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.
