Image: One More Level & Lyrical Games

Today's biggest release just rolled out, and it joins an exclusive list of fascinatingly offbeat first-person souls-likes. Valor Mortis is the latest release from One More Level, the studio best known for the twitchy Ghostrunner series- first-person cyber-ninja platformers- although aside from being first-person and involving some gory swordplay, this one couldn't be more different. This one's at least 80% Dark Souls by weight, set against a Napoleonic war backdrop, albeit with a lot more monsters, mutants, and magic.

It's a fascinating choice of setting for a game, exploring an alternate timeline where Napoleon won at Waterloo and turned towards the conquest of Europe as a whole. Historical battlegrounds rich in real-life suffering have been the inspiration for many a horror game, but this is a particular slice of time that usually gets relegated to stuffy strategy games about a lot of soldiers politely standing in lines and firing rifles at each other.

Don't expect gritty realism, though. It's all gone a bit Nioh, and there's a magical plague going on here. You're playing as one of Napoleon's officers, brought back from death with spooky powers (including throwing flames from your hand, which has a real gnarly animation revealing bones and veins) and set off on a quest to deal with a whole lot of apocalyptic weirdness, semi-anachronistic revolver in one hand, sword in the other.

While Valor Mortis gives you a gun (three even - pistol, musket, and blunderbuss), and it's an important part of your combat kit, this game is no shooter. Ammo comes at a premium, and your main method of interacting with the many monsters out in the world is at swordpoint, with your standard souls-like parrying, dash-steps, and backstabbing options as well as the usual combos.

What has me itching to play this one is that the reviews are all over the place. Depending on who you ask, this is either a 9/10 classic, a barely-tolerable 5/10 also-ran, or anything in-between. Push Square's Khayl Adam reckons it's a great time, but I've had other critics telling me to avoid this one like the plague. One thing that few disagree on is that the game is surprisingly lengthy, and whether you enjoy the fundamentals can turn that to extended adoration or torture.

That kind of disagreement on every fundamental point of a game is like catnip to me - it usually means the game is trying something interesting and not matching up to personal taste for some. As such, I'm excited to see where I end up standing on it, once I've had a chance. If only I wasn't dabbling in a half-dozen other souls-likes. And like fifty other games. Perhaps I'll put this one aside until it's fully complete - there's an expansion yet to come.

Valor Mortis is out now for £35/$40, with a respectable discount for owners of Ghostrunner 1 or 2. There's also a Deluxe edition which includes several skin packs and an upcoming expansion, but that part won't be released until 2027 at the earliest. Sadly, the Valor Mortis demo is no longer available, but if you're hankering to try out another first-person gunslinging souls-like that's even weirder mechanically, there's nothing quite like Guns of Eschaton.