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The first public build of Valor Mortis was a global pre-alpha playtest that ran from October 6 to October 13, 2025. It is the origin of most early hands-on impressions of the game, and the studio has described its feedback as directly responsible for several systems changes that followed. Everything in that build was pre-alpha and a good deal of it has since changed.

Distribution

Announced in August 2025 as running for five days, the window shipped roughly as promised. Sign-ups were free and the build was localised into fifteen languages.

What Was In It

The build was a condensed version of the game's first level, the material that later became Chapter I: Revival. The studio's own pre-announcement described it as covering basic combat styles, a variety of enemies to duel, the first branches of the skill tree, and one big challenging abomination at the end. That closing fight was General Lothaire.

The mention of skill tree branches is worth noting on its own: it is the only first-party use of the phrase "skill tree" for this game, and it predates the Catalysts framing that later material uses.

What the Build Ran On

The studio published a minimum profile for the playtest specifically, stressing that performance and optimisation had not been prioritised at that stage. These are historical figures for a pre-alpha build, not the game's requirements; the System Requirements page carries the current ones.

Changes Carried In From Events

Before the playtest the game had been shown at three events in August and September 2025. The studio said it had already added or adjusted several things from that feedback: localisation into fifteen languages, a field-of-view slider, keyboard remapping and multiple controller presets, and changes to game balance and enemy locations.

Known Issues

The studio published a long known-issues list with the build, which is a useful picture of how rough a pre-alpha genuinely is. Selected entries:

Fourlegs is named only here, in the playtest known-issues list. No later first-party material has used the name.

Hotfix

A build update landed on October 10, 2025. It fixed crashes tied to corrupted save files and added checks to prevent that corruption, stopped the Fire Transmutation disappearing from the player's equipment, improved enemy collision detection, corrected a bug that respawned the player or their Catalysts far from the place of death, improved the Eternal Guard's attack selection pattern, and fixed frame generation being enabled by default.

Contests and Community

The studio ran speedrun, screenshot and fan-art contests through the playtest, with copies of the finished game as prizes, and split the speedrun category into in-bounds and out-of-bounds runs. Community runs cleared the playtest level in under six minutes during the window and under five minutes by the end of it, which is the first sign of the speedrunning scene that later formed around the demo.

What It Changed

Two outcomes are on the record. The studio said it received over ten thousand survey responses, and in December 2025 it published a development update naming the three most common pieces of combat feedback and what it planned to do about each: combat readability, keyboard control defaults, and target lock behaviour. Those commitments are covered on the Combat page and in the Development timeline. A first round of playtest statistics, covering attempts, kills and deaths per encounter, was published alongside the November 2025 trailer.

What Is Still Open

As of September 13, 2026, the studio has not published a total participant count for the playtest on its own, on the official store listing, the official site or its Steam development posts. Its August 2026 figure of hundreds of thousands of players covers the playtest and the demo together, and its separate figure of more than 250,000 players covers the demo alone. A second playtest was teased in May 2026 and never materialised as a playtest; the public demo took its place in June.