“Tainted Grail” is a first-person, open-world role-playing game. With its story being a dark reimagining of the legends of King Arthur.

It is being developed by a Polish indie company, Questline. The game is currently in early access on PC/Steam.

Dark Fantasy with inspiration from a famous RPG

“Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon” is an RPG that contains strong inspirations from the “The Elder Scrolls” series, mainly in Oblivion and Skyrim. There are great similarities in their gameplay mechanics: combat, progression, and interactivity with NPCs.

Despite being similar, “Tainted Grail” has enough charm to bring a new feeling, as its story and theme seem to be unique, and its visuals (both graphically and aesthetically) are very beautiful and add an individuality to the work. This is even more impressive for a work done by an indie studio.

Combat and progression

Combat, along with progression, contains many different possibilities.

As for Combat, you can focus on close combat, ranged combat, spells, and stealth. You can be an archer, knight, mage, rogue, you can mix them up: be a rogue who heals with spells when needed; be a knight in heavy armor who releases fireballs; and so on.

Outside of combat, you can create various items through alchemy and cooking.

The progression here is based on all your actions, meaning everything you do generates experience in some way: crafting items level up alchemy, attacking with one-handed swords increases your proficiency with them, sneaking will level up your stealth, and so on. This makes the game very rewarding, as everything you do rewards you in some way.

This is a very strong point for a Live Stream, as you can show your audience or even ask them which Builds they want you to explore since there are so many possibilities.

By accumulating a total of experience, you will also increase your character’s total level, thus being able to acquire skills that add effects according to how much you have leveled up other parameters: For example, by focusing a lot on melee combat, you will gain access to skills that will bring advantageous benefits to combat, such as less stamina expenditure or increased damage from charged attacks.

Exploration and visuals

The exploration of “Tainted Grail” is through an open world, in which you have a main Quest to follow, but it’s up to you to choose to do it whenever you want, because you can explore the world the way you prefer, going after other Quests and enemies to face.

In Quests, you can choose how to carry them out; if you carry them out, you will choose the fate of certain NPCs and whether to help them or not.

In a Live Stream you can leave the choices up to your audience, as it will certainly generate some unusual situations.

The visuals of “Tainted Grail” are very beautiful; it is a very beautiful game on higher settings. Even at medium settings, it is very visually pleasing.

Tainted Grail: A product under development has its problems

As an early access game, “Tainted Grail” lacks in one aspect: its optimization.

There is still a lot to work on in terms of this feature.

As mentioned before, it is a very beautiful game, but you will hardly be able to enjoy this beauty during a Live Stream, because it requires a lot of the Video Card and CPU in the state in which the game is.

Fortunately, the developer is actively updating the game and promising several improvements: visuals, optimization, bug fixes, and quality of life.

But be aware that some of the upcoming changes will be so drastic that they have warned that your saves will not be usable, so be careful not to lose any advanced progress when the changes occur.

The game currently contains the first Chapter and lasts around 10 to 15 hours in length. Although it contains a lot of history through Quests and books that can be found during exploration, you can probably ignore some of them because there is so much lore that it can become tedious, depending on your audience’s personal taste.

Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon

PC (2023)

Performance

Streamability

Audience Engagement

Replayability

Summary

Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon is an ambitious and promising Indie RPG. As an early access game inspired by great titles of the genre, it contains very fun combat and exploration. A very beautiful look, however, is limited due to its current poorly optimized state. Enough content to show the public what it could become if properly improved, as the developers promise.

2.8