Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon is an open-world action RPG that attempts to reproduce Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls formula, but with its own unique spin. From combat to quests to NPCs, Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon attempts to improve upon its inspirations in every way imaginable, aiming to be not just a game like Skyrim but one that wants to be better. While it may not achieve the same level of fame as the game it sets out to improve upon, the hints of brilliance are plain to see.
Avowed, Obsidian Entertainment’s open-world title, set in the same universe as Pillars of Eternity, is also often compared to The Elder Scrolls games. While Avowed didn’t stick the landing quite as convincingly as it wanted to, it does a lot of things right. And just like Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, one of them is exploration. Its open-world map is structured in such a way that stumbling upon good loot isn’t just a happy coincidence, but the expected outcome. Both Avowed and Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon promise rich, jam-packed worlds to explore that aren’t afraid to shower players with epic loot.
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Avowed and Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon’s Open-Worlds Deserve Praise
Avowed and Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon are Cut From the Same Open-World Cloth
In Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, every inch of the map houses stuff to find. Cities are filled to the brim with chests, sacks, crates, barrels, and every other storage container imaginable. Forests are littered with ruins, dungeons, shrines, and buried chests. Any area that appears remotely interesting has something going on. Every cave will have at least three to four uniques inside. Most NPCs players meet in the wild are either quest-givers, merchants, or bandits with great loot on them. Every dungeon is a sprawling labyrinth of winding passageways that loop with great loot hidden in every corner. Anything that looks out of place has a reason for being so, as Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon’s world amazes because everything is hand-placed and nothing is procedural.
All that’s well and good, but it wouldn’t matter if the actual loot obtained via exploration wasn’t worth picking up. Games can only have so many unique weapons and powerful armor to go around; it simply cannot be sprinkled around in every single location. Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon solves this by making trash loot useful. Most random containers, like the dozens of sacks found by the side of the road, typically contain ingredients for food or alchemy. These ingredients can either be bought from merchants or picked up as loot. Buying is expensive, and gold is hard to come by, which means any time players do find an ingredient, picking it up feels like the right thing to do. Who knows when it might come in handy. Food and Potions are also the main methods to recover health, making the looting process all the more important. Best of all, these ingredients tend to weigh next to nothing, solving the biggest problem item hoarders tend to face in these sorts of games.
Even more impressive is that Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon isn’t afraid to lock all the best armors, weapons, and spells behind exploration. Players who want to find the most overpowered spell for their mage build will need to go out exploring ruins and dungeons to get a chance to stumble upon a spell worth their time. Merchants do sell items, but often, the most powerful uniques aren’t in the hands of traders but in the wild, inside a chest hidden behind a suspicious-looking rock.
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Additionally, Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon makes heavy use of quality-of-life features as a means of making exploration more streamlined. When players encounter a stack of a dozen crates crammed in a city corner, instead of having to open each one of them individually to take a look at what’s inside, they can see all of their contents by simply hovering over the container. Then, if they find an item that can’t be used by their character due to stat limitations or because the item has zero value—a rare occurrence—the loot UI will indicate it by coloring that item differently. It’s an intuitive system that immediately flags items that may not be worth looting, solving the problem of having to clean out inventory down the line.
Open-Worlds are Only as Good as Their Exploration
A common gripe players have with a lot of open-world games is that there’s lots of space but little to do. Huge worlds with acres of empty space are no one’s idea of a good time, at least not in a video game setting. Typically, maps like this are composed of a handful of handcrafted locations like cities, dungeons, and hideouts, which feel great to explore, but the rest of the world is only occupied by endless generic forests made up of the same three trees copied and pasted a hundred thousand times. Exploration is bland and uninteresting, with little to do besides beating up the mobs along the way.
There have been quite a few over-hyped open-world games that don’t deliver on their promises, which can put players who grew up on fun open worlds in the camp that hates the very idea of them. The market for open-world games is still just as large as it was 20 years ago, but the sentiment has gradually turned more sour. As such, games like Avowed and Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon deserve to be celebrated, as they prove that open-worlds do not have to be empty and soulless. With proper care, an eye for level design, and quality over quantity, open-worlds can still be a joy to explore.
Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon
8/10
- Released
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May 23, 2025
- ESRB
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Mature 17+ // Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Language, Use of Drugs
- Developer(s)
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Questline
- Publisher(s)
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Awaken Realms
- Engine
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Unity