VALOR MORTIS: Napoleon blown apart

We wake up in a forest grove surrounded by the corpses of French soldiers. We do not know when or who we are, nor what our purpose is, but we hear Napoleon's voice in our head, urging us forwards. If the characters in War And Peace had nightmares, they may well have looked like this.

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"It's hard to tell whether you're still alive or dead," says narrative lead Bogdan Graczyk. "You start as a soldier, and, as you experience the game, from tiny pieces of evidence you will piece together your backstory." Your first goal is to find other survivors, but what of Napoleon's voice? "It could be a manifestation of how powerful Napoleon's presence was in this world," Graczyk says cryptically. "Maybe it's a lasting memory of the Emperor's speech that you keep hearing."

The setting is less ambiguous, though still shrouded in mystery. "What if Waterloo isn't Napoleon's greatest defeat?" Graczyk teases. We are in the early 1820s, within a fictional second Eastern campaign for Napoleon and, for reasons unknown, the army has stalled. In reality, Napoleon's first Eastern campaign, in 1812, was a disaster, as the French emperor could not sustain a prolonged war deep in Russian territory during a harsh winter. This alternate history looks equally ill-fated, but the reasons are more supernatural.