The Call of Duty Endowment (C.O.D.E.) Presents the Forged in Valor Series, A Look into the Making of the Valor Pack

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.

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.

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.

Sam Hill is a news writer at Polygon covering gaming and entertainment. He's a Portland, Oregon–based journalist known for covering gaming, the outdoors, national parks, tech, food, and internet culture. He has written for a range of publications including Outside Magazine, Boston Magazine, Vice, the Seattle Times and Digital Trends. New mod gives NPCs their own histories, grudges, and reasons to hunt down Arthur Morgan

If you’ve ever watched someone play an old PlayStation game and wondered why their character keeps spinning around in circles, congratulations, you’ve already met tank controls. If you’re unfamiliar, here’s your quick introduction: With tank controls, pressing up moves your character forward in whatever direction they’re facing, and pressing left or right only rotates them, so with the stick alone, you can’t sidestep or turn on a dime. That’s manageable in a hallway. It’s much less so when you’re sneaking past a guard, lining up a shot, or timing a leap across a pit, which is why the same scheme caused trouble in just about every genre during the PS1 era. These eight classic games are the hardest to go back to, whether the culprit is tank controls or something else entirely. The dealbreaker: Lining up one jump means turning in place, backing up, taking a run-up, and holding a grab button in midair. Every single time Reminder: Tomb Raider is a platformer. You’re jumping roughly every 15 seconds, and most of those jumps demand precision measured in single pixels.