How Supernatural-Napoleonic Wars Story ‘Valor Mortis’ Became Lyrical Games’ First Release: ‘A Setting Nobody Else Is Touching’
How Supernatural-Napoleonic Wars Story ‘Valor Mortis’ Became Lyrical Games’ First Release: ‘A Setting Nobody Else Is Touching’
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Oct 12, 2026 7:00am PT
How Supernatural-Napoleonic Wars Story ‘Valor Mortis’ Became Lyrical Games’ First Release: ‘A Setting Nobody Else Is Touching’
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Jennifer Maas
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Lyrical Games
Lyrical Games will make its market debut this week with the launch of Soulslike game “ Valor Mortis.”
Set in a supernatural reimagining of 19th-century Europe, “Valor Mortis” lets players take on the part of William Dowsett (voiced by James Alexander), a resurrected English soldier of the Grande Armée who wields both Napoleonic-era weaponry and devastating supernatural powers. The game also stars Vincent Cassel as the legendary Napoleon Bonaparte and Jennifer English as The Shrike, a key figure in the resistance to Napoleon’s war.
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Developed by “Ghostrunner” studio One More Level, “Valor Mortis” is the first of multiple titles in the works at the Lyrical Media’s indie video game publisher and the game’s ambitious first-person take is setting a high bar for what Lyrical plans to produce from here.
“One More Level specializes in first-person action, so they understood the problem better than anyone,” Lyrical Games chief Blake Rochkind tells Variety. “The core challenge is that Soulslikes are built on reading your opponent: spacing, telegraphs, knowing exactly where you are relative to an enemy’s swing. A third-person camera gives you that for free. In first-person, you lose a lot of that awareness, so the team had to rebuild it. They spent an enormous amount of time on the parry window specifically, plus lock-on, audio cues and hit feedback, so a perfect parry feels as readable as it does in a third-person game. The other hurdle was pace. Ghostrunner is all about speed, and Valor Mortis is deliberately slower and more methodical.”
“Valor Mortis” launches Tuesday for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S and for PC via Steam priced at $39.99. Notably, the title will be available on Day 1 for those with an Xbox Game Pass subscription, though Rochkind declined to share details about striking that deal while still making the game available for purchase across platforms.
See below for more from Variety’s interview with Lyrical Games’ Rochkind below.
What made you feel confident in Lyrical picking this unconventional take as one of its first publishing deals? What do you want this project to say about the direction Lyrical plans to go in?
I knew I wanted to work One More Level within five minutes of playing Ghostrunner when it released in 2020. Strong game-feel is the rarest talent in this medium, and when you play something with truly great game-feel (and you play a lot of games), you know it immediately. It took a while for the stars to align, since they made Ghostrunner 2 before being ready to tackle this. The pitch for Valor Mortis checked every box. You had a proven team with a unique specialization, working in a genre with a huge audience, but with two real twists: a first-person camera and a setting nobody else is touching. That’s Lyrical Games’ thesis in a nutshell: midtier budgets, unique takes on proven genres and genuine partnership with developers. If this game says one thing about us, I hope it’s that we’ll push our chips in on talented teams with a strong point of view.
What was the casting process like and how much did the team prioritize landing big-name talent?
After the announcement of the game went well, we realized we had something here, so it was a question of how we can pour gasoline on the fire. Vincent Cassel was truly the dream casting for Napoleon. He’s not on screen the way a typical character is. He’s a voice in William’s head, speaking to him almost like a father to a son. That role lives or dies on presence, and Vincent Cassel has a kind of controlled menace that’s hard to find. Landing him was a big moment for us. Similar with Jennifer English. We had a very meaty role in The Shrike, and she was the only name on the list for us. It helped in both cases that the game’s announcement had gone well enough that we had some stature to reach out to both. Finally, James Alexander carries the whole game as William and I hope this will put him on the map even more than he already is. For a new IP, a cast like that tells players we’re taking the story as seriously as the combat.
What inspired the team’s interest in a supernatural, cosmic horror version of the Napoleonic Wars for the setting?
That’s OML’s vision, and it’s one of the things that sold me on the game. Fantasy Soulslikes are everywhere, so the setting immediately made it stand out. The Napoleonic era is also a natural fit for horror. You have this charismatic figure promising a unified Europe, and millions of soldiers who believed in that idea and died for it. Layering a plague and body horror on top of that lets the game ask a pretty dark question: what would you sacrifice for power, and for someone else’s dream? It’s a period most players know in broad strokes, which makes twisting it that much more unsettling. It’s also simply iconic, which has gone a long way in people’s interest.
How would you describe the journey William Dowsett sets out on and how his resurrection carries players through the narrative?
William is a young Englishman who’s disillusioned with the monarchy and volunteers for Napoleon because he believes in the idea of a unified Europe. Then he dies for it. The game opens with him waking on a battlefield with the plague running through his veins, though not fully “turned.” That corruption is both his curse and his power. It’s how he fights, and it gets stronger as he absorbs what he defeats. Napoleon is in his head guiding him, and partway through, another voice joins that pulls him somewhere else entirely. So the journey is really about whose cause William is fighting for, and what’s left of him by the end.
Were there any significant changes made to the game following the Steam demo feedback?
We did an early public playtest shortly after announcing in August 2025. That was a massive boon to the game and significantly influenced One More Level’s development from there. The Next Fest demo this summer was just a few months before launch, and of course One More Level took a lot away from that as well, but the playtest was just transformative for the game and we’re so grateful that so many players have stuck with the game for over a year since then and have helped make the game what it is today. It’s definitely an approach we hope to do again with our games in the future.
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Jarksays:
Lol, 19th century Europe (any-century Europe & US too) is a setting that is touched by everyone in the West — regardless of whether it’s dressed up with some sort of “eldritch” otherworldly eerie themes or not.
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