Development

Valor Mortis is being developed by One More Level and published by Lyrical Games. As an original IP, it represents a new direction for the studio while building on its established strengths in fast, first-person action. The game is in active development for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X and S, and is set to launch on October 13, 2026, arriving day one on Xbox Game Pass.

The Studio

One More Level is a Krakow-based studio best known for Ghostrunner and its sequel Ghostrunner 2, both first-person action games celebrated for their precise, high-speed combat. That pedigree is a natural fit for a first-person Soulslike, where timing, reading enemies, and deliberate movement are central. With Valor Mortis the team applies its first-person expertise to a slower, more methodical combat style grounded in stamina management, parrying, and weighty melee exchanges rather than the breakneck pace of its earlier work.

From Cyber Slash to Valor Mortis

The project did not start under this name. The developer's own filings record that the game was previously developed under the code name Cyber Slash, and that the current publishing arrangement replaced an earlier one that had been terminated. The studio is a publicly listed Polish company, which is why the commercial history of the project is on the record in a level of detail that is unusual for a game of this size.

The Publishing Agreement

The agreement with Lyrical Games was concluded on October 9, 2025, and its terms are set out in a regulatory filing rather than a press release. Three points matter for understanding who owns what.

That co-publishing structure is why the PC store page credits One More Level as a publisher alongside Lyrical Games, and why the money flowing in from the Game Pass agreement and from the later DLC annex is described as recoupable against the publisher's outlay rather than as revenue.

Publisher and Technology

Lyrical Games handles publishing duties for the project. On the technical side the game is built in Unreal Engine 5, and dev updates have called out engine features such as World Partition and Nanite that underpin the expansive environments and atmospheric, horror-leaning visuals of its corrupted alternate-history setting.

PC System Requirements

Ahead of launch, the Steam store lists provisional minimum and recommended PC specifications. The studio notes the specification is subject to change for the final release, so treat the figures below as a pre-launch target rather than a locked requirement. An SSD is listed as required at both tiers, and both call for a 64-bit operating system, DirectX 12, and 50 GB of storage.

Direction and Music

The project is led by game director Radosław Ratusznik, with Łukasz Wabik as lead designer and Krzysztof "Dalton" Pachulski as technical director. The score has been credited to Arkadiusz Reikowski, whose own credits include Silent Hill 2 Remake, The Medium, and Layers of Fear, together with Oskar Bala. That credit does not appear in first-party material. Re-checked on September 13, 2026 across the official store listing, the official site, the full run of the studio’s Steam development posts and the console catalogue entry, neither composer is named on any of them, so treat the music attribution as reported rather than confirmed until the shipped game carries a credits roll.

Announcement and Reveal

The game was revealed during Gamescom in August 2025, introducing its premise of a Napoleonic alternate history overrun by a supernatural plague. The reveal was paired with an extended Gamescom demo that gave press their first hands-on, with a focus on the opening level and the first major boss.

2025 Playtest

A pre-alpha global playtest ran from October 6 to October 13, 2025, distributed first through a Firstlook portal and then on Steam in staggered waves. The playtest covered a condensed first level with combat mechanics, skill tree branches, and a challenging boss encounter, and ran a five-day public window followed by community speedrun, fanart, and screenshot contests. A hotfix patch addressed crashes, save corruption, equipment bugs, and control mapping issues partway through.

Late 2025: The Crimson Plague

In November 2025 the team published a new gameplay trailer titled "The Crimson Plague", showing a darker nighttime village level with a stronger horror tone, mutated villager enemies, and an elite unit called The Relentless. The trailer also introduced a second named boss, Sergeant Gaspard "Cannonhand" Dubois, alongside the first round of playtest statistics.

Combat Improvements Devlog

In December 2025 the developers published a video addressing three combat issues raised by playtest feedback. They committed to improved enemy readability through clearer windups and audio cues, more flexible keyboard controls with custom binds, and refined target lock behavior for fights with multiple enemies at once.

Spring 2026: Emerging From Winter

A March 2026 developer update titled "Emerging from Winter" previewed new weapons, the design of the Relentless elite soldiers, and the technical achievements the team is hitting in Unreal Engine 5. The update included concept art of a blunderbuss carried by William and a first look beneath a Relentless helmet, and it pointed to an interview with technical director Krzysztof "Dalton" Pachulski on the studio's engine work. Pachulski was clear that Valor Mortis is not an open-world game: World Partition is being used to build sprawling levels that are much larger than anything in either Ghostrunner title rather than one continuous map. The same update credited Nanite with holding visual fidelity down at a manageable processing cost, and Niagara alongside atmospheric lighting for the particle work. The studio also travelled to PAX East in Boston that month.

