Valor Mortis Launches Today: Everything to Know About the First-Person Soulslike

Some games are easy to categorize the moment you see them. Valor Mortis is not one of those — and that is exactly why it is one of the most interesting launches of October. Out today, October 13, 2026, it is a first-person action soulslike, a combination so rare it immediately makes you sit up and pay attention. The soulslike genre is practically defined by its third-person camera; taking that formula and welding it to a first-person perspective is a bold creative bet.

It is also the latest game from One More Level, the Polish studio behind Ghostrunner, which means the developers making it have a proven record of fast, demanding, first-person combat. Here is everything you need to know about the game, where to play it, how much it costs, and why it might be worth your time.

What Is Valor Mortis? Story and Setting

Valor Mortis is set in a dark, plague-ridden Europe in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. That sentence alone carries a lot of atmosphere: instead of the usual fantasy kingdom or dying gothic world, the game drops you into the grim fallout of one of history’s bloodiest conflicts, then twists it with supernatural horror. Europe has been ravaged by war, and now something worse has arrived — plague, monstrosity, and decay, in a world where the line between the living and the dead has clearly broken down.

You play William, a soldier of Napoleon’s army who has been raised from the dead. William is not a blank-slate warrior; he is a man resurrected with supernatural powers, fighting his way through hordes of horrifying monsters while slowly unraveling a conspiracy. The undead-soldier setup gives the game two strong narrative hooks at once: the power fantasy of a soldier wielding unnatural abilities, and the mystery of who brought him back and why. Soulslikes live and die by their worlds — the lore told through environments, enemies, and fragments of story — and a Napoleonic-war-horror setting is fresh territory for the genre, which has leaned heavily on dark fantasy for over a decade.

Structurally, the game follows the soulslike blueprint: deliberate, punishing combat where every encounter matters, enemies designed to kill you if you fight carelessly, and a progression system that rewards patience, observation, and mastery. The difference is the camera. Everything that makes soulslikes tense — reading an enemy’s wind-up, managing distance, committing to a strike — plays out through William’s own eyes. There is no over-the-shoulder view giving you situational awareness for free. If the developers have tuned it well, that first-person perspective could make every duel feel more intimate and more frightening than anything the genre has produced in third person.

Why Valor Mortis Stands Out in the Soulslike Genre

To understand why Valor Mortis matters, you need to understand just how unusual a first-person soulslike really is. The soulslike genre grew out of FromSoftware’s Dark Souls series and its successors — games that are almost universally played in third person.

The reason is practical: soulslike combat is built on spacing, positioning, and reading body language. Seeing your character’s whole body relative to the enemy gives you information — how far your sword reaches, whether that overhead slam will connect — that is much harder to judge from a first-person view. Elden Ring, Sekiro, Bloodborne, Lies of P, and their many imitators all stayed in third person. It is not a coincidence; it is a design choice the genre’s best studios kept making.

First-person melee combat, meanwhile, has its own lineage and its own reputation for being hard to get right. Games that have tried it — from early experiments to more recent entries like the Kingdom Come: Deliverance series — often get described as ambitious but divisive. Hitting a sword swing in first person can feel great, but it can just as easily feel weightless or disorienting, especially when an enemy circles behind you and your only information channel is sound. Valor Mortis is therefore attempting something genuinely rare: soulslike difficulty and deliberateness, delivered through a perspective that the genre has historically avoided.

That is also the source of the game’s early buzz. Coverage and first impressions describe Valor Mortis as drawing real interest precisely because of the first-person angle — the novelty of the concept is its loudest selling point.

A first-person soulslike does not need to be perfect to be worth watching; it needs to be competent enough that the experiment pays off. If One More Level can translate its first-person expertise into slower, heavier, read-and-react combat, Valor Mortis could carve out a sub-niche that barely exists right now. If the experiment stumbles, it will still be a fascinating case study. Either way, this is a launch-day game that gives players something they have not played before, and in a genre crowded with imitators, novelty is currency.

From the Studio Behind Ghostrunner

The developer is One More Level, the Polish studio best known for Ghostrunner and Ghostrunner 2. That pedigree matters more than it might seem, because Ghostrunner was essentially a first-person precision-combat game: one-hit kills, blistering speed, momentum-based movement, and levels designed like violent puzzles. Ghostrunner demanded absolute focus and punished every mistake — a design philosophy that overlaps heavily with what soulslikes ask of players.

There are meaningful differences, of course. Ghostrunner was about speed; a soulslike is about control. Ghostrunner wanted you moving constantly; a soulslike wants you standing your ground and choosing your moment. But the overlap is real and encouraging: both demand precision, both are built around learning patterns through failure, and both live or die on the feel of first-person combat. One More Level understands how to make a weapon feel dangerous in first person, how to build levels that read clearly at speed, and how to tune difficulty so that it feels fair rather than arbitrary. If there is any studio positioned to take a credible shot at a first-person soulslike, it is the one that spent two games perfecting first-person melee precision.

The setting choice also suggests confidence. Placing a soulslike in Napoleonic-era Europe rather than another dark fantasy realm is a deliberate break from genre convention, and it hints at a team that wants this game to have its own identity rather than ride Dark Souls’ coattails. Musket-era warfare, plague horror, and supernatural resurrection make for a distinctive visual and thematic palette — one that should stand out in screenshots, trailers, and, most importantly, in the store pages players browse on launch day.

