A little 9 hours into Tainted Grail, and the good first impressions have faded a fair bit. Once you get out of the tutorial and into the open world, the game simply can't hide its AA budget and eastern european jank. It's a very ambitious game, and the studio clearly shot for the moon. But there's stuff all the effort and passion in the world simply can't overcome.
The world feels rigid and lifeless mainly for a reason I wasn't expecting: the background ambience, or rather lack of such. It's weird to notice something I've never consciously paid attention to stand out so much by its absence. But there's just too little background noise to give the impression of a living world. It's not nonexistent: there's waves crashing, occasional bird sounds, leaves rustling. But compared to, say, Skyrim, where in dungeons there's always the sound of the wind whistling somewhere, water dripping, cracking of stone, and of course Jeremy Soule's music, the ambience is just so much more layered. In Tainted Grail it makes immersion that much harder to come by, when you stop in the middle of the dungeon and it's just dead silence.
There's some rather hefty jank to the gameplay. Hit detection with the bow seems to be all over the fucking place. Like a dozen times I've lined up a perfect shot, only for the arrow to seemingly evaporate mid-air. Because there's so little indication as to the arrow's path, there's basically no way to know if you're doing something wrong other than trial and error. The AI, while fairly decent in open spaces, basically breaks the moment more than 2 NPCs have to navigate any kind of narrow space. Multiple times I've shamelessly cheesed groups of enemies by plinking them to death with my bow while they do a Three Stooges doorway routine. The game shows its Skyrim roots in one of the most infuriating ways: inventory clutter. When adventuring you're constantly picking up all sorts of garbage for crafting, and whoops surprise, now all your inventory space is taken up by random flowers, iron ore, cooking ingredients and other clutter. You can obviously mod it out, but it's just jarring why the team decided to keep this most infuriating of Skyrim's foibles.
On the leveling side I'm kind of two ways about it: I like how stats actually matter for gear, and you have to start leveling with some sort of intent pretty early on. You can't just put on every plate mail armor you want, you have to level your stats for it. The skill trees are nothing to write home about, but then again neither are Skyrim's, and their straightforwardness is kind of endearing for a lower-budget game. The thing I'm wondering about is the scaling. I'm level 13, and it's already feeling like I'm not keeping up with the enemies. This could maybe be because I haven't properly engaged with all the systems yet, but it doesn't feel great nonetheless.
Still, the fact that I've kept with it this long despite still being in the first zone, and intend to play more speaks for itself. As mentioned, the writing is quite good, and has that specifically Polish, Witcher-reminiscient sardonic sense of humor, where characters might be lost in their lives, alcoholics or dying, but they at least crack jokes about it. It's a good world for roleplaying a cold, amoral character. The story is genuinely interesting, and presents a very interesting moral dilemma which I'm waiting to start unfurling at some point. So yeah, it's a 7/10 if there ever was one, but I'm having a lot of fun with it.
