A heavy rapier attack in Valor Mortis can send William rushing past a plague-infected soldier, leaving the player unsure whether the enemy is dead or standing behind them, ready to strike. That’s the central problem in Polygon critic Austin Manchester’s assessment: a Soulslike can retain the difficulty while losing the visual clarity that makes its fights satisfying.
After spending time fighting the plagued soldiers of Napoleon’s army in the recently released Valor Mortis, Manchester isn’t convinced its first-person perspective delivers the genre’s distinctive combat. The challenge is there. So is losing XP on death, a mechanic he finds annoying. What’s missing, in his account, is a reliable sense of where threats are and what each exchange accomplished.
This isn’t a rejection of Soulslikes from someone indifferent to their appeal. Manchester traces his enthusiasm to buying Bloodborne in 2015, when he sold plasma to afford it during college. He enjoys the challenge, triumph, opacity, and sudden “OH SHIT” moments. Valor Mortis was his first experience with a first-person Soulslike, a perspective he associates more readily with a subset of shooters.
His criticism draws a useful distinction: difficulty asks players to execute under pressure; readability gives them enough information to understand that pressure. Valor Mortis, as he describes it, struggles with the latter.
The enemy in front of you can hide the fight around you. Most Soulslikes place a sometimes awkward third-person camera behind the player character. Their combat typically combines melee attacks with dodge-rolls, while magic or something like the robot arm in Lies of P gives players other ways to tackle opponents. That external viewpoint also helps players judge their position relative to several enemies.
Manchester illustrates this with a familiar Dark Souls situation: skeletons overwhelm the player in a castle’s dusty halls, and any one of them could send the character back to a bonfire. Rolling away doesn’t just avoid damage. It can put the player in a better position with a clear view of the enemies.
In Valor Mortis, getting close enough to attack can make one opponent fill most of the screen, hiding companions who are also trying to cut William down. Some zombie-like enemies attack from blind spots, much as foes do in FromSoftware games. An on-screen warning signals those incoming attacks, but Manchester argues that it reduces their impact. He sees the indicator as something close to developer One More Level acknowledging that the perspective cannot provide the necessary spatial awareness.
That interpretation exposes the trade-off. A warning can signal an unseen threat, but it doesn’t give players the same information as seeing an enemy’s position and movement. It compensates for the camera rather than recreating the view that third-person combat provides.
William’s own attacks can make matters worse. With a relatively small arsenal available, Manchester mostly used the parry-focused rapier. Its heavy attack propels William forward through a series of powerful strikes, leaving him on the enemy’s opposite side. Manchester reports being unable to tell immediately whether the soldier survived. Sometimes he couldn’t even judge whether his blows connected, particularly without locking on, because the combat lacked the weight he expects from a Soulslike.
Movement brings a related problem. Valor Mortis replaces dodge-rolling with a quick dash; Manchester imagines that rolling in first person would invite motion sickness. But dashing feels too costly in stamina to him, and trouble tracking his surroundings leads to extra dashes just to reach safety. With water nearby or fire circling an arena, he describes accidentally dodging into hazards and taking damage because watching the enemy and the environment at once proves too difficult.
A harder parry isn’t necessarily a better one. Parrying is Manchester’s strongest objection, despite his enthusiasm for the mechanic: “I’m the Parry Guy around these parts. Put that shit in everything.” He argues that the combination of weightless combat and first-person depth-perception problems makes parry timing harder to judge than in almost any Soulslike he has played.
The first major boss, General Lothaire, the Eagle-Bearer, makes that complaint especially concrete. Lothaire is a five-armed abomination Manchester compares in size to Absolute Bane. In his assessment, missing just one parry lets the boss’s standard combo pound the player into paste. The punishment is severe, but the criticism concerns how clearly the game communicates the moment that must be countered, not simply how much damage follows a mistake.
None of this establishes that first-person Soulslikes are an impossible design problem. Manchester calls Valor Mortis a good first step, albeit one whose fights tend to feel more confusing than impactful. His examples also identify distinct obstacles: the camera restricts awareness of surrounding enemies and hazards, while weak impact feedback makes individual exchanges difficult to read. Those problems overlap, but they aren’t identical.
There are also ideas he wants other Soulslikes to adopt. Against the grim backdrop of bodies stacked across 19th-century battlefields, Valor Mortis provides a practical notebook containing quest details, divided into main and side quests. Manchester welcomes that clarity compared with FromSoftware quests that can require traveling between levels to find characters in obscure locations. Despite the limited weapon selection, he also appreciates a weapon wheel that makes William’s full loadout of blades, firearms, and magic abilities available during combat.
The unresolved question is whether a first-person Soulslike can make positioning, contact, and parry timing readable without relying on warnings that dilute the threat. One feature needs no such qualification in Manchester’s verdict: Valor Mortis has a pause button, and he thinks every Soulslike should adopt it.
