I’m always excited for ambitious indie or “AA” RPGs, especially those that might offer serious mechanical or narrative depth – even if it is often found under a veneer of jank like much of Piranha Bytes’ output. In recent years, I’ve sunk more time into both classic and new budget RPGs, like Gothic, Two Worlds, ATOM RPG, and Chernobylite, than I have into AAA RPGs that usually offer incredible production values at the expense of gameplay freedom or branching narratives. Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon in one such mid-tier RPG, with a console port arriving after a year in PC early access. Unfortunately, without serious optimisation patches, the result is a mix of admirable ambition and infuriating instability that is much tougher to recommend than its highly praised PC counterpart.
Premise and storytelling
Starting with the good, Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon’s grimdark reimagining of Arthurian legend provides a strong narrative hook. Centuries before the game takes place, a relentless plague – the “Red Death” – swept over Arthur Pendragon’s homeland, forcing him to lead survivors to colonise the mythical island of Avalon and drive back the presence of “Wryd” magic using ancient menhirs activated by Merlin. Your protagonist finds themselves imprisoned on Asylum Island just off the coast, tortured by “Red Priests” that have turned to increasingly desperate and brutal methods to treat the resurgent plague. During this prologue, your hero is bound to a fragment of King Arthur’s soul – now a spectre seemingly oblivious of recent events, who wants to be reborn to restore his kingdom. Unexpectedly, a Knight of the Round Table that aids your escape seems intent on destroying the soul fragments and preventing his rebirth.
Shipwrecked on the misty southern shores of Avalon, you soon discover that Arthur has been revived multiple times over the centuries to restore the Kingdom of Man, but those efforts have been in vain. The Wyrdness continues to reclaim more of the island, corrupting humans, animals, and mythical beasts. Society has become increasingly brutal, with those taking up the mantle of a Knight of the Round Table no less savage than the bandits that raid caravans and villages. Conflict is brewing between Kamelot and the local human tribes, while a schism in Kamelot’s Court might result in civil war. It’s a dark and blood-soaked setting for a suitably dark and blood-soaked game, but the overarching goal is made clear from the start: regardless of the factions you aid or hinder along the way, you’re going to collect the fragments of Arthur’s soul to revive him or destroy him.
Gameplay systems
The basic gameplay loop has been compared to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, which is not an unfair observation, but at least faction and ending choices feel more involved than Skyrim’s singular and half-baked “Civil War” questline. Combined, these regions may not match the scale of an Elder Scrolls map, but they are dense and diverse, packed with quest givers, marked locations, and hundreds of unmarked secrets for those who explore every corner. You assign armour and accessories to equipment slots; you assign weapons, shields, and spells to your left and right hand; you wield blades, hammers, bows, explosives, elemental magic, and summons against both human and monstrous enemies; you craft, brew, and cook hundreds of items to aid you in battle; and you fetch or kill an improbable number things to gain experience towards a flexible levelling system.
There is an overworld with hub settlements and significant locations. There’s no shortage of interior locations like caves, crypts, ruins, and temples that conveniently loop around on themselves and have a treasure chest at the end. Named enemies serve as boss encounters and often guard the aforementioned treasure chests. Respawning overworld enemies allow you to farm experience and crafting materials and they become tougher during the night when afflicted by Wyrd magic. There’s also a ridiculous amount of gear, consumables, and crafting materials to loot from containers, locked chests, or corpses after every battle. At this point, you’d be right to think Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon offers few surprises for fans of the genre and, if anything, the size of many locations, the enemy respawn rate, and the sheer number of optional systems and item tiers can start to feel like unnecessary padding at times.
Thankfully, Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon benefits from its setting and build flexibility. You gain proficiency levels and bonus XP by repeatedly using specific gear and skills like in Skyrim, but for each level you gain and attribute point and skill point to invest wherever you so choose. You can just scrape by as a generalist on medium difficulty, but you can also focus on two or three skill tress with complementary perks, supplement those skills with armour and accessory buffs, and become overpowered – so long as you’re not forced into an encounter outside of your comfort zone. Dialogue and quest solutions are more focussed, with the main quest often forcing you to pick a faction in each region, with player choice and attribute-checks slightly altering events or changing the outcome of standalone side quests. All familiar systems but they’re elevated by the Celtic setting, diverse and enthusiastic voice work, and a soundtrack that shifts from serene exploration tunes to metal combat tracks.
Presentation and technical performance
The problem – as of this impressions piece going up – is that the console release of Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon intersperses familiar and satisfying gameplay with a mix of exploitable jank, performance issues, and both random and repeatable crashes. As a mid-tier game with mid-tier pricing, I don’t mind that it often looks and feels last-gen, and I always appreciate games that let me survive tough encounters by clipping through geometry, spamming summons, exploiting OP skills, or dubious AI pathfinding. I don’t even have an issue with the residual PC-like menu that lets you freely toggle resolutions, framerate caps, v-sync, and vegetation quality. What I don’t appreciate is how little those settings influence the wildly variable performance on an Xbox Series X; how console-level VRR doesn’t work if you disable v-sync; or how simply running between certain areas or spawning multiple summons can tank the framerate and crash the game.
To Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon’s credit, you can manually save, quick-save, and even maintain a half-dozen autosaves as often as every minute. This limits lost progress, sure, but random crashes can still ruin tough combat encounters in which saving is disabled, and some areas of the Keeper fortress hub became a stuttering mess and even inaccessible at times – notably the blacksmith and path towards the outlying village. I often had to take lengthy detours around the hub or fast-travel back and forth – presumably loading and de-loading map data – before I could finally engage with essential NPCs and merchants. For a game with dozens of multi-part quests that involve backtracking, this grew more annoying the longer I played and always left me on edge, incessantly saving just in case an autosave triggered in an area that would crash the game again after reloading.
Concluding thoughts
It’s all the more frustrating as I’ve been enjoying Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon despite those issues and desperately want to push forward into Act 2. However, given the current state of the console port during the first act – the act I assume benefitted the most from the early access period – I’m reluctant endure more performance hitches and the ever-present threat of crashes. For fans of the genre who don’t have the option of playing this on PC, I’d suggest you keep Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon on your radar while it receives more patches as there’s a solid and satisfying, 7/10-style budget RPG just waiting to emerge from a mire of technical issues.
Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon was played on Xbox Series S|X using a code provided to gameblur by the publisher. It is also available on PC and PS5.
