Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon – Sanctuary of Sarras Review – An Excellent Addition

When Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon got its 1.0 release earlier this year, our own review regarded it as a pretty good game that, while having some rough edges, made up for it thanks to its fantastic world-building, intricate lore, and generally fun setting. This setting has now seen a surprisingly well-thought-out expansion with the new Sanctuary of Sarras DLC. Sanctuary of Sarras doesn’t dramatically change how The Fall of Avalon plays, but it’s a strong expansion where it counts: story, atmosphere and lore. Spoiler warning: this review discusses major base-game story details.

While the base game focused quite a bit on the classic Arthurian legend and twisting it into a dark reflection of itself, the DLC adds a surprising amount of extra detail that makes it fun to delve further into all the history that you can find through side quests, random conversations, books and item descriptions you might find along the way. Sanctuary of Sarras manages to accomplish the rare feat of actually making the story of the base game better just by existing.

"Sanctuary of Sarras manages to accomplish the rare feat of actually making the story of the base game better just by existing."

The core premise behind Sanctuary of Sarras revolves around a group that decides that Avalon under Arthur’s rule was turning out to be a little too hellish for their tastes, wants to return to what they call the “homeland” – a place far away from Avalon. This group was led by Merlin’s apprentice Nimue, and as you might expect, Arthur was incredibly displeased about this would-be rebellion happening under his rule. While he ultimately decided that he should let this group try and find their way to the homeland, and likely die trying, Merlin decided to take things a step further and sank the entire fleet while still cursing them with magic that kept them alive. This would ultimately lead to the creation of an entirely new kingdom forming underwater – the realm of Sarras, named after the ship leading the group.

The story itself ties into that of Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon; you, along with Arthur, end up in the ocean after getting mysterious hints from a stranger telling you that the ocean’s depths hold important secrets to uncover. On getting there, you start peeling back layers of not only the story of the ship Sarras and how its sinking led to the formation of the realm of Sarras itself, but also more details about what Avalon was like under Arthur’s and Merlin’s rule in the fallout after the Red Death. In many ways, the central story of Sanctuary of Sarras is self-contained, with you never really leaving the underwater realm over the course of its runtime. However, the fact that it ties in so well with the base game is what makes the story especially interesting, since you also get to hear Arthur’s own thoughts about Sarras and its denizens.

"The core premise behind Sanctuary of Sarras revolves around a group that decides that Avalon under Arthur’s rule was turning out to be a little too hellish for their tastes"

Mechanically, Sanctuary of Sarras only really has one major addition to the game: a new progression system that revolves around exploring the world and finding a new passive skill tree that gives you some added bonuses to make your time in the DLC easier. Generally speaking, enemies in the DLC scale in power alongside your own level. This means that one of the best ways to get stronger than them is by getting the various buffs offered by the new skill trees, which are split across three distinct branches: Warrior, Rogue and Mystic. The bonuses are just passive ones, like letting you do more damage. They do affect your playstyle, however, since there are plenty of choices to specialise further in your preferred playstyle by, for example, getting damage bonuses according to the weight of your armour in the Warrior tree, or by applying damage-multiplying debuffs in the Rogue tree that encourages faster attack speeds.

You can switch your tree at any time, which makes experimenting painless. If you’re bored of playing an archer, for example, you can just equip the right bits of gear and switch to a magic using playstyle, while also getting power ups courtesy of the Mystic tree.

When it comes to core gameplay design, Sarras is quite an interesting place. Rather than being open for free roam like the base game, the DLC’s zone is instead separated into distinct underwater islands with access to other islands being blocked off by gates with guardian fish spirits protecting them. Each one of these islands is fairly small on its own, and as a whole, the map is smaller than what you would see from the base game. While this might sound like a letdown in theory, in practice, the relatively smaller zones throughout the map ensure that you’re never really running around for too long without something interesting happening nearby.

"Each one of these islands is fairly small on its own, and as a whole, the map is smaller than what you would see from the base game."

