“Rotting in one of their cells is a stranger who might bring a spark of change to this cursed island stuck in everlasting autumn.”

A few days ago, YouTube recommended a video to me titled “This RPG Is BASICALLY Indie Skyrim….” With the number of hours I’ve put into Skyrim over the years, I now wanted to have a look at Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon.

It’s still in early access, with a release date months away! Boo! And it has a demo! Yay! For an earlier version than the video showed off (0.7 vs. 0.8)! Boo!

I decided to give it a try, and here’s how that went:

Character creation is… lacking. As in, there are four faces and two body types (“kinda fit” and “fit with more muscle tone”). It is marked “WORK IN PROGRESS” at the top of the screen, though, so there’s that.

I woke up in a cell, and once I’d proven that I can move myself around with WASD, a jailer spoke up from the other side of the bars. He asked me a couple of questions – basically, which skills did I want a few bonus points in to start¹ – before being stealth-archered by a less hostile stranger who gave me a key to the cell, told me to head left,² and then fucked off to “scout ahead.”

I was now in an Elder Scrolls dungeon, engaging with what felt a lot like Skyrim’s combat. I was more than OK with that. It was slightly grimmer and gorier than an Elder Scrolls starting jail, but only slightly (I remember scraping bone meal off of less fortunate prisoners on my way out of Helgen).

I was still noob level with noob gear and stats, though, and blocking – at least at this low level – only let me take less damage, so I found myself trying to sidestep or back away from enemy attacks, then step back in to give them a quick whack while they recover. Either that or whacking them while they were winding up, trying to interrupt their attacks.

One notable room had three foes in it, which is a fight I couldn’t win head on; they were spread out a bit and their AI was pretty dim, but they weren’t obliging enough to let me sneak in and backstab more than one, at most. The room also had the fantasy equivalent of an air vent passageway, though, which they didn’t know how to deal with. (It’s also optional; I could have just snuck past, if I was willing to pass up some XP.)

I picked up a ranged weapon, a decent sword, and (instead of a dragonshout) a time-slowing power. I got my first spell from a fire-throwing prick whose fight felt a lot like the shouting draugr in Bleak Falls Barrow, only with less room for me to maneuver or hide. Then I get out into the world, with a few NPCs to talk to…

…and I put the demo down.³ I had a few reasons, but they were all some variant of “I want to see more of this when it’s finished.”

Tech stuff first. I was playing on the game’s recommended medium graphics setting – which was a headscratcher to start with; a 4070 should be able to handle this pretty easily – and I was seeing LOD pop-in a few feet in front of me. What I’ve seen of the setting looked really evocative, and I want to see it with more optimization and less jank.

And that YouTube video mentioned changes to the combat balance and skills, which I’d like to see finished without getting used to the current, presumably inferior version first. It also mentioned missing voice lines for some NPCs later on in the game, which I’d like to not deal with.

Also, the store page describes patch 0.7 as adding “an entire region with 10-20 hours of additional gameplay,” which makes me wonder how much more they’re going to add between now and 1.0. I think I’d have enjoyed Skyrim less if, say, one or two of its holds were missing.

Anyway… wishlisted.

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1. Refusing to answer, IIRC, gives bonuses to stealth, blocking, and thievery.

2. Heading right first leads to a dead end with a bit of loot.

3. In hindsight, I was coming up on a fairly obvious stopping point for the demo anyway… huh, good guess.