Triple-i Initiative: Fall 2026 Confirmed

On April 9, 2026 the team appeared at the Triple-i Initiative showcase with a new gameplay trailer that locked in a Fall 2026 release window. The trailer revealed grapple hook and wall-running additions to the traversal toolkit, the new rapier melee weapon designed around timed parries and precise dodges, and a new boss called The Orphan, described as a Nephtoglobin abomination living in the city sewers. The studio characterized the project as content complete with alpha buttoning up, framing the remaining work as the final sprint to launch.

PAX East 2026

Valor Mortis returned to the show floor at PAX East 2026 with a roughly thirty-minute hands-on demo that covered the opening section and the first boss. Coverage from the demo confirmed concrete combat-system details, including a posture meter that drains as the player parries, an approximately seven-to-eight-slot weapon wheel, a perfect-parry punish on common enemies, and Metroidvania-style destructible barriers gating optional side areas with accessories and lore pieces.

Pre-Launch Outlook

In May 2026 the studio published a devlog in which the game director talked through the move from the first-person movement of its earlier work to the slower, more deliberate combat of this game, and said there would be another opportunity to play more of Valor Mortis soon. That opportunity turned out to be the public demo in June rather than a second playtest; no second playtest was ever run. The same post shared concept art of the rapier, a spread of firearms, and a historically-inspired bedroom.

With the project described as content complete and the alpha buttoned up, the rest of 2026 was framed around polish, public demo feedback and the launch itself. On June 11, 2026 the studio moved the release date from September 24 to October 13, 2026, citing a crowded September release window and the extra time to fold in demo feedback. Several demo hotfixes shipped in the days around that announcement to address crashes, performance and graphics-card support.

Xbox Games Showcase 2026

At the Xbox Games Showcase on June 7, 2026 the studio premiered a narrative-focused Release Date Trailer announcing a September 24, 2026 launch across PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X and S, with day one availability on Xbox Game Pass and Xbox Play Anywhere support. The same trailer revealed the actor Vincent Cassel as the voice of Napoleon Bonaparte, and a free playable demo went live on Steam alongside the showcase. The demo contains two levels: a refined version of the playtest battlefield, called Chapter 1: Revival, which teaches the combat system and ends in the General Lothaire boss fight, and a brand new level where the destroyed bridge to the Lighthouse must be crossed using transmutation traversal. Its second level also introduces a new blade weapon, the rapier, a new firearm, the musket, and a new shield Transmutation.

Steam Next Fest 2026

The free demo took part in Steam Next Fest in June 2026, the first time the studio opened the game to everyone without a sign-up. Steam highlighted Valor Mortis as one of the event's top demos, and the team responded by extending the demo for two extra weeks while it kept gathering feedback on the combat system. The demo's platforming drew a speedrunning scene, with runners clearing its later traversal level in only a few minutes, a nod to the fast movement of the studio's earlier first-person games. One More Level framed the extended window as time to keep fine-tuning and optimizing the game ahead of its October 13, 2026 release.

Summer 2026: Demo Return and Event Tour

The studio brought the demo back to PC for a second window running July 20 to August 7, 2026, timed around a run of summer showcases. One More Level said the team would be taking Valor Mortis to COREBLAZER and to ChinaJoy in Shanghai, and that the game would take part in a Steam publisher event running under the banner From Poland with Love. The studio described it as a chance to meet players around the world in the run-up to the October launch, and confirmed afterwards that the ChinaJoy showing had gone ahead, thanking attendees who played the game in Shanghai at the start of August 2026.

The same announcement doubled as a behind-the-scenes post, publishing production concept art for Sergeant Gaspard "Cannonhand" Dubois, for the corrupted villagers introduced in the Crimson Plague trailer, for the rapier, and for a set of ordinary world objects such as letters, notes, keys, and books. The studio noted that these smaller props were drawn to fit the Napoleonic setting even though most players will pass them by, and said it posts this kind of material regularly through its community channels.

Commercial Announcements

Two commercial details were disclosed in June 2026 through the developer's regulatory filings. The first, on June 7, confirmed an agreement between Lyrical Games and Microsoft placing the game on Xbox Game Pass from its release day for PC, Xbox Series X and S, and Xbox Cloud, with the payment from Microsoft counted toward recouping publisher costs under the co-publishing arrangement between the two companies. The second, on June 10, opened pre-orders for a boxed edition and set a recommended price for it. That figure was superseded on July 23, 2026, when a further filing lowered the recommended boxed price to 39.99 US dollars, expressly amending the June filing and applying only to the physical edition. The studio said the decision was taken together with its publishing partner after reviewing market conditions. Around the same time the studio also reported a change on its management board, with a vice-president stepping down effective June 9, 2026. Further detail on what each version includes lives on the Editions and Availability page.

