Tainted Grail: The Fall Of Avalon - Flawed In The Stone (Review)
- James Stephanie Sterling
- May 22
- 10 min read
Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon
Released: May 23rd, 2025
Developer: Awaken Realms, Questline
Publisher: Awaken Realms
Systems: PC, PS5 (reviewed), Xbox Series Copy provided by publisher
John Carpenter’s The Thing is one of my favorite movies, not least for the fascinating concept behind its titular antagonist. A monster that consumes and copies organic life, its mimicry is so good it will even emulate the flaws, as demonstrated when it suffered a heart attack in one of its guises.
Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon is to The Elder Scrolls what the Thing is to Niles.
It replicates the experience to such a degree that, for all its potential to enthrall a player, it’s quite thoroughly fucked. It crashes, it locks up, it breaks in every way a game could break. I’ve had to play sections of it thrice due to a corrupted save bug that needed hotfixing during the review period.
This is truly the Bethesda game your mum’s got at home. It even starts the bloody story in a prison cell!
Based on a board game of the same name, Tainted Grail is among the bleaker takes on Arthurian legend. You explore an island of utter despair with King Arthur’s ghost knocking about in your head, witnessing the degradation of Avalon while its former ruler angsts about how shit things are. It’s as good an excuse as any to run around bashing things to death.
If you hadn’t picked up on my subtle clues already, Grail is a shoestring Elder Scrolls and doesn’t try to hide it. A questing power fantasy in which skills improve as you use them, perk trees offer further abilities, crafting systems provide options for smithing, alchemy, or cookery, and picking locks triggers a familiar minigame. Added to that is the same clunky combat you’d see in Skyrim fifteen years ago or in Starfield today.
Also, you keep accidentally picking up plates while trying to get the food on top because you’ll loot all sorts of meaningless junk that floods your inventory if you’re not careful. What else could you call that if not Bethetic?
Shameless is one word for it, but such is the nature of the medium that an audacious enough videogame can get away with a lot, and Fall of Avalon has audacity in spades. Besides which, since I’m currently not playing Microsoft-owned games because of stupid bloody ethics, Tainted Grail has come along at just the right time.
Opinions may vary on whether it’s an homage or a ripoff, though it could easily qualify as both. Nevertheless, despite its bootleg nature - and against my better judgment - I’ve taken a shine to the thing.
Grail’s one of those efforts that has me examining the qualifications for a “good” videogame. By the lower end of commonly accepted standards, this is not a good game. It’s dated, it’s derivative, it crashes a lot, but I’d be lying through my teeth if I said I wasn’t having a good time with it.
In its own cretinous way, Fall of Avalon possesses a scrappy charm that’s got me rooting for it.
Character progression is one of the more enjoyable aspects. While actually leveling up can feel slow, innate skills are conversely quick to upgrade. When you run around, fight, sneak, or craft, you’ll receive constant positive feedback as your associated traits swiftly improve. There are lots of bars to fill, and they’re filling all the time.
Abilities such as lockpicking or crafting are never restricted by stats or skill trees, allowing a player to become pretty adept at everything. If you want to smith more advanced armor, all you need are materials and recipes - a low handcrafting ability means a high chance to produce a dud, but reducing that chance only requires you to keep crafting and naturally improve.
Skill points are used less to unlock and more to enhance, adding extra bonuses on top. Continuing the crafting example, unlockable skills include reduced material costs or a guarantee that you’ll never make a low quality item. Nothing too elaborate, but nothing that stops you from having a go at something. No investing precious points to open up tiers of capability.
As you level up, you’ll be able to upgrade the usual set of attributes, some of which cover an interesting range of abilities. Raising Endurance will improve health, stamina, and encumbrance all at once, while Dexterity governs not just attack speed, but the noise and visibility of the player. Essentially, investing a point in any given stat tends to dish out a generous set of improvements.
