Valor Mortis puts Napoleon’s ghost in your ear and a rapier in your hands

The creators of Ghostrunner have spent the last few years figuring out what happens when you wire soulslike DNA into a first-person frame. Valor Mortis is their answer: a dark, brutal action RPG where every parry happens inches from your face, every enemy flanks you from angles you cannot fully see, and Napoleon Bonaparte’s disembodied voice murmurs instructions while you die and try again.

The premise is specific enough to be memorable. You play as William, a French soldier of the Grande Armée who has been resurrected and corrupted by a substance called Nephtoglobin — a plague spreading across war-ravaged 19th-century Europe in the wake of Napoleon’s conquests. The world William wakes into is not history reimagined gently; it is history turned horror. Creatures that should not exist patrol fortified positions. Something has colonized the bodies of the living and the recently dead alike.

The combat borrows One More Level’s established vocabulary and applies it somewhere unexpected. The studio’s Ghostrunner titles built their reputation on ultra-precise, split-second first-person action — move wrong and you die, full stop. That same discipline shows up in Valor Mortis through a parry system that demands timing as precise as any soulslike, augmented by a stamina meter and stagger mechanics borrowed from the Souls genre. But it runs in first person, which changes the texture of the fight: the enemy fills your field of view, and there is no camera pull to soften the moment before impact.

William’s toolkit mixes two eras that should not coexist. He carries a cutlass and a rapier for melee — weapons suited to the Napoleonic period — alongside a pistol with limited ammunition that can target enemy weak points. His left hand holds something less historically grounded: a flamethrower-like supernatural ability that inflicts burn status effects and sets up finishing attacks. A grapple hook and wall-running mechanics, direct carryovers from Ghostrunner, let William access elevated positions and flank enemies in ways the soulslike formula rarely allows. Checkpoints come as lanterns — functionally identical to Dark Souls bonfires, though the lighting design makes them feel more like survival beacons in fog.

The exploration model adds a Metroidvania layer on top. New traversal abilities unlock access to previously sealed sections of the map, rewarding players who return to completed areas after each upgrade. Optional bosses sit off the critical path for those who want the full challenge roster. The world is built in Unreal Engine 5 and carries an original score co-composed by Arkadiusz Reikowski, who scored the Silent Hill 2 Remake — which sets an immediate mood benchmark.

What distinguishes Valor Mortis most from the current wave of soulslike releases is what the first-person perspective does to tension. Third-person soulslikes give the player a spatial buffer — your avatar is a figure you watch. In first person, the buffer disappears. The parry window is the enemy’s blade. Several hands-on previews noted that a boss following up a blocked attack with a counter feels categorically different when you cannot back the camera out of the moment.

The version shown to press at early events was pre-alpha, with optimization issues acknowledged by the developers. Polish studios with ambitious scopes have shipped technically impressive but rough titles before — One More Level itself released the original Ghostrunner with performance gaps that required post-launch patching. Whether a 60-person studio can deliver a full soulslike at consistent performance across three platforms by October is a question the launch build will answer, not the preview.

Valor Mortis launches October 13, 2026 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and PC via Steam. One More Level has not announced pricing. Lyrical Games is publishing the title.

Tags: gaming, soulslike, Ghostrunner, Lyrical Games, One More Level, Valor Mortis