What Kind of Game Is Valor Mortis?

In one line

Valor Mortis is a first-person action soulslike set in an alternate 19th-century Europe, where you play a soldier of Napoleon's army who has been brought back from a battlefield grave into a continent consumed by plague.

That sentence is almost entirely the developer's own wording. Four elements do the work — first-person, action, soulslike, alternate 19th-century history — and each one is worth taking separately, because the combination is unusual and the label "soulslike" carries assumptions that do not all hold.

The developer's description

The store description states the premise directly, so it is quoted rather than paraphrased:

"Valor Mortis is a first-person action soulslike from the creators of Ghostrunner. Rise from death as a former soldier of Napoleon's army. Wield supernatural powers, battle horrifying monsters, and unravel a conspiracy that threatens all of humanity."

Three things are established inside that paragraph. You begin dead and return. You are a soldier of Napoleon's army rather than a hero outside history. And the story is framed as a conspiracy to unravel, which is a different shape from a game about surviving a hostile world.

First-person, single-player

The perspective is the defining technical choice, and it is stated twice in the official materials — once in the store description and once in the store's own genre field. Valor Mortis is played in the first person, which puts it in a small group: soulslike systems are overwhelmingly built in third person, and building them around a first-person camera changes what you can see and how you read an enemy's movement.

The game is single-player. The Steam listing carries the single-player category and there is no co-op or multiplayer category alongside it, no mention of another player in any official description, and no online component described anywhere on the store page. If you are looking for a game to play with someone else, this is not one.

The soulslike label

"Soulslike" is a genre term rather than an official category, so it is worth noting that the developer uses it about itself rather than having it applied from outside. The store description calls the game "a first-person action soulslike", and the studio published a video explaining why it uses the word at all.

What the developer's own description actually commits to is narrower than the genre label implies. It names parries, dashes and visceral finishers across a variety of weapons, and a progression loop where each death is a chance to grow stronger. Those are the genre's bones. What it does not describe is a specific formula — no difficulty menu, no described route structure, no covenant or faction system, no stated penalty on death.

Setting and story

The setting is one of the game's clearest selling points, and the developer describes it in specific terms rather than atmosphere alone.

Two of those are worth emphasising. The protagonist is officially named William — the store description names him, so this is not a community nickname. And the framing is explicitly alternate history: the developer says the premise involves historical figures and realities, which means it is inventing rather than documenting. A guide that treats its events as history has misread the game's own description.

What it is not

Several plausible assumptions are worth ruling out, because each one has a basis in something real.

For the practical questions that follow from this — what platform to buy it on, what it costs, and how combat and progression are described — the platforms page, the price page and the systems page cover them in more detail than fits here.