I’ve gotta hand it to the people at developer One More Level: after well over a decade of countless variations on the soulslike formula, I’ll admit that going first-person with BioShock-like magical abilities shooting out of your hand in an alternate history of the Napoleonic era is… a pretty darn original idea, actually. Valor Mortis is a punishing action game that tries a whole lot of compelling stuff, from combat that mixes sword fighting, spell slinging, and firearms, to the platforming sections that have you wall-running around like you’re in Titanfall, to the bizarre 19th-century setting that kept me guessing. These experiments work out for the most part, and I have many fond memories of dying again and again as I fought my way through this bleak world full of zombified French soldiers. But there are also plenty of moments when this hodgepodge of ideas doesn’t quite come together, not to mention numerous bugs and crashes that turned an otherwise good time into my own personal Waterloo. So while the 20-hour campaign can be a bit uneven, there are still enough interesting things going on in Valor Mortis to make it well worth playing.

If you’ve ever played a BioShock game, you’ll probably feel unexpectedly at home here. Valor Mortis shamelessly cribs the channeling-magic-powers-in-your-corrupted-left-hand concept, and also has the whole alternate history thing going for it as well. But instead of blasting your way through enemies with guns, you’ll mostly be getting up close and personal with a sword, parrying, dodging, and getting killed a whole bunch in the time-honored tradition of the soulslike.

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