How Tainted Grail: The Fall Of Avalon Won Me Over With A Single Dungeon
The magic of the mysterious.
Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon begins in a dungeon where you spend the first 40 to 90 mins of your playthrough. I felt that this game might not be for me, but was intrigued enough for what I’d seen up until then to push through. Around an hour later, exploring the open world, I found a gorgeous blood lake hiding two secrets.
Here’s the story of how Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon won me over with a single dungeon.
Before we get into it, I want to share with you what I knew about Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon before playing it. I had watched a gameplay trailer for the 1.0 launch, skimmed through a few Steam reviews, and read the endless comparisons to The Elder Scrolls, likely artificially boosted by the recent release of TES:IV Oblivion Remastered. I knew nothing else.
My first impressions —written on paper while playing— prior to reaching the eerie bloody lake were the following:
Excellent Main Menu Song.
Decent to great voice acting.
Combat is better than expected, definitely an upgrade over TES.
Sneaking, Lockpicking, Alchemy, and Cooking are simple systems, but done well.
Good sense of exploration.
Excellent ambiance.
Good difficulty (playing on hard).
Beautiful art despite “lower fidelity” graphics.
So I was having a good time with the game, but after playing over 50 hours of Oblivion Remastered in the past couple of months, a dark fantasy take on it with better combat wasn’t going to be enough to keep me engaged. As mentioned previously, though, I pushed through.
I was venturing through the intriguing open world, blindly exploring and fighting a couple bosses on the way before opening the map and actually analyzing it. I found a conspicuous red circle on it, and that’s where our real story begins. Enjoy.
By this point I had taken down two bosses, one inside a dungeon, and another on a nearby fortress wall. They were challenging and interesting fights, but nothing too memorable. I had no context of who they were other than their suggestive names, and learned nothing of them after, at least so far.
I opened the map and became instantly intrigued by the nearby red circle. After resting and leveling up, I sprinted towards it. Upon reaching it, I encountered a beautiful lake of blood with a somber stone statue rising from it. My gamer instincts kicked in so I immediately dove into the lake, finding a few bodies hidden beneath the blood. They had no loot but offered an interesting clue: people in this world have come here before looking for something.
After checking every body, I swam around the statue and encountered a hidden door to the Blood Cave. I ventured inside, quicksaving multiple times as I suspiciously made my way through the corridor. I ended up in a sight that instantly reminded me of the boss arena of the Abyss Watchers in Dark Souls 3. As a matter of fact, I had been feeling that Tainted Grail had a similar ambiance and atmosphere to that of FromSoftware games. Music is sparse and the world seems rotten, forgotten by whatever gods may be out there. You make your way through it alone, with the majority of beings you encounter being immediate enemies.
The room at the end of the corridor was round and filled with half-decomposed bodies laying around a pool of blood. Some were lying face down in the blood, as if defeated in battle, others sitting cross legged facing a mysterious door, as if these ones had voluntarily given up. Amongst the mess of bodies, blood, and swords, there stood a single humanoid being. They looked like they might have once been human, but were now only a mix of exposed bone and sinew, with a strange bloody mask made of bone covering their eyes. They stood with their hands behind their back and straight backed, like a proud general.
Our brief conversation was enough for me to know that Mallory, as they were called, had been stuck in this forsaken room for longer than I can imagine. He’d been the sole survivor of a seemingly endless battle that had taken place inside, and now awaited for one who would be able to take him down. After a few failed attempts, I managed to fulfil his wish and, in exchange, his death opened the strange door, allowing me to explore further.
The strange room that followed further piqued my interest. The traces of blood and death were left behind, now replaced by a beautiful garden with a massive tree in the middle. Despite being located underground, the tree was in direct sunlight and grew bigger than most that I’d seen outside. But, regardless of the beautiful appearances, this place was no less miserable than the room filled with carcasses. I found cryptic notes throughout the place hinting at corruption and madness. Alongside these were multiple non-hostile NPCs named “Hollow Druid”, sitting on the ground with their heads down, appearing half-decomposed despite being alive.
After thoroughly exploring the place, I entered into the tunnel beneath the tree and the third room in this massive dungeon. At the end of a claustrophobic stone corridor the dungeon opened into a huge room filled with glowing flowers. Beautiful yellow petals that seemed to emanate firefly-like lights. The beauty not only hid corruption here, but strange enemies by the name of Marrowghasts. Long limbed and with unnervingly human hands, these beings looked like a mix of a long-dead person with a single eyed larva. They were challenging, but I managed to take them down, making my way to another intriguing being.
At the left corner of this massive room, past the multiple Hollow Druids that were ignored by the hostile Marrowghasts, I encountered a humanoid that looked like a weird fusion between man and parasitic plant, like something out of Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation. Prydwen spoke calmly, showing no signs of aggression. He told me of his failed plans and mused on how humanity cannot be saved because of how human it is. I asked him if I could do anything to help, and he told me that the only thing left to do was to put an end to it.
I took the seal he gave me and made my way back through the beautiful yellow flowers, using it to open a previously sealed door. Inside I fought the first bossfight that kicked off with a cutscene, despite this being an entirely optional and missable dungeon. After a few attempts, I used my magic prowess to take the enemy down. I will not make any mention of it here, as I want to save something for you to experience. Once victorious, I returned to Prydwen intending to tell him that it was done. Before I could even say anything, he knew. His dialogue ended with the following sentence:
”Let the flower bloom in all its beauty, and die, as it was always meant to… Thank you, Seeker”.
Before I even had a chance to respond, he died, and the Blood Stains the Circle Quest popped up as completed. I sat on my chair for a few seconds, entranced, taking it all in.
This blood lake was something I bumped into by happenstance. I spent a little over an hour inside the Blood Cave, carefully listened to every piece of dialogue and interacted with everything that I could find. Mallory and Prydwen were two expertly written and voiced characters that I barely had a chance to interact with, but I don’t think I’ll forget them any time soon. The quest might be completed, but not much has been answered. I feel like I only took a peek at what corruption hides in the world of Avalon, and the beautiful storytelling that this game has in store for me.
Despite leaving the dungeon with a lot more questions than the ones I entered with, I had answered the most crucial one: is Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon for me? It absolutely is.
If you think that it might be for you too, or were at all intrigued by this little readthrough of a dungeon, there’s a demo up on Steam, so you can try it for free. I hope the AA 50€ middle part of our industry keeps thriving, because it feels like that’s where the most unexpected treasures lie.