I’ve always had a bit of a chip on my shoulder when it comes to people reviewing games that they haven’t been fully played. Not 100% completed, like, collect every token in every stage or see every single ending a game has to offer, that’s in no way realistic. But I expect reviewers to have pushed through the main campaign to see the end credits. My opinions largely stem from reading review after review of Final Fantasy XIII and the waves of criticism it received for being a “ series of hallways,” only for the game to meaningfully open up beyond the point many reviewers managed to reach. Reviewing a game you haven’t beaten yet always felt a little presumptuous to me, like judging a book before its Act 2 has even started. And yet, here I am, about ten hours into Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, only two chapters deep into a sprawling fifteen-chapter campaign, and I’m already forming opinions that feel too defined to ignore. Turns out that age and limited gaming time have a way of softening my old convictions, and so rather than wait for a full conclusion on a game that I may never finish, this is how I feel about Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon.

There’s something immediately compelling about Tainted Grail’s premise that hooked me long before the systems started to wear me down. The idea that the great heroes set out on a grand adventure to save the realm, but failed to return so now you need to figure out what happened to them, creates this melancholic, haunted tone that permeates everything. Kamelot is no longer a shining ideal but a looming, foreboding structure, coated with the grime of a century of greed and avarice. The land of Avalon is choked by the Wyrdness, and whatever remains of Arthurian legend feels distorted and uncertain. You’re not stepping into the boots of a chosen saviour, but instead you’re picking through the aftermath, trying to piece together what went wrong. I’ve always loved this kind of narrative framing, where you’re following in the footsteps of legends rather than becoming one outright, and Tainted Grail leans hard into that mood, leaving a breadcrumb trail for you to follow. It’s strange, bleak, and consistently intriguing in a way that makes you want to keep pulling on its threads. That is, when the gameplay allows you to progress the narrative, at least.

Exploration is where that narrative lives. Moving between locations, unlocking new locations and story passages, and making choices that branch into further consequences. Often a location or path will ask “If you have part 1 of this quest line, go to this verse, if you have this status, go to this other verse. If you have this item, go to this third verse. Otherwise, go to this verse”. It’s intriguing and when you manage to hit one of those conditions, it’s exciting to feel like you’re progressing, plumbing the depths of the world. But there’s no strong system for tracking those where those threads are left, so it often turns into a vague sense of “wasn’t there something back there?” whenever we manage to get a new status or learn part of a quest line. I suppose I could be keeping a journal and be writing down every keyword and location we come across, but that’s overly onerous. Getting back to those locations isn’t always trivial either, and the energy requirement of movement and exploration often means that revisiting old ground always comes with a tangible opportunity cost. What should feel like uncovering a living, reactive world instead sometimes feels like trying to recall half-forgotten notes from earlier sessions two months while wading through a waist deep bog and your food supply has run dry.

I’ll stop beating around the bush, the resource management systems are where most of my frustrations lie. Everything in Tainted Grail revolves around scarcity, and not in a way that feels empowering or satisfying to overcome. The path forward can only be explored when adjacent to a Menhir. Lighting Menhirs generally requires a bounty of resources. You will have to spend significant amounts of your actions just gathering the resources to dump into a Menhir, just to reveal the next 3 location cards. Adding to that, travelling to locations and exploring them cost energy, which is limited. At the end of each day, you can rest and recover your energy back up to it’s maximum (depending on your health, but I’ll get to that in a moment). If you happen to have dipped into the 1 or 0 section of your energy, you’ll only recover 4 points, but avoiding that will leave you with 2 unspent energy, which will often recover up to a max of 6, so you’re often only recovering 4 points anyway? And your energy limit is capped by your current health, meaning if you’re close to death you’ll be given even less opportunities to find the resources you need to come back.

Healing opportunities are limited enough that every point of damage carries some long term consequences. Each day when you rest, you consume a food and heal 1 point of health. But the resource dumps that are the Menhirs are constantly ticking down and need to be relit, creating a background pressure that never lets up. You can’t idly explore each nook and cranny, lest you run out of resources and your Menhir’s light goes out, leaving you alone in the myst. So instead of doing something you want to do, like exploring ploy threads, you’ll spend hours of your gameplay grinding out encounters to stockpile the resources you need to survive and light the next Menhir, all so you can maybe explore one or two more cards before you go back to the resource grind.

That menhir lighting loop can be exhausting, both mechanically and thematically. There’s a version of survival pressure that enhances immersion, making every decision feel meaningful and every success feel earned, but in Tainted Grail, so far it feels like busywork that exists to slow you down and gate the more interesting parts of the experience. Spending hours grinding for resources so that you can afford to take a handful of meaningful actions doesn’t create tension so much as it creates inertia. I don’t feel like I’m taking bold choices or making risks, I’m just stabilizing your position just enough to keep going, kicking the can down the road while the systems demand I spend more time amassing resources to dump into a bonfire. And then when I finally do have the resources to do something interesting, I’ve forgotten what I wanted to do in the first place.

