First-person Soulslike Valor Mortis is already making a profit after seven days, despite launching against some stiff competition

Ghostrunner studio One More Level returns with a Napoleonic alternative history Soulslike that fuses fluid sword- and gunplay with exhilarating parkour, and it's a delight. Valor Mortis plays a bit of a sneaky trick. For a while it keeps it straight. 'Yes', it seems to say; 'I'm definitely a Soulslike. Look at my bonfire equivalents, my healing flasks, my corpse runs, even my early impossi-boss feints. Look at my cautious action, my fog gates, the oppressive air of melancholy that lingers over these fields of mud and blood'. But jumpcut to a few hours later, and there you are: first-person wall-running, grapple-swinging, one-two parry slashing, quick-step-fire-ball-dismembering, slow-mo bullettime high-jump shotgun-blast-to-the-face-ing. This, it's fair to say, is not your usual Soulslike.

Pretty good first-person Soulsliker Valor Mortis seems to have sliced its PC system requirements down, dropping its minimum CPU and graphics cards demands as an October 13th launch – for those who never trusted calendars, that’s tomorrow – looms. Previously, the game’s Steam page listed some luxurious hardware indeed. Around the time of the final demo release in June, Valor Mortis was asking for either an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X or Intel Core i7-11700 as a min-spec processor, plus an AMD Radeon RX 6700 or Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Super as a minimum GPU. Currently, the same page now lists the choice of an Ryzen 5 3600 or Core i5-10600K, as well as an RX 5600 XT or GTX 1660 Ti, making for far more budget-friendly entry into the plague-sodden battlefields of Napoleonic Europe.

Well, I say "freshest. " In its ickily up-close vision of Napoleonic battlefields, swapping the boring old bubonic plague for a fleshy, pustulating necro-blight, Valor Mortis is as horrid and grim as a standard Soulslike rulebook would compel. At the same time, One More Level’s first-person take on campfires and attack-pattern combat does feel like a game striking out on its own, and not just through its unusual choice of perspective. If anything, there are decisions here that might have FromSoft purists calling for the guillotine. Yet it’s almost all in service of an intentionally tighter, more intimate kind of supernatural action, which – while lacking the immaculate complexity of Souls masterworks – serves up enough tense sabre duels to see the whole thing through.

Edwin came up the ladder to my office last week to remind me that my quarterly Maw Safety Certification was up for renewal. Without an in date health and safety and wild eldritch creature control license, I'm not allowed to remain in the Treehouse and we have to shut down the site. So, today I'm down in the Maw's chamber coaxing it to hock up some globules of games. Edwin's here, of course, though he seems pretty smug to be on the other side of the plexiglass for a change. I wouldn't mind if he weren't also inciting the Maw with lurid hand gestures.

A few of the things that have us hooked this week. Hello and welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little about the games we've been playing. This week, Connor plays a classic, and ticks it off his bucket list; Sherif isn't sure about a first-person shooter foray into Soulslikes; Matt visits a South Pacific island volcano and Jim Henson's Labyrinth, all in one game; and Bertie discovers that playing D&D with kids is enormously entertaining.

Penguin Colony is probably the best pisstake of Lovecraft and Lovecraftian horror I've played. It's the best because it places Lovecraft's universe at a creaturely remove, amplifying its absurdity without having to drop any punchlines. Entering a ravaged polar campsite, I advance among burning tents and uniformed corpses to a pioneer seated on a crate, who is busily sawing his own face off. Ice and snow shrill overhead and Lenval Brown's narration rumbles in my bones, speaking of eldritch relics and unquenchable ambitions, of "queer creatures" and inexplicable deaths, of madness and glory, of "scientific explanations" and empires from other dimensions. I consider all this, and say: Fnaaarp. Another man standing at the top of a pile of sandbags catches my attention. I waddle up to him and his head explodes, emitting a gory spark that resolves into the word "sex". I regard the body gravely and say: urk urk urk. Then I flop on my belly and slither out of camp, chasing the whistling wires of the wind. For I am a penguin. These creatures, their flags, their words and their elder gods mean little to me.