastions of virtue doing good things for the peoplefolk, wooing maidens and sure, there’s a druid and witch or two in there, but their spells can’t penetrate the shiny armour. Yes, I know that’s a naive fantasy and we’re not allowed to indulge naive fantasy in 2025, but, damnit, those are the depictions of Arthur I grew up with and perhaps preserving the innocence of some stories is worth doing. I cannot begin to delve into the deeply flawed modern society is that we as a collective community can look at King Arthur and go “yeah, that’s good content to fuse with the f-ing Crow.” Yet that is what we have done as a collective society, and Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon is the latest spin on it.

Putting aside what I consider to be a fundamentally dubious creative decision, Tainted Grail is a great Eurojank take on the Elder Scrolls approach to RPG design, I have to give it that. I enjoyed it a great deal, even if I would have preferred it to be applied to the world of Dante or Beowulf or something more appropriate to the grimdark aesthetic instead.

You start in a prison (this game really wears its Elder Scrolls “inspirations” on its sleeve). You’re being tortured because of some red death plague thing, but someone rescues you. Somehow, in the escape, you find yourself healed of the plague and also possessed by the spirit of King Arthur, who had been trapped away from the real world by the forces that conspired against him. They still do conspire against him, so you’ll need to find a way to avoid losing your head to their interests, while also running around trying to help Arthur do his thing to save a dying land.

It really is a dying land, too. Utterly miserable. Poison infests the land of Avalon and the few places that still stand struggle under the weight of refugees and zero morale. Corruption is rife, every form of bigotry you can imagine has become the norm, and everyone seems to have resigned themselves to the inevitability of decline and doom. As they often say, art reflects the collective mindset of society, and on that basis, people should be looking closely at just what games like Tainted Grail are saying.

What is interesting is that this misery does interesting things to the way you play Tainted Grail. While it feels and behaves very much like an Elder Scrolls title, where Bethesda has always aimed to make their titles teeming with energy and adventure, Tainted Grail is a lot more desolate. That is a very specific creative decision, and has no bearing on the number of side quests you can find, but actually exploring the world feels lonely and almost claustrophobic for just how atmospherically decrepit it is. This is even different to other dark fantasy adventures, like The Witcher 3 or Elden Ring, which still aim to inspire a sense of elegant, even majestic wonder. Tainted Grail errs on the side of crumbling ruin and miserable, forlorn landscapes at every opportunity, and it’s quite intense at that.

What helped me come to appreciate that creative direction is how effective the game is at dragging me into its stories, I think. Just like with the Elder Scrolls titles, Tainted Legend loves throwing side quest after side quest at you. While many of those side quests do follow genre best practice, the developers have been careful to ensure that every single one of them builds on the world and lore around you in some way, whether that be that you come away with a better sense of just how badly people are handling the situation, the history of the world around you, or what is being lost in the fading corners of the world. Very cleverly, the developers weave moments of humour (however grim at times), and allow for heroism too. These breaks from the otherwise unrelenting misery help to keep you invested in Tainted Land, with the promise that you’re still going to be able to shape it, somehow, and that there’s something in there to want to shape in the first place.

Once you get into combat, you’ll be very comfortable with it if you’re used to Elder Scrolls in any way. Melee works pretty much exactly the same. As does ranged combat and stealth. As do incidental activities like lockpicking. As does magic combat, though, in a clever little twist, you do have both light and heavy cast options, which adds an extra dimension to spell casting. You improve attributes by using them, just like in Elder Scrolls, and there are intricate skill trees and attribute systems for you to really tailor your character’s progression.

In the early stages, combat is pretty easy to navigate through button mashing, but soon enough, memorising enemy patterns and learning how to apply the dodge button becomes essential to survival. Overall, I was surprised that the developers didn’t aim for outright Soulslike difficulty, given the theme somewhat lends itself to that, but there’s a good balance in here that will keep most players invested throughout. If you could fault Tainted Grail it’s that all of this is far too derivative, but then Bethesda did pioneer an approach to first person RPG combat that is too good to ignore. Better that combat be derivative than unenjoyable in some way.

The real biggest issue with the way Tainted Grail plays is the bugs, which are significant and often potentially game-breaking. I’ve had a few crashes myself, and an almost endless number of amusing bugs where people teleport around the place and the physics system simply breaks. Luckily, nothing corrupted a save. Yet. I’ve played enough Eurojank RPGs to be juggling multiple saves for safety. For some these bugs will be frustrating, but given that these exact same kinds of bugs are a hallmark of Elder Scrolls games AND this is Eurojank, anyone that’s familiar with the B-tier of Western RPG isn’t going to be too fazed or offended with what they have to grit their teeth through here.

The thing is, Eurojank RPGs are always better than their big blockbuster counterparts, because they’re what the developers really want to make. I don’t think an Elder Scrolls could be made with the grimdark purity of Tainted Grail. Look at what happened when EA put the blockbuster sheen over Dragon Age, which itself once indulged in dark fantasy. I personally don’t think King Arthur is as dark as game developers continue to, but I certainly appreciate that the developers of this game committed to that and actually delivered it. There’s a real heart and soul to this project, and Poland has produced yet another developer that is well worth keeping an eye on.