For better or worse, Dark Souls is easily one of the most influential games of the 21st century, inspiring so many others that it spawned an entire new genre. But while there are lots of great Soulslikes out there, it can get a bit tiring seeing the same style of punishing third-person action game again and again. That’s what makes something like Valor Mortis one of the more intriguing Soulslikes on the horizon: It has all the familiar hallmarks of the genre, translated into a first-person perspective with plenty to set it apart.After its reveal at Gamescom Opening Night Live, Valor Mortis is holding its first open playtest in early October. Running only until October 13, the playtest is a chance to check out a small chunk of the game’s pre-alpha version, meaning it’s far from finished, but with enough pieces in place to get a taste of the full version.In Valor Mortis, you play as William, a definitely British member of Napoleon’s army in an alternate history version of the Napoleonic Wars. For reasons that are unclear to both William and the player, fellow soldiers are being transformed into literal monsters by a fleshy, necrotic infection sweeping across the land. Those affected by it have their bodies mutated, gain fearsome new abilities, and most seem to lose their sense of humanity entirely. William gets off easy comparatively, keeping his mind intact and just getting the cool magic powers part of the deal.For the most part, Valor Mortis straightforwardly adapts Soulslike principles into its first-person combat. You have an endurance meter that depletes when you take actions, fights are heavily reliant on dodges and parries, and falling in battle means restarting at a checkpoint, with the resources you need to level up dropped at the feet of the enemy that beat you.While it doesn’t break the mold too much, simply moving to first-person does make Valor Mortis feel unique, and it takes advantage of that shift in perspective. You’re armed at first with a sword and a sidearm, which can be aimed manually to shoot at enemies’ weakpoints. Shortly into the demo, you also gain the ability to shoot fire from your offhand like a terribly lost Skyrim character, which again takes advantage of the first-person perspective to let you aim more accurately. The fact that enemies can (and frequently do) sneak up behind you more easily from this point of view is used to full effect, lending a sense of paranoia to every step you take.Combat feels complex without being too complicated, though it’s still a bit on the sluggish side. | One More LevelDespite all that, it took me a while to get up to speed with Valor Mortis’ combat, and I’m not entirely sold on it yet. The main sticking point is a pervasive sense of sluggishness, where your character moves and dodges just a bit too slowly — which feels especially strange, given developer One More Level’s ultra-fast Ghostrunner games. That really comes into play in the first boss fight, where a mutated general’s wide, sweeping attacks are mostly a danger because William seems strangely unmotivated to get out of their way. That same fight does showcase some of the breadth of Valor Mortis’ combat, though, asking you to use your full toolkit of weapons, parries, and dodges to survive, even amidst a sense of lethargy.Although combat is the game’s clear focus, with little exploration shown in the playtest, the world presents some interesting possibilities. Valor Mortis takes place on the battlefield, and the ground is strewn with countless bodies in this early portion, forcing you to literally step on human backs at times. At certain moments in the demo, Napoleon literally speaks in William’s head, extolling the virtue of empire and the boundless rewards one can reap for serving it, all over images of fields littered with artfully arranged corpses. “War is hell” is far from an original message, and the Napoleonic Wars may not be the most relevant touchpoint these days, but the sheer scale of the carnage is effectively sickening, the contrast between the ruined landscape and the gleaming mountains in the distance driving the point home even harder.It’s clear that Valor Mortis still needs some combat tuning, and it’s unclear if the world has much to offer aside from endless battle. But over the course of the demo, I became more and more convinced that the final version of the game could be something special when it arrives.Valor Mortis will be released on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC in 2026. Its playtest is available on Steam until October 13.