Tainted Grail promises a VERY goth take on the King Arthur mythos. While I am goth and always up for another take on the King Arthur mythos, this one is a little over the top. An actual quote from the opening is: “You awake to nothingness. All you can sense of darkness. A dense mass of emptiness so total that even your thoughts disintegrate.” Okay, Azrael, isn’t it time for your shift at Domino’s?
Tainted Grail
Developer: Awaken Realms Digital
Price: $20 USD
Platform: PC (Steam, GoG)
MonsterVine was supplied with Steam code for review
It’s based on the well-reviewed tabletop board game Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, which is not one of those board games you bust out for Grandma and the kids at Christmas. Tainted Grail the board game is one of those ultra-premium hard-to-find board games that started on Kickstarter and now goes for…let me just see here…ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY AMERICAN DOLLARS ARE YOU CRAZY? I’m not willing to shell out $180 for the sake of this review, and I also have no friends, but I hear it’s good.
The computer game takes the board game’s Very Goth Avalon where Arthur and Merlin Dun Goofed and turns it into a, let me just read, “uniquely infinitely replayable story-driven hybrid between a deck-building roguelike and an RPG.” Now, those are a lot of words, and words could mean anything, so here’s what it is: $20 instead of $180. It’s worth a shot to me.
Tainted Grail is an interesting combination of butt ugly and janky visually, but very detailed and interesting in the game systems. If you’ve ever said, “I don’t care about graphics, all that matters to me is gameplay,” then I am calling your bluff. The player art assets are a Unity Asset Store mix ranging from the hairstyles that all seemed to be some variation of “ponytail/topknot” to character customization that’s basically “pick a skin tone and some tattoos.”
The monster design is so bizarre I couldn’t decide if they came from the board game or they just bought a pack of assets and went with it, but I think it actually works in this game’s favor because storywise, you are an undying person trying to fix whatever Arthur and Merlin screwed up. Judging by the horrors wandering around, they screwed up good. By the way, the story is “Arthur screwed up and brought his people to a strange and dangerous land,” with, and I quote, “Nightmares born of Wyrdness,” so I see you’ve met my ex. Ha cha cha.
However, if you endure the eye-rolling story and the bad art, there’s a lot here. As usual with the RPG/Roguelike/Deckbuilder “genre,” you begin with creating a character and giving them a name–Shittypants for me, since it wouldn’t let me do Sir Shittypants–and then assigning them a class. Classes are unlocked through progression and woo, buddy, are there a lot of classes. They are (taking a deep breath):
Wyrdhunter: Classic warrior, hits things
Pathfinder: D&D 5th Edition is better BLAMMO, GOT EM. This is a different kind of warrior, focused on turtling then unleashing big hits
Zealot: They shoot fewer but more powerful arrows than the Sentinel, more defensive
Sentinel: Initially weak, focus on shooting arrows and self buffs
Apostate: Shoot arrows, but focused more on Maneuvers for buffs and armor.
Berserker: HIS LOVE FOR YOU IS LIKE A TRUCK. As you get hit, you build up power, then you go nuts and kill things.
Blood Mage: Uses his own blood to summon minions, a goth summoner if you will
Summoner: Summon minions, with the twist that they are connected to their minions and will take damage if they get hit. Minion management is key.
Necromancer: You summon minions but they are dead and you sacrifice and eat them a lot. Another goth summoner.
Wyrdhunter is the only class unlocked initially and you begin the game with base HP, base damage, an ultimate ability, and a passive skill. As you play through the game, you unlock more cards and abilities and classes, more items, more stuff, and so on. You run into monsters and fight turn-based battles, usually based around each enemy’s gimmick, while randomly building your own gimmick as cards unlock.
The twist for Tainted Grail is a kind of Diablo-style overworld. You start in a village that you gradually populate with NPCs as you explore, level up, and fight monsters. They provide you with healing, equipment, modifications, and bits of story. You charge back out into the overworld and fight more monsters. Just like in life, it’s relentless toil until you die, and your reward for giving it all is more work.
The overworld gimmick is the “Wyrd,” which you have noticed I used several times because it is the explanation for everything. Anyway, if you don’t have “Wyrd candles” to keep back the “Wyrd,” you get bad cards in your deck ,and more bad things happen to you as you roam around. Wyrd candles are also relatively limited and expensive, so there’s the risk-reward balance of venturing out, but bad things happening, but making more money for more candles. Think of it like taking your goth girlfriend to Yankee Candle.
The story is a weird goatman with an English accent summoned you away from your village and is basically putting you through this ordeal until you kill the four Guardians. Along the way, you find out everything is stopped. Even Death is sitting idly by, drumming its fingers and waiting for you to do the thing, which is the canon reason you can’t die.
The story is Wyrd…sorry, weird, and the art is kind of off-putting, but the game itself is interesting and fun if you like the roguelike deckbuilding cycle of “charging out to fight some guys until you die, unlocking some new stuff, and charging out to fight some guys again and get a little bit further.” The tutorial is actually a good introduction to the genre and explains things pretty well rather than tossing you off a cliff and yelling “IT’S HARDCORE! FLY BITCH!” It’s actually pretty fair in explaining things, showing you incoming damage and effects, and telling you how most of the systems work rather than leaving you to blunder around in the Wyrd…dark. It also tells you how to unlock the ending and how far along you are, which is a nice touch rather than making you play through it while snickering because you didn’t pick up the Poopmaker 9000 in the secret room on level 3, you unbelievable idiot.
Once you start unlocking some of the classes, you’re into the real meat of the game. There’s a lot to it, even if they all fit broadly under the “warrior/hit things, arrows/buffs, summons creatures” headings. Each has its own blend of abilities and skills that give it a distinct feel. While the fighters might worry about offense and defense in varying blends, the monster-focused summoners are concerned with managing minions or sacrificing them, activating them in the right order, and making sure the mage doesn’t die while doing all this.
The random runes (there’s runes and rune combining and quality just like Diablo, yes!), the random card drops, the ability choices, the itemization, the deckbuilding and customization options all provide a very different gameplay experience for each run. As in most of these games, the world itself is also randomized aside from the general “kill the big bads” theme, so you never quite know what Wyrd things are awaiting you out in the Wyrd, but you know they’re going to be Wyrd.
Ultimately, it’s not a pretty game, but it’s also not a AAA game that wants 60 bucks and a Battle Pass subscription full of lootboxes to actually enjoy it. If you can overlook the janky quality of the engine and some of the art, there are a ton of classes to unlock, a lot of different combat options, weird monsters, a bizarre story, and the satisfaction of out-gothing the Dark Souls crowd when you talk about storylines and you can’t get much more satisfying than that. Put a flag over its face and do it for Avalon.
The Final Word
An interesting and deep card-based RPG with a bizarre story and freaky monsters.
– MonsterVine Rating: 4 out of 5 – Good
