"Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon" Game Review
A must play for Elder Scrolls fans that won't change your mind if you aren't one.
Fall of Avalon is a game that is impossible to talk about meaningfully without drawing comparisons to its biggest and most obvious influence, The Elder Scrolls, a franchise that I have a conflicted relationship with. On one hand, it's a strong contender for my absolute favorite game series. It has encapsulated some of my most important and foundational gaming experiences, helped kick-start my lifelong love of RPGs at a young age, and has consumed many hundreds of hours of my life across five mainline titles and various spin offs. There’s something unique about the sheer scale, scope, and role-playing freedom of Bethesda’s open world experiences that few other developers have managed to meaningfully capture.
On the other hand, I find the later and more successful TES titles to be emblematic of developer excess, stripping away mechanical weight in pursuit of pleasing the every-man, and an inability to reconcile the incongruency between a very free-form approach to game-play and the desire for Hollywood spectacle and forced narrative urgency. I find myself hunting for games that manage to take the Bethesda formula and manage to overcome its shortcomings by retrofitting either some balls or some brains (preferably both) onto the framework, with SureAI’s Enderal being my personal high watermark of what you can accomplish when you thread the needle between Elder Scrolls’ freedom and presentation with Gothic’s danger and progression. I came into Fall of Avalon hoping it would capture some of that. Did it manage to succeed, or even really attempt to? Not really. But that doesn’t mean the experience is without merit.
There's lots of elements here that I wish had a little more substance. The game world would be far more interesting without having the different zones gated behind a three-act structure, the difficulty of each bracketed in such a way that you’ll never truly find yourself out of your depth. The factions are just extended quest arcs that see you spend the entire time trying just to get in. “Guildhalls” barely exist, and there are no real perks or consequences to your membership. It’s just content.
Further, almost every element here feels borrowed from somewhere else. We have Skyrim gameplay and perks but with traditional attributes and XP gain with no real meaningful interaction between the two. We have dialogue checks for clout, but they feel shallow and arbitrary. We have crafting and fishing, but these are eminently ignorable except for completing the occasional quest. So much of this feels like ticking boxes that people expect in your modern RPG or stuff that the developers enjoyed from other games without any thought put into how it integrates into the experience with any real weight or bite.
Even with all this potential left at the table, I couldn’t help but enjoy most of my time with Fall of Avalon and I often found it hard to put down. The setting and atmosphere are strong. The game world is packed with interesting nooks and crannies to explore, and I was frequently surprised where the devs accounted for some random spot I decided to check out with a bit of treasure or environmental storytelling, or an NPC that had new dialogue in response to story events. Environments are an absolute pleasure to look at with a nice mix of beautiful natural vistas, grand fantasy landmarks, and horrific Beksiński-esque hellholes that are always accompanied by great music and ambience. At many points I simply stopped to admire the spectacle and look around me.
The narrative, often taking a backseat in games of this sort, is also above average. The enigmatic figure of Arthur at its center is compelling and conflicting with a great script and voice actor, new dialogue with him never ceases to be exciting, and certain narrative beats that crop up in the late game are surprisingly impactful and emotional. The story strides a good line between not getting in your way when you want to explore but also being interesting enough to encourage you to move forward, with some of the strongest moments and implications held in secret for those patient enough to search them out.
It’s easy to look at Fall of Avalon and see everything it fumbles or doesn’t do, both in terms of my own preferences and the visible seams where the reach of the developers’ ambitions clearly exceeded their grasp, but it surprised me in everything it managed to get right. If you don’t enjoy the Elder Scrolls formula, there is nothing here for you. But if you’re a fan of the influences here and want more Skyrim and a new world to explore with a slightly edgier skin, I can easily recommend this.
3.5/5
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