September 2026: DLC and Post-Launch Financing

A further regulatory filing on September 4, 2026 recorded an annex to the publishing agreement the studio had signed with Lyrical Games on October 9, 2025. Under the annex the publisher takes on the cost of producing and releasing paid downloadable content and of running post-launch support, against a newly agreed milestone schedule whose delivery and acceptance is planned through October 4, 2027. The total guaranteed financing the publisher provides rises by the cost of that DLC and of the specified post-launch work, and the money remains recoupable from future sales on the same terms as the rest of the deal.

The filing also states that the annex provides for expanding the list of target platforms on which the game is planned to be available. It does not name any of them, and as of September 13, 2026 no additional platform has been announced on the official store listing, the official site, the console storefront listings or the studio's own development posts.

This is the first commitment to post-launch content for the game, and it puts a contractual horizon on support roughly a year past release. The Editions and Availability page carries what it means commercially.

August 2026: Responding to Demo Feedback

On August 9, 2026 the studio published a developer log built entirely around feedback from the public demo, presented by game director Radosław Ratusznik and lead designer Łukasz Wabik. The studio said more than 250,000 players had tried the demo across its two windows, and described the project as being in its polishing phase, with the game playing and performing better day by day ahead of the October 13 launch.

The team reported that the responses it liked hearing most were about the first-person combat system, and singled out the feel of landing a perfect parry, the boss fights, the way the game blends first-person shooter and Soulslike play, and the Napoleonic setting and atmosphere. The log then set out four areas the team wants to improve before release.

The demo jump the studio referred to is also the clearest statement so far that the finished game is divided into numbered chapters, and that the two demo levels sit at Chapter I and Chapter VII of that sequence. The total number of chapters has still not been given.

The studio confirmed separately that its ChinaJoy showing in Shanghai went ahead at the end of July 2026, thanking the players who came by and the feedback they gave.

August 2026: Gone Gold and the Story Trailer

On August 19, 2026 the studio announced that the game had gone gold. It explained that the version bound for physical discs was ready for printing, noted that the milestone does not bear directly on the PC build, and said the team had moved into final polishing: "Improving the details that will ensure that the game is absolutely the best it can be at launch." The same post placed the studio "just a few fortnights away from launch on October 13".

That post also set up the next reveal. The studio said its new trailer would premiere at gamescom Opening Night Live on August 25 at 19:30 CET, exactly a year after the game was first shown at the same event, and that it was partnering with AMD to put the game in front of attendees in Köln. It added that in the year since the reveal, "hundreds of thousands of players have played Valor Mortis in the Playtest and Demo versions".

The Story Trailer duly premiered on August 25, 2026. It runs ninety seconds, closes on the October 13 date, and is the first piece of marketing to give the protagonist a full name: William Dowsett. It also introduces several of the survivors he meets in the corrupted countryside and, for the first time, The Shrike, the rebel leader whose resistance the voice of Napoleon is pushing him to break. Announcing it, the studio said the finished game would deliver first-person Soulslike combat, "sprawling historical level design from the Napoleonic era", and "an intriguing conspiracy from the ashes of Napoleon's own writing". What the trailer revealed about the cast is covered on the Setting and Story page.

September 2026: The Final Stretch

On September 4, 2026 the studio published a development update written from its return from gamescom in Koln, where it said its stand had drawn hundreds of new players and where the Story Trailer had been its centrepiece. The post framed the trailer as a first look at the game's narrative depth and posed three questions it says the finished game answers: why William cannot remember his past, what the beast in the sandy desert is, and which of the remaining survivors are friends and which are foes. It described the survivors as few in number and each pivotal to William's fate.

The post carried two concrete pieces of news.

The update closed by saying the team was confident the game launching on October 13 would be much better than the demo, and repeated the date.

Status as of September 13, 2026

September 2026 launch announcements

On September 17, the studio announced the base game's $39.99, €39.99 and 149.99 zł launch prices and a $59.99, €59.99 and 199.99 zł Deluxe Edition. Deluxe includes a major story DLC planned for 2027 and several cosmetic packs before it. Multiple free updates are also planned after launch, without a published feature list. Editions and Availability records the package details.

The same announcement describes a 20-hour story and confirms dynamic field-of-view scaling for large boss encounters. On September 30, an extended gameplay overview narrated by William's actor, James Alexander, presented combat, progression and branching levels with secrets, shortcuts and side quests. The cast reveal names seven actor and character pairings, collected on the Voice Cast page.

The earlier PC targets on this page reflect the September 13 listing. The October 8 store requirements retain 16 GB RAM, DirectX 12 and 50 GB space at both tiers, but omit CPU, GPU, Windows-version and drive-type fields; System Requirements keeps both the current listing and the older dated targets.