The encounters add another layer to this, and they’re probably the most interesting and most frustrating part of the design at the same time. The card-based combat system revolves around playing cards from your hand and building a timeline of events, where the matching icons put red cubes on your enemy. That, coupled with the different effects each card doesn’t, each encounter feels like a puzzle, asking you to make the most of a limited hand while dancing around the consequences of your actions. There can be a brief moment of glory when you manage to evade the enemy’s attack and set up a strong next turn, especially when you can coordinate with other players land that final blow to end the outcome in a dramatic flourish. In theory, it’s clever and engaging.

In practice, especially in a multiplayer setting, it can become a slog. Because the resource system is so punishing and resources are so tight, every decision feels like it needs to be optimized, and that leads to extended discussions about the best possible sequence of plays. A single encounter stretches into a 30-minute discussion as each player analyzes their options, weigh risks, then checks what the other players have landed on, only to go back and reevaluate their options again, all to end up with sequence of moves that has us taking one damage instead of two. And even when you do make progress, the combat system pushes back against you by just straight up undoing some of your progress, removing the cubes you’ve placed, moving the goal posts further away. It creates this rhythm where you’re constantly teetering on the edge of success, only to be dragged back to the start by a bad draw or an unfavourable tag, turning what should have been a moment of triumph into yet another round of recovery.

All of this is compounded by the multiplayer experience, which feels fundamentally at odds with how the game wants to be played. With three players, if the party separates, then individual turns become long, involved processes where one person is actively engaging with the story, reading the verses, deciding how they want to approach the encounter while the others watch and occasionally offer input. If you enter encounters together, you’ll spend 3 actions (one for each player), and everyone gets to be involved, but not all the rewards scale to the party size making this choice feel wasteful. It feels like both choices are bad, but to add onto this, Tainted Grail often forces players back together. Particularly because lighting the Menhirs require the party to be gathered before they can be lit, but also because you’ll often run into an encounter that requires specific traits that you might not have. Splitting up to cover the most ground seems like the best option, but that makes the game contort from a cooperative experience into 3 solo games where you need to wait for your turn with the encounter book.

What’s frustrating is that I can see a version of this game that works much better for me. Stripped of the multiplayer downtime, with pacing entirely under my control, I suspect a solo experience would allow the narrative and exploration to breathe in a way they currently don’t. The decision-making would feel more immediate, the consequences more personal, and honestly, I’d probably just enact a house rule and turn all the resource requirements down a touch. But I don’t really play solo games, let alone big narrative ones, and that makes it difficult for me to meet Tainted Grail on the terms where it might shine the brightest.

That friction, between what the game is and what I want it to be, runs through my entire experience. I genuinely enjoy the world that’s been created here, and I find myself drawn to its mysteries in a way that few campaign games manage. The reinterpretation of Arthurian legend, the sense of decay and loss, the slow uncovering of what happened to the heroes who came before you, all of it is so intriguing. I want to follow those threads, to see where they lead, and to uncover the larger picture that’s being hinted at in fragments.

But the gameplay systems wrapped around that world feel like they’re constantly pushing back against that curiosity. Every step forward is negotiated, every moment of progress paid for in resources and time. Instead of feeling like I’m uncovering a story, it often feels like I’m working a day job to earn the right to read a single chapter, before I have to return to the resource grind.

There’s also the lingering issue of the revised rules, the so-called “2.0” ruleset that supposedly addresses many of the complaints surrounding the original system. On one hand, it’s encouraging to see a game evolve and improve based on player feedback. On the other, it highlights how rough the initial experience can be, and I find myself resistant to the idea of needing to retrofit a game mid-campaign to get the “best” version of it. I don’t particularly want to print updated materials, rely on apps, or navigate multiple versions of the same system just to smooth out an experience that should have been fun, right out of the box.

Where I’ve ultimately landed, at least for now, is that Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon is not a bad game, not by a long shot, but it is a frustrating one. There are ideas here that I genuinely admire, and a world that I find compelling enough to keep thinking about even when I’m not playing. But the combination of punishing resource management system, drawn-out encounters, and a multiplayer structure that introduces more slog than flow, makes it difficult for me to enjoy the experience. I can see the version of this game that I might love, probably one that’s through solo play and house rules, but I shouldn’t have to house rule a game to make it palatable. The version of Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon that’s in front of me feels weighed down by its own systems. I’m drawn to Avalon, but I’m increasingly exhausted by what it asks of me to stay there.