Valor Mortis Is Out Today: The Ghostrunner Studio Trades Neon for a Rotting Napoleonic Battlefield

The setting is an alternate 19th-century Eastern Europe where Napoleon's endless campaigning has torn something open, and a supernatural plague now follows the armies across the continent. You play William, a British soldier in the Grande Armee who is resurrected by Napoleon himself and sent back into a battlefield where his former comrades have risen as the undead.

It is a genuinely unusual backdrop for the genre. Soulslikes lean on medieval ruins and dark fantasy almost by reflex, and trading that for black-powder muskets, bayonets, and plague-ridden grand armies gives Valor Mortis a look that is hard to confuse with its rivals. The French actor Vincent Cassel voices Napoleon, lending the villain at the center of it a real screen presence.

The bigger gamble is the camera. Most Soulslikes sit behind the hero in third person so you can read the arena and your own tells at a glance. Valor Mortis pulls all the way in to first person, which makes every parry, dodge, and heavy swing something you feel from inside the fight rather than watch from outside it.

That is risky territory. First-person melee has a long history of fighting against the player's sense of space, and a Souls-style game lives or dies on how clearly you can read an incoming attack. One More Level's pedigree with fast, precise, timing-driven combat in Ghostrunner is exactly the resume you would want attached to that experiment, and it is the single thing most worth watching as early verdicts come in.

The Soulslike shelf is crowded, and most new entries compete by doing the familiar thing a little better. Valor Mortis is trying to stand out on identity instead: a fresh historical setting, a first-person camera almost nobody else in the genre commits to, and a studio with the combat chops to maybe pull it off. The developer has also confirmed a New Game Plus mode arriving later this quarter.

Whether the first-person swing lands is the open question, and it is the kind of question that only play answers. If you are hungry for something in this space right now, our ranked Soulslike coverage and reviews of recent genre standouts are a good place to decide where to go while the Valor Mortis verdicts settle.