Valor Mortis is a brave new game from developer One More Level. It competes not only against the studio’s excellent Ghostrunner series, but also the ever-expanding Soulslike subgenre of action games. Fortunately, Valor Mortis largely succeeds on both counts, creating a new world I hope to see more of from this team and a unique first-person stab at its action. It is too often unfairly challenging, largely because of brutal balance issues in the first half, and it doesn’t take its compelling narrative premise anywhere unexpected. But its beating heart is the combat and how it intersects with exploring this nightmarish 18th-century France, and that provides an enticing playground for trying, dying, and trying again.

William is just another soldier in Napoleon’s continent-stretching army, but when he dies, he somehow reawakens on a destroyed battlefield with the Emperor speaking directly to him, seemingly telepathically.…