Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon

9% of reviews raise bugs, glitches, softlocks or getting stuck, and this comes up in 17% of negative reviews. Some describe quest-breaking states: killing or angering a character the main quest needs (the blacksmith who must repair the gong, or a faction the player refuses to side with), a bounty that becomes "unforgivable" and turns a whole town hostile, dialogue choices that silently close off the main quest, and quest items lost when a ragdolled body flies off a cliff. "My problem is that the way in which I made the main quest inaccessible was not only stupid, but I wasn't informed of it." Smaller glitches include falling through terrain, elevators that drop the player through the floor, and summons that get stuck or block the way. Reviewers joke about the game's own unstuck option: "There's an option in the pause menu in case you get stuck in level geometry. It's that kind of game." Some long-time players say patches fixed most of what they hit, while reviews from 2026 still report quests that could not be finished.

8% of reviews raise performance, crashes, save corruption or launch-time file checks, and these issues appear in 20% of negative reviews. Several describe the same pattern: the opening prison runs fine, then frame rates fall in the open world and in hub towns. Reviewers blame a CPU-bound engine ("this is a Unity game and is not well optimized at that, you will be CPU bound HEAVILY."), pop-in, heavy fog, the vegetation setting and memory leaks that slow the game until a restart, and some Steam Deck owners question its Verified badge. Others report crashes and, in a smaller set of reviews, corrupted or lost saves, some after patches. Some players report smooth play, and some say performance improved a great deal over time: "Early Access had horrible performance, current release has very good performance".

8% of reviews talk about balance, difficulty spikes, damage sponges, nerfs or the game becoming too easy, and these complaints appear in 16% of negative reviews. The curve reviewers describe: a hard start, spikes at certain bosses and on entering each new region, where ordinary enemies have far more health ("bandits in the third zone have comparable HP to bosses in the first zone"), and then a point where a developed build flattens everything, even on high difficulty: "there was a tipping point at which the rest of the game became very, very easy." Magic and summoning get named as the easy route and stealth as a weak one, especially against bosses that lock the player into an arena after a cutscene. One reviewer put it briefly: "it's not too hard, it's not too easy, it's inconsistent."

The developers' balance changes split the audience further. In early March 2026 a few players blamed patch 1.20 for raising enemy health and cutting experience gains: "Update 1.20 ruined this game." "No matter the difficulty you chose, mobs are bloated hit point sponges." In the week of 2 March 2026, the positive share fell to 80.4%. Reviews from the autumn of 2025 show the same anger over nerfs to crit and mage builds, from players whose builds stopped working mid-playthrough: "Treating it much like a competitive MMO rather than a singleplayer experience that already has a difficulty setting." Other players welcomed the harder tuning, the optional challenge mode and the diminishing-returns setting.

4% of reviews raise quality-of-life problems. They include no maps inside large dungeons and castles ("No maps for many large interior areas"); few fixed fast-travel points, with campfire travel costing a consumable; a horse barely faster than running; three quick slots and potion variants that do not stack; encumbrance in a game full of ingredients; upgrade costs that climb into the hundreds of thousands of gold while loot sells for a tenth of its listed value; and a default where left click swings the right hand (one reviewer quotes patch notes from April 2026 that added rebinding for attack and block). One recommending reviewer wrote that "the UI feels like an afterthought".

3% of reviews complain about fetch quests, back-and-forth errands or an empty, static world, and these complaints appear in 9% of negative reviews. Reviewers describe NPCs who stand in the same spot all game, towns with a handful of residents, quest chains that send the player across the map to speak to one person and back ("I ended up feeling like Avalon Postal service after a while."), and a volume of side quests that wears some players down. "The world feels static," wrote one reviewer who still recommends the game. Several place the worst of it in Acts 2 and 3.

3% of reviews point at presentation problems. Reviewers say lip sync barely exists, subtitles often differ from the spoken line, some lines sound recorded on home microphones or keep audible retakes, and names like Cuanacht and Dal Riata are pronounced several different ways. Some call the third-person view, which they say was added after launch, an afterthought. Recommending players raise this too: "Aside from the low res cutscenes and bad lip syncing, it's a really fun game."

1.6% of reviews (160) accuse the game of using generative AI, and these accusations appear in 10% of negative reviews. Players point at murals, paintings, item icons and cutscene stills, and at text: bestiary and codex entries and dialogue that they say read like ChatGPT output, a few down to the em dashes. Many of these reviews are about disclosure: they say the Steam store page doesn't mention AI use, and that "the consumer still deserves to know to make informed purchases." The complaint came in waves, highest in August 2026, when 4% of that month's reviews raised it ("cut corners with AI art, icons, and writing"). Some recommending reviewers mention it as a mark against an otherwise good game.

Under 1% of reviews complain that the game verifies its files at startup and after updates, sometimes for 10 to 30 minutes and sometimes in a loop that never finishes. Most of these are negative reviews, and nearly half come from players with under 5 hours, who object that the wait "counts toward your playtime for the refund window". The complaint peaked in December 2025. A handful of reviews also object to the game's analytics and data collection.