Eventually, however, you will want to travel to the other parts of Sarras, and to do this, you must convince the sea creature guardians – referred to as Maws of various things, like Maw of the Current or Maw of the Tide, for example – to let you use the gates to travel to other “islands”. Each one of the Maws tends to have a different request that you must fulfill before you are allowed entry through the gate. These requests can range from fighting off nearby enemies, to having a philosophical discussion about the nature of a dictatorship, to even cooking a specific food. Once you’ve completed the request, however, the gate is free to use at your leisure to travel back and forth across the various parts of the DLC’s map.

The DLC’s other major strength lies in its side quests. While there’s an excellent main quest to follow, with some downright fantastic writing that makes the whole world of Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon more interesting, the side quests go a step further in giving you a glimpse into how this underwater realm survives. Just about every quest goes into some aspect, be it how humans mutated into hybrid ocean creatures, or how they established relationships with other sea creatures, and in some cases, even what their day-to-day life means in their present form.

Enemy design is also quite interesting, both in terms of visual design as well as their behaviour. Visually, the enemies fulfil just about every undersea creature you can think of, ranging from tentacled beasts to barnacle-crusted zombies, fish people, serpents, and everything in between. In fights, they tend to behave how you might expect them to; the more serpentine enemies, for instance, will tend to focus on hit-and-run tactics that let them take advantage of their agility. Zombies, on the other hand, don’t use much in the way of tactics aside from trying to swarm you.

"Enemy design is also quite interesting, both in terms of visual design as well as their behaviour."

Boss fights also don’t really get particularly complex, with most of them revolving around you hanging back for a few seconds to wait for an opening to take advantage of. Some of the bosses are slower, which tends to favour builds that focus on ranged attacks like bows or magic. Others will be faster, with moves that let them close the distance quite fast, which favours builds that either focus on heavy armour or dodging. While you’re not going to get intricate puzzle bosses in Sanctuary of Sarras, the bosses still end up leaving a lasting impact because of their visual design.

Most of these new enemies and bosses can be found in the many new dungeons you can find all over the new map. Generally speaking, only some of these dungeons tend to offer anything more interesting than groups of enemies to fight in your quest for epic loot. A few, however, can offer up more interesting encounters; these tend to be tied to side quests as part of a larger narrative, and can provide some unique chances to have a conversation with, for example, a pair of particularly intelligent serpents that are only out to partake in scientific research rather than attacking anything in their paths. Essentially, while the combat spaces might be simple, the context provided by the narrative tends to serve as their saving grace.

The DLC also brings with it a lot of new gear, from weapons to armour pieces and even accessories like rings. However, these offer little in the way of gameplay-altering changes, instead merely being different ways to boost your stats. Depending on at what point of your journey through Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon you decide to kick off your journey into the DLC, you might very well end up with gear that’s much more powerful than anything Sanctuary of Sarras has to offer. To that end, the biggest benefit to doing side quests and roaming off the beaten path to explore the world tends to be learning more about the world and lore rather than a shiny new sword. Since you need to reach Cuanacht in Act 2 to trigger the quest that starts the DLC, chances are high that you will have built up a tidy arsenal before you venture into the depths of Sarras.

"The DLC also brings with it a lot of new gear, from weapons to armour pieces and even accessories like rings."

While our review of the 1.0 release of Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon had noted that the title suffered from quite a few technical problems, these issues have seemingly been smoothed out in the months since. Playing the title on an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, a Radeon RX 7800 XT GPU, and 32 GB of DDR5-6000 RAM allowed me to maintain solid frame rates of over 100, with only the occasional hiccup when loading into a new area for the first time. I was able to comfortably crank up the graphics settings to the High preset while playing the title at 1440p, facing no issues for most of my play time.

Sanctuary of Sarras is an excellent addition to Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, thanks in large part to how well it helps in fleshing out the already-excellent worldbuilding and lore of the base game. While the DLC’s story is largely self-contained, it also happens to give you a lot more context about the characters of Arthur and Merlin, and slowly learning about a medieval fantasy take on an underwater civilization is a cool concept in and of itself. It isn’t mandatory to understand the main story. Still, it meaningfully enriches the broader mythology of Tainted Grail, which helps to enhance the overarching story thanks to how it builds on the foundations that were already laid by the base game.

This game was reviewed on PC.