One of the most useful (and unusual) stats is Practicality, due to how much it offers per level - not only does it improve all forms of crafting, it increases damage to enemy weak points, reduces stamina/mana costs, and improves prices at merchants.
Each of the player’s six attributes have a series of associated skill trees to separately invest in, and here’s where the stat umbrellas can get quite wild. Strength, for example, handles all forms of melee weapons except for daggers, which are not covered by Dexterity, but by Perception, a trait that also moonlights as the stat used for various dialogue persuasion attempts. Dexterity handles bows, but despite the bonuses it gives to stealth, the actual sneaking skills are once again gathered under Perception.
There’s a logic to these groupings, but it’s not a logic that matches conventional RPG wisdom so it may read as unintuitive. Still, the bizarre layout does make for a flexible system with some really generous unlockable bonuses.
I’ve mostly been running a magic build with a focus on summoning, and it’s been quite a bit of fun. Skills synergize well with each other, as bonuses in some areas often enhance bonuses in others. Plus you can make a lot of skeletons happen. Of course, summoned creatures are dumber than a spunk bubble, never stay still, and push you around when you’re trying to talk or fight, but I think they fall safely under the “adorable” category of jank.
Fall of Avalon starts out with a misleading sense of player frailty. After completing the introductory prison area and venturing into Avalon itself, I was stunned by what felt like a significant uptick in difficulty. Not only does everything hit hard, the starting undead can lunge across startling distances, magnetizing to the player. Not great for a magic build, especially as it all seems designed to push a melee parry mechanic.
After a bumpy start, however, the challenge quickly dissipates for any character type. Magic, initially weaker than toilet water, becomes a win button as soon as you get a good lightning spell or a gaggle of minions. Stealth players won’t have a hard time, as sneaking and thieving is a doddle even without upgrades.
I’m not necessarily complaining about this. It’s a power fantasy after all, and there’s nothing wrong with a fast track to mightiness provided said track remains fun. The lightning spell has looked, felt, and been strong enough to provide me immense satisfaction. It just works!
Well, at least until you move on to a new area. The world is segmented rather than consistently open, with storyline progress gating access to them. Those challenge spikes come back with a vengeance when you move on, with enemies once again kicking you pissless until you adapt again.
Melee combat is unrefined save for a quick dodge move that’s very useful. Ranged attacks are only marginally less frantic. Fighting is antiquated, and once more it comes down to mileage - I can’t tell you to decide if it’s obsolete or retro. Again, I would suggest it’s both.
What can I say about quests? They’re there, they’re abundant, they provide adequate reasons to go and kill stuff. Many characters are written and performed in a highly exaggerated fashion, often hitting out with silly lines or weird requests to provide a surprising amount of levity in such a miserable world.
I find the humor quite fun, sometimes even in the way it’s intended. That said, occasional attempts to be edgy fall flat. The first time I found a page of erotica I was amused by its cringiness and the notion of “laying love-siege.” A page I found later was, to put it mildly, rapey. I don’t know if they were trying to amuse or offend, but they did neither - it was just a bit revolting and came off as unnecessarily desperate.
You’re better than that, Tainted Grail.
Fall of Avalon has a handful of little quirks to call its own. Leveling is done at a portable bonfire that can be set up almost anywhere outdoors, where players can also cook and chat to Arthur. Fueling the fire with Ethereal Cobwebs opens more options, including fast travel, alchemy, and identifying loot that’s been arbitrarily obscured to justify an identification mechanic.
Cobwebs are easily found by fighting enemies during Wyrdnight. For several hours a night, stuff goes all shimmery and spooky as the Wyrdness of classic folklore ups the threat level while yielding more rewards. Wyrdnight is a good time to hunt for loot, but make sure you’re traveling light first. Encumbrance is a bitch.
Look, I loathe encumbrance systems at the best of times, I’m aware of my biases, but damn does Tainted Grail piss me off with it. Even with solid investment in the Endurance stat, looting feels actively discouraged, and you’ll get really choosey if you want to avoid constantly navigating your inventory to find stuff to drop.
