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Valor Mortis
Update: game's delayed
Update: A few hours after I published this, One More Level announced that Valor Mortis has been pushed back from September 24th to October 13th. I’m keeping the rest of the article as originally written, even though several of its jokes no longer land.
I thought I was fairly well-informed about Valor Mortis , the Napoleonic first-person fencing soulslike from Ghostrunner developers One More Level, but it turns out I overlooked the four-second segment of flesh magic hook-grappling in this earlier trailer . As a result, the swinging and wallrunning mechanics in the new, significantly expanded demo caught me off guard, much like British archers surprised the French at Agincourt. Yes, I realize that simile is off by about four hundred years.
Additionally, there’s another new trailer, along with a release date: September 24th 2026. Wait, that’s the same day as Control Resonant . And Silent Hill: Townfall . And just one day before Onimusha: Way of the Sword . Which doesn’t interest me as much as the other two, but still, wow .
Valor Mortis - Official Release Date Trailer | Xbox Games Showcase 2026 Watch on YouTube
Anyway, Valor Mortis: I enjoyed the first demo , and I like this one too. It still treats parrying as its primary language, which I’d understand if anyone—not just soulslike enthusiasts—is growing tired of it, given how many games now prioritize deflecting attacks over launching them. But the saber combat here focuses very intensely on the kind of tense, close-quarters, almost understated humanoid duels that I generally prefer to mindlessly slashing at moon-sized demigods.
This particular demo also demonstrates how Valor Mortis makes effective use of its first-person perspective, rather than it being merely a soulslike selling point for the Steam description. Compared to, say, battling an Omen in Elden Ring ’s sewers, there’s a much stronger sense of its diseased, unnaturally elongated Grande Armée soldiers looming over you, with the fear of their strength and reach advantages digging deeper into your gut. There are also several instances where you’re forced into the cramped, infested interiors of some poor deceased soul’s home, a classic tension-building tactic that might have struggled to comfortably accommodate a third-person camera.
At this stage, I do find the freerunning elements a somewhat odd addition, though I’m prepared to give them a chance to prove they’re not just an out-of-place power fantasy flourish in a game where you spend half the time getting your lungs pierced. For one thing, it appears mostly separate from the combat—the demo offers a few opportunities to grapple up to musketeers’ nests, but the wallrunning is more for linear traversal than Titanfall -style arena maneuvering. Besides, the French invented parkour , so who am I to deny them this tradition?
There’s also the matter of One More Level’s Ghostrunner heritage. Few studios possess as much institutional expertise on pleasurably smooth freerun moves, and while Valor Mortis’ versions are grittier in texture, they’re functionally identical to the cyborg leaps of the studio’s previous work. It would therefore be incredibly amusing, to the point that I now choose to believe it will happen, for Valor Mortis to pull a Deathloop and climactically reveal that it shares a silly alternate-history timeline with the far-future Ghostrunner. Make it happen, OML. Delay into a different week from Control, if you’d like.