A new Elder Scrolls is still years away, but this fun Arthurian take on the formula is 50% off right now
Overview & Key Takeaways
Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon is a very competent Bethesda RPG, not made by Bethesda.
It's a little surprising there aren't more The Elder Scrolls clones. Aside from Avowed, the only other example I can think of is Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon. It launched in May last year after a stint in early access, and the response was positive, perhaps surprisingly so, considering how tough it must be for a relatively young studio to make a game of this scale. Our reviewer wrote that it "puts an interesting spin on Arthurian legend and presents a competent world that plays like a love letter to the open-world first-person RPG genre."
It's a "dark reimagination" of Arthurian legends, set entirely on the island of Avalon. There are three distinct zones to explore—in this sense, it wends closer to Avowed—and it has all the usual distractions: you can fish, farm, cook, mine, smith weapons, mix spells, and sketch in your journal, between the usual bouts of dungeon crawling, overworld exploration, and "morally ambiguous" choice making.
I've played a couple of hours on Steam Deck and it runs pretty well there too, albeit at around the 30-45fps mark. The art style is darker than Skyrim's, coming off almost as a hybrid of Dark Souls and Morrowind. It feels unmistakably like a first-person Bethesda RPG, but has a lot of ideas of its own, especially where combat is concerned. Maybe it's not so surprising given it's been 15 years since Skyrim came out, but the melee here is much more elegant.
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With the next Elder Scrolls game so far off I reckon Tainted Grail is well-worth checking out. Especially because it's currently 50% off on Steam, which is cheaper than I've ever seen it. If you're unsure, there's a demo you can try before you buy.
The discount coincides with a major new patch and free DLC drop. It adds new items, a new "ultra+" graphics preset for extremely well-endowed PCs, as well as new armor sets for rangers and sorcerers, as well as new bows and wands. There's apparently a new romance option, too.
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