A large part of the issue is an abundance of crafting resources. Such plenty should be a good thing, but despite them weighing almost nothing, they add up fast unless you just want to ignore crafting. Thing is, the only reason to ignore such an accessible and profitable system is to avoid encumbrance - crafting requires materials to be in your inventory rather than spent from a storage stash, so whether you keep them to hand or stow them away, you’re burdened in some fashion.
Don’t get me started on how prohibitively heavy some of the two-handed weapons are. I could've sold so many more hammers if I could carry the bastards.
It may be heavy business lugging gear around, but it’s stylish gear at least… for a very specific definition of stylish. Tainted Grail has some truly weird and wonderful stuff to wear, and as a lover of masks I feel especially spoiled for choice. I’d love there to be a transmogrification feature for armor, since I really wanted to keep dressing like an occult beekeeper but couldn’t say no to the stat bonuses for cosplaying a Dryad.
Cool visual designs regularly peer out through a cloud of otherwise generic fantasy aesthetics. Standard architecture and NPCs are as basic as it gets, but the aforementioned gear, the more eldritch locations, and especially the creatures provide some outlandish appearances. There are really fun monsters among the roster.
Of course, this is Tainted Grail, so artistic positives must be let down by graphical negatives. As cool as the outfits are, they’re often difficult to appreciate thanks to how extremely articles can clip through each other. Animations are stilted, frames occasionally freeze, and switching to the menu usually includes a split second screen full of scrambled glitchy textures.
I won’t criticize the wonky physics too much, because let’s face it, those are usually just funny.
Less funny is all the other rickety shit that assails this game at every turn. Whatever state it launches in - and it will be an utter state - know that it’s a remarkable improvement over what I’ve seen. I can say that throughout extensive patching, Fall of Avalon has remained volatile, and there’s no shortage of catalysts to make it blow up.
As well as the crashing, I’ve accrued a modest collection of quests that can’t be completed because their related NPCs have broken. I died after a cutscene once and I have no idea how or why.
I can personally attest that the developers are working hard on it, as I provided them what information I could to help deal with the save file bug - I wouldn’t usually go out of my way like that, but I really have become strangely fond of the game for all its many faults. Any more than I’ve done, however, and I think it’d qualify as unpaid QA.
Even some of the fixes come with their own brand of clunkiness - a bunch of missing voice lines have been recently patched in, but they very clearly sound as if they were recorded in a separate location. It’s this kind of thing that makes me wish software could have hair, because I want to ruffle it.
Tainted Grail is a digital monument to jank. However much I may admire its doggedness in the face of its own disrepair, I’ve neither the ability nor the impetus to excuse its most broken elements. What I will do, however, is pose a question:
Is Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon any more broken than the games it so loyally emulates?
It’s unstable, it’s old fashioned, quests are busted, physics have a will of their own, and even the patches have issues. That’s me describing the average Todd Howard production, not Tainted Grail. I genuinely mean my own answer to the question - no, Fall of Avalon is no more fucked than The Elder Scrolls.
I have no idea how well this game will land with other reviewers, but I’d be interested to see how consistent the reception is between Tainted Grail and the critically acclaimed - but no less buggy - games produced by a studio that’s backed by Microsoft money and consequently has far fewer ground on which to stand. I would hope anyone who praised Starfield doesn’t shit on this for being no worse.
Perhaps it will be given the same grace (some early reviews have been quite positive). It’s got less of a budget but a lot more heart than its "AAA" templates. It seems to be rooted in the archaic out of genuine love for the style as opposed to rote complacency, which counts for something. Given the size of the game relative to the size of the developer, it deserves to be called ambitious. As a result, I'm far more inclined toward leniency than I have been elsewhere. Plus, y'know, I had fun with it.
Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon is doing its little best, and if Skyrim is a hallmark of roleplaying quality, then Tainted Grail’s best has to be good enough.
7/10
