I’ve played some very good games over the last year, but very few gripped me quite as much as Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon. Polish developers Questline have created what I’ve secretly yearned for, for many a year - a spiritual successor to the likes of Oblivion and Skyrim with a nod to the darker side of life.
A huge world begging to be explored, tied to an Arthurian storyline courtesy of Polish writer Krzysztof Piskorski, who originally created the world of the Tainted Grail for a board game that was an enormously successful Kickstarter project back in 2018. Questline previously released a game based in the Tainted Grail universe that was in the deckbuilder genre back in 2021, called Tainted Grail: Conquest – which I haven’t played – but the fact that four years later they’ve released a fully-fledged open world RPG in a ‘Western’ style is incredibly impressive, not to mention the full voice acting, audio, narrative and all the other glorious aspects of Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon that I’ll delve into here.
Basically, this game is absolutely fantastic and has kept me apart from my trousers for over two weeks now, it’s one of those games that creeps into my mind throughout the day and pulls me back towards it with an almost sexual magnetism. If there was ever a game designed to seduce me into neglecting my family so I could play it all day long in 2025? Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon is that game.
Beginning with your character – which can be customised – waking up in a jail cell (stop me if you’ve heard this one before), you soon escape with the assistance of a shadowy figure, and fight your way out of incarceration and to the first of three expansive locations that you’ll be visiting, The Horns of the South.
It’s not all fun and games, though. In the six hundred years since King Arthur last walked the earth, the once-proud reign of Kamelot has crumbled into a tyrannical ruling, with the knights of the round table now feared across the land, with various under-factions either hiding from them, or outright working against them.
To makes things worse, you have been imbued with a shard of King Arthur’s soul, and the once great king is now part of you as you walk this new Earth in a bid to to raise him to glory once again. Also of note – there’s an encroaching magical fog called ‘The Wyrdness’ that is threatening to cover the land...so there’s that as well.
Tainted Grail is thick with atmosphere. You can check out the soundtrack from the main menu (also, let me know if you thought that Eddie Vedder was vocalising the title menu theme as I did for a few seconds) and be treated to the aural magic woven by Andrzej Janicki and Kamil Krupiński, echoing, sombre strings dustily ring out as you make your way around this ruined landscape smattered with with pockets of humanity, ominously raising with tribal drums and more ambient work as danger approaches.
Tainted Grail is thick with atmosphere. You can check out the soundtrack from the main menu (also, let me know if you thought that Eddie Vedder was vocalising the title menu theme as I did for a few seconds) and be treated to the aural magic woven by Andrzej Janicki and Kamil Krupiński, echoing, sombre strings dustily ring out as you make your way around this ruined landscape smattered with with pockets of humanity, ominously raising with tribal drums and more ambient work as danger approaches.
The quality of the audio work is immersive all round, with the music especially acting as a highlight. There are some moments during conversations whereby a difference in the recording volume is occasionally noticeable, or the quality may vary slightly due to different recording setups, but these are minor niggles when compared to what Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon offers as a total package.
This is a game with around 50-75 hours of gameplay, and over two hundred side quests dotted amongst the three major maps you’ll be travelling. Whilst the gameplay and tone most resemble Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, the style and smoothness of gameplay is closer to Skyrim as the in-game menus are actually comfortably traversable, for one thing. There’s also a sense that there’s not a lot of ‘dead ground’ in aimless dungeons offering little (yes, I’m looking at you, Starfield.), every nook and cranny that you come across, and odd features in the landscape will tie into an interesting quest sooner or later, where it be a mysterious trapdoor discovered in a burned-down building, a huge stone elephant carved into a valley wall...or a giant, ghostly stag seemingly having a bonk behind a mountain (I have proof recorded on my phone, don’t worry), there’s always something to keep you surprised in your travels.
So yes, awesome gameplay, awesome music, awesome atmosphere… but how does it run on a technical level?
Well, here there are admittedly a few hiccups that did affect my time with the game. For starters, this is a game that doesn’t seem to like ‘quick resume’ on the Xbox, as I found that I had a few crashes to desktop when continuing in this mode, so I got in the habit of closing down the game and rebooting each time, after the third crash or so – although it didn’t have an impact on my game as the auto-save is pretty consistent.
The frame rate is also a little scatter-brained, with indoor areas being pretty much 60fps but outdoor areas being a little more unreliable, especially in the night-time sections when the Wyrdness makes an appearance. I have to say that The Wyrdness genuinely makes progress quite unpleasant, in a fun way – the thick, magical fog is filled with various terrors, and quite often I’d pop down a bonfire and rest until light, it’s quite incredible how much the atmosphere changes!
Being an open world first-person RPG, there’s quite a lot of combat here, and it’s worth mentioning that the adjustments in the difficulty modes makes a pretty extreme difference. Setting the game to be more story-focused means that you will be able to cheese your way through most enemies with little risk, so it does pay to choose the level that suits your appetite as it completely changes your approach and strategy.
As you can tell, I thoroughly enjoyed Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, the sense of hopelessness that permeates the denizens of the world, combined with the landscape design - rickety ladders and bridges acting as temporary fixes for long-collapsed architecture really leans in to the thought that the folks who live here feel that the balance of life is so transient that there’s no point in long term solutions - as you make your way through foggy, destroyed fishing villages, hacking down drowners and picking up ingredients, body parts and items to complete quests, create marvellous dishes, or upgrade your weapons and armour, if you get immersed enough, there’s a feeling that this is a world that deserves to be saved, battered as the citizens have been by individuals that feign godhood, as well as more otherworldly, supernatural forces for so long that you feel for their seemingly endless suffering.
Being an open world first-person RPG, there’s quite a lot of combat here, and it’s worth mentioning that the adjustments in the difficulty modes makes a pretty extreme difference. Setting the game to be more story-focused means that you will be able to cheese your way through most enemies with little risk, so it does pay to choose the level that suits your appetite as it completely changes your approach and strategy.
By the same token, coming across the more densely populated towns and cities makes for more variety in quest types Satisfying combat, well-written dialogue, and an emotive score that breathes life into your actions and explorations – Tainted Grail may not have the technical nous or graphical excellence of other modern titles, but my word, does it have heart. And for me, the decision to keep the visual style a little on the ‘vintage’ side only adds to that sense of this being an underdog classic. 
Questline have created what could very possible be my game of the year, and I very much look forward to what they work on next, as should you.
SUMMARY
Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon is -very clearly - better than Starfield.
9/10
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