Valor Mortis Boss Guide: How to Beat Every Story Boss

One More Level — the studio behind Ghostrunner and Ghostrunner 2 — launched Valor Mortis on October 13, 2026, and it isn't a cyberpunk parkour game. You play William Dowsett, a soldier of Napoleon's Grande Armée who wakes up on a battlefield grave years after he should have died, carrying a plague that is also the only thing keeping him alive. The Europe around him has rotted into an alternate 19th-century timeline where Napoleon's Eternal Guard still marches, corrupted, and every other survivor you meet is deciding in real time whether William is friend or threat.

What matters for this guide is the combat. Valor Mortis is a first-person Soulslike, a genre almost nobody else has fully committed to, and the studio built its systems around parries, dual-wielded melee and ranged weapons, and unlockable magic specifically to make that perspective work. It launched at $39.99 on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S, with a voice cast that includes Vincent Cassel as Napoleon Bonaparte, Jennifer English as the rebel leader known as The Shrike, and Behemoth frontman Adam "Nergal" Darski voicing one of the bosses you'll meet below. Two major patches and a content update later, the game you're fighting through today plays differently from the one that launched in October, and this guide covers both how to beat its story bosses and what those patches actually changed underneath them.

01Combat Basics: Cutlass, Flintlock, Transmutations and Catalysts

You start the campaign with a cutlass and a flintlock pistol, and most of your build decisions from there are about what you add on top of them. You can block, dodge, or time a parry for a heavy damage window against incoming attacks — parries are the skill the game's difficulty curve leans on hardest. The flintlock is a precision tool: ammunition is limited, but it's accurate enough to target an enemy's exposed weak points when melee isn't safe.

Alongside your weapons, William channels Transmutations: supernatural powers drawn from the plague itself. The ESRB's own content description for the game confirms fire, stasis, and shield-type powers exist among them, and One More Level's official patch notes separately name a Flame Transmutation that bosses themselves can apply to allies. You unlock and upgrade Transmutations and weapons by spending Catalysts, the game's souls-like currency earned from kills and spent at Lantern checkpoints. Die, and your unspent Catalysts drop at the spot where you fell — you have to fight your way back to reclaim them before they're gone for good.

One detail worth knowing before you meet your first real boss: One More Level has said it built dynamic field-of-view scaling specifically so that the game's larger enemies stay readable in first person, since judging distance and wind-up on an oversized boss is a harder problem in this perspective than it is in a third-person Soulslike. It's a small thing, but it explains why bosses in Valor Mortis tend to telegraph their biggest swings with noticeably more space around them than the regular enemies do.

02How to Beat Every Story Boss After the Halloween Update

Every boss in Valor Mortis has been through at least one round of balance changes since launch, and One More Level's own patch notes are unusually specific about what makes several of them tick. Below is the campaign's boss lineup in story order, with strategy pulled directly from what the developers have confirmed fixing or tuning on each fight, not guesswork about movesets the studio hasn't talked about.

Valor Mortis Boss Order and Strategy

1. 1Lothaire caps Chapter II, not Chapter I — One More Level moved him back after demo players said the duel felt too punishing only 30 minutes into the game. Treat him as your first real check on parry timing rather than a speed bump, and use the extra chapter to get comfortable blocking and dodging before you commit to the fight.Chapter II
2. 2Patch notes confirm the Marshall can be finished off with a well-placed grenade, strong enough that One More Level had to fix a bug where a grenade kill sent his body clipping through the floor. Save at least one explosive for him instead of relying on your blades alone.Early-to-mid game
3. 3One More Level's own bug-fix notes confirm the Sphinx can be staggered by fire, so lead with a Fire Transmutation before closing in with melee combos. Don't assume a quiet fight is a safe one either — a now-patched bug could mute the boss's audio cues after you paused.Mid-game
4. 4Raphael strafes, walks, and shoots, and the October 21 patch specifically retuned those movement speeds alongside his block-and-stagger behavior. He also has a confirmed weak window: a Rapier heavy attack can stagger him out of his guard, so swap to that weapon the moment he turns defensive.Mid-game
5. 5The Bride teleports around her arena and could previously be cheesed for free from a specific rock pile — One More Level removed that exploit in the October 21 patch, so you'll need to fight her properly now. Stay mobile between her teleports and punish her landing recovery instead of chasing her mid-warp.Mid-to-late game
6. 6Aurelius genuinely has a second phase: a bug that let the fight end early after phase one had to be patched out, which tells you the real test only starts once you think you've won. Hold your healing Ferrofluid Flask in reserve for the transition instead of burning it during phase one.Late game
7. 7The first phase has a known camera-lock issue near the arena walls, and the second phase triggers when you pull open the arena doors during the boss's Windpush attack. Bait the Windpush on purpose, then go straight for the doors — pulling them at the wrong moment has been known to glitch the transition.Late game
8. 8The final fight summons corrupted copies of earlier bosses carrying Flame Transmutation effects, so expect burning adds on top of the Entity's own shield attacks. Clear or kite the adds first — the patch notes themselves note the Entity's shield can end up in the wrong position, as much a warning to stay mobile as a bug report.Final boss

03Best Build for Boss Fights: Weapons and Transmutations to Prioritize

You don't need to commit to one weapon for the whole campaign. The October 27 Halloween Update added new critical attacks specifically for the Rapier and the Saber, on top of existing hitbox and damage-window tuning from the October 21 patch that affected "many enemies and bosses." That combination makes a Rapier or Saber worth keeping upgraded even if your main loadout is heavier steel, since it's the weapon class the developers have been actively building boss-specific interactions around.

For Transmutations, Fire is the one you have direct, patch-confirmed evidence for: it's capable of staggering the Sphinx, and it's also the power the Entity's own corrupted allies carry into the final fight. Carry at least one Fire charge into any fight where you're not sure what you're facing. Keep a couple of grenades in reserve too — they're confirmed strong enough against the Iron Marshall that the developers had to patch a bug caused by killing him with one. None of this requires a full respec between bosses; it's closer to packing the right tool before a specific job.

04The October Patches: What Changed for Boss Fights

Three updates shaped the boss fights you're playing through today. The October 16 hotfix focused on crashes and a GPU driver-detection prompt, plus a fix for a Chapter 4 boss sequence that could fail to save progress. The October 21 patch went further: it retuned attack hitboxes and damage windows across "many enemies and bosses," specifically calling out the Risen Duelist, Eternal Guardsman, and Howler enemy types, and it shipped a long list of boss-specific fixes, from the Iron Marshall's grenade-kill bug to a Slaughtermill camera-lock issue and an exploit where Anna, the Bride Drowned in Tears, could be beaten for free from a specific rock pile.

The Halloween Update that followed on October 27 was aimed more at content than balance — new weapon skins and, more relevantly for this guide, new critical attacks for the Rapier and Saber — but it came bundled with another wave of boss bug fixes, including issues on The Orphan, Captain Raphael, The Bride, and the final boss, The Entity. One More Level posted about the update's free content directly:

In yesterday's update, we added a free set of weapon skins and finisher animations! Thank you to everyone who has played Valor Mortis so far! We've got a lot more we want to improve in the game

— Valor Mortis (@ValorMortis), October 28, 2026 on X

The pattern across all three patches is consistent: the developers have been using real player feