Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon review for PC, PS5, Xbox Series X

In some ways, it’s kind of a shame that Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon is coming out now, when there’s no shortage of very good games coming out constantly, rather than, say, ten years ago when it probably would’ve been much easier for it to get widespread attention. And that it’s been released by Awaken Realms, a fairly small publisher more known for board games than video games, than a studio like Bethesda, who probably could’ve released Tainted Grail as a post-Skyrim stopgap (think of it as Elder Scrolls 5.5?) and had it be a massive hit.

Mind you, the flip side of that would be: a publisher and developer (Questline) known mainly for board games managed to put out an enormous open-world RPG that, after spending two years in Early Access before getting a full release, feels like it’s on par with Skyrim or Oblivion. How insane is that?

Regardless of how you want to look at Tainted Grail, the bottom line is that it feels like a pretty impressive achievement. After a couple of hours of setting the stage and giving you the basics of the game, it sets you loose in this huge open-world and basically gives you the freedom to do whatever you want.

Of course, “whatever you want” had better include killing, because you’ll be doing a whole lot of it in Tainted Grail. While there are other things to do in the game, it takes its M rating very seriously, which means you spend a lot of time hitting/stabbing/arrowing enemies until they die bloody deaths. It’s probably worth noting that even though we’re in an age where seemingly every other game is inspired by Souls-like combat, that’s not so much the case here; while you certainly can parry and dodge if you want to, you’ll generally be much better served by being more aggressive in your attacks.

As for the world itself, it’s pretty huge with a decent amount of non-killing things to do. While there’s a story here that generally pushes things forward – you’re helping the ghost of King Arthur find parts of his soul to bring him back to life – along the way you’ll have plenty of side quests to carry out and things to loot and collect. The game promises you 50+ hours of content, and it delivers on that. What’s more, it also promises a branching storyline with consequential decisions, and it delivers on that too.

Mind you, because this is a sprawling open-world epic that aims for Skyrim-level grandeur but that was made on a fraction of the budget, there are definitely places where things tend more towards Euro-jank. You’ll notice this especially in the optional third-person mode, where your character (and everyone else, really) looks and moves a little weird. I also had all kinds of issues getting it to run properly; I had to play it on three different handheld PCs before I was able to both get the game to run and have all my button inputs work (weirdly, on one handheld it looked fine but I couldn’t attack anything, while on another I could attack but everything happened in slow motion).

It’s easy to forgive a little jank, though, when the overall package is this impressive. Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon is an epic RPG that aims high and that, much more often than not, succeeds in what it sets out to do. With everything happening with Microsoft and its studios right now, who knows when Elder Scrolls VI will finally come out, so it’s probably worth giving a game like this a chance in the meantime because it’ll surely scratch that itch.

Awaken Realms provided us with a Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon PC code for review purposes.