Game News Tainted Grail now available on Early Access

[Infinitron]

Tags: Awaken Realms Digital; Tainted Grail; Tainted Grail: Conquest

You might remember Tainted Grail, the remarkably lavish Arthurian board game CRPG spinoff from the Polish tabletop specialists at Awaken Realms that was formally unveiled back in December. While the game's graphics were impressive, few approved of its card game approach to combat. The developers took that criticism on board and announced back in April that they were revamping the combat system such that battles would visually appear on screen. A month later, they were ready to announce that Tainted Grail would be coming to Early Access on June 25th. So I was rather surprised when it was released today instead, a week early. The centerpiece of the Early Access release is something they're calling Tainted Grail: Conquest, which is basically a roguelike sandbox mode where players can experiment with the game's combat system. However, it also contains a short preview of the final game's story campaign. Here's the launch trailer and an excerpt from the accompanying announcement:

As we announced before - our main focus during early access is going to be Conquest, our narrative-driven rogue-lite/RPG hybrid. An endless game mode, we're going to support with regular updates all the way until our proper launch.

What's Conquest?
This is a whole, new roguelike mode that we announced in our last update. We've been working on it for the past months, and we've been actively iterating it with our discord community, and while there is still a lot of work ahead of us... It already feels really satisfying to play!

Also, we have our first community-made guide to playing one of the classes! Thank you, Disiesel!!!

Main highlights:

• Tons of story locations/interactions with different lore and choices
  
• Procedurally generated world – every time you start a new run, you will find different things on your way!
  
• Possibility to create unique combos between cards, passive skills, items, and consumables
  
• An option to build and upgrade your village in between the runs
  
• High-scores! Defeat the final boss and beat your high score!
  
• Learn extra lore about the world of Tainted Grail.

To stress it out: this mode will be the focus of our early access and will be developed over time with your help, folks! We will be adding much more content, new classes, new runes, new monsters, new bosses, and various challenges!

And we're going to share a roadmap with you really soon!
​

The Tainted Grail Early Access release is available on Steam and GOG for $25, with a 10% launch discount on the latter platform until next week. According to the Early Access FAQ, the final game should be out sometime early next year, at which point its price will increase.

 

[luj1]

Pretty unremarkable trailer tbh, looks like the story is too

 

[Lithium Flower]

I don't know why they decided to allocate resource to this conquest mode. The draw of the board game is that it is a fairly challenging open world narrative experience with C&C that can be enjoyed solo or with friends - not exactly common among board games outside of PnP. Having the spinoff focus more on basebuilding and a sandbox endless mode seems to be gunning for an entirely different demographic of players. Should be noted that the board game and the spinoff are developed by completely different teams, but both were funded by the same kickstarter IIRC.

I'm really enjoying the board game so far (and that has quite an interesting story, a more dark ages/pagan take on the Arthurian legend). That being said, I'm rather assmad about this spinoff game. Awakened Realms forbid people from porting the board game to Tabletop Sim...because they worry it will detract from the sales of the digital game. This is monumentally stupid because the board game and this RPG spin-off have nothing in common besides the name and theme - the former is a lot like a solo GM-less tabletopmodule, the latter is a CRPG with basebuilding and a weird endless mode that no one asked for, not to mention that both have a different take on the same story and game concepts. So they've banned the only way to play the board game with people over the internet to protect the sales of a spin-off that isn't even multiplayer anyway.

Regardless I did play an early prototype of the spinoff and while I found the story and writing to be as enjoyable as they are in the board game, as well as the beginnings of some intriguing C&C, the adaptation of the board game's combat (which, too, I found enjoyable in its original form) didn't engage me at all. If they can iterate on the gameplay then it might very well be a game I might like, but the fact that its very existence comes at an arbitrary expense of my ability to share my enjoyment of the board game with a distant friend makes me a sad boi

 

[Quatlo]

It makes sense, first you iron out the combat systems, story is being made by different people too I bet so they can deelop both modes correctly.
I really liked 3 hours of story mode that were available, setting reminds me of Darkwood a lot. I'm just worried that combat is almost identical to Slay the Spire.

 

[taxalot]

Absolutely no gameplay in trailer. Shit game ahead.

 

[Haba]

eeh

GOTY 2020

Spoiler

 

[negator2vc]

This "new" version of the game is very weird! Not to mention the combat animations just don't feel right.
I really liked the original digital boardgame version including the original 2D combat. I hope they didn't completely replaced
with this new full 3D roguelike slay the spire version.