Valor Mortis Platforms, Price, and Game Pass Day-One Availability

Valor Mortis launches today, October 13, 2026, on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. The price is $39.99 for both physical and digital editions on PlayStation 5, positioning it below the standard $70 AAA price point — a reasonable ask for a focused, genre-pushing action game from a mid-sized studio rather than a 100-hour open world.

The headline news for many players, though, is Game Pass. Valor Mortis is available day one on Xbox Game Pass, on both the Ultimate and PC Game Pass tiers. That changes the value proposition dramatically: if you already subscribe, you can try a first-person soulslike experiment today at no additional cost.

For a game whose core appeal is a bold, unusual idea, day-one Game Pass availability is close to ideal — it removes the price barrier that might otherwise keep curious players on the fence, and it gives the game its best possible shot at building a community quickly. Soulslikes thrive on shared discovery — players comparing notes on bosses, sharing strategies, posting clips of impossible-looking fights — and nothing fuels that like a large day-one player base.

And Valor Mortis is not the only notable addition to the service this week. Battlefield 6 also joins Game Pass on October 13, on the Ultimate and PC tiers as well — making today a genuinely stacked day for subscribers. The rest of the month’s additions round out an unusually strong lineup: Echo Weaver and Forever Ago arrived on October 8 alongside Neon Abyss 2, Deep Dish Dungeon landed on October 13, Bluey’s Happy Snaps and Chained Beasts are coming October 15, and Beyond These Stars follows on October 16. If you have been weighing whether a subscription is worth it, this particular fortnight makes the case as well as any.

Getting Your Setup Ready to Play

First-person melee games are uniquely sensitive to performance. When a game asks you to read an enemy’s attack animation and react in fractions of a second, frame rate and input responsiveness stop being luxury concerns and become part of the game’s difficulty tuning. A stuttering frame rate in a turn-based game is an annoyance; in a soulslike, it is the difference between a perfect parry and a dead character.

On console, the equation is simple: Valor Mortis targets the current generation (PS5 and Xbox Series X|S), so a standard console will handle it as designed. On PC, it is worth making sure your rig is up to the task before you dive in — especially if your machine is a few years old or was built for a different era of games. If you have been thinking about upgrading, this is a good excuse: building a budget gaming PC has never been more accessible, and a modest, well-chosen build will carry you through this year’s releases and well beyond. Pay particular attention to your GPU and to fast storage; soulslikes punish slow load times almost as much as they punish slow reactions, since you will be retrying encounters a lot.

Controller players should also think about input. Soulslikes reward precise, deliberate inputs, and first-person games reward good mouse-look or well-tuned stick sensitivity. Whatever your setup, spend ten minutes in the early game calibrating sensitivity and camera settings before judging the combat — a surprising number of “this game feels bad” impressions come down to default settings rather than design.

Who Should Play Valor Mortis?

Soulslike veterans: If you have exhausted Elden Ring, worked through Sekiro’s boss gauntlet, and find yourself browsing for the next fix, Valor Mortis is the most mechanically interesting soulslike launch of the month. The first-person perspective changes everything you know about spacing and timing — it will be humbling even for experienced players, and that is the point.

Ghostrunner fans: If you loved One More Level’s precision combat, this is the studio’s next move, and it carries their DNA. Expect demanding combat, a strong sense of momentum, and difficulty that respects your intelligence.

Game Pass subscribers: The day-one Game Pass release makes this a zero-risk experiment. If the first-person soulslike concept clicks for you, you have found a new obsession; if it does not, you have lost nothing but an evening. Few launch-day games offer that kind of upside with that little downside.

Horror and history fans: A plague-ridden Napoleonic Europe is one of the most distinctive settings in recent action games. If you are drawn to dark historical atmospheres — the grime, the disease, the supernatural dread layered over real history — the setting alone may carry you through the learning curve.

Who should wait? If you bounced off soulslikes because of the difficulty rather than the setting, Valor Mortis is unlikely to convert you — the first-person perspective arguably makes things harder, not easier. Players who struggle with first-person melee or motion sensitivity should also approach carefully; this is not the game to test those limits on. And if you prefer sprawling open worlds to focused combat gauntlets, the game’s structure may not be for you. There is no shame in any of that — but if you are on the fence and subscribed to Game Pass, the fence is a free download away. If you are looking for more ways to play without spending anything at all, check out our roundup of free-to-play games worth playing in 2026.

Conclusion: A Launch Day Worth Paying Attention To

Most launch days bring another competent entry in a familiar genre. Valor Mortis brings something genuinely rare: a first-person soulslike, from a studio that knows first-person combat better than almost anyone, set in a plague-haunted Napoleonic Europe, priced at $39.99, and available day one on Game Pass. Any one of those would be worth a headline; together, they make this the most interesting action-game launch of the week.

The experiment could go either way — first-person soulslike combat is unproven territory, and the genre’s third-person tradition exists for good reasons. But the combination of One More Level’s pedigree, the freshness of the setting, and the zero-risk Game Pass entry point means there has rarely been a better time to try something new. Download it today, give it an honest hour, and see whether seeing a soulslike through your character’s own eyes changes how the genre feels. For a genre built on dying and learning, there is something fitting about its boldest experiment arriving on a day when the barrier to trying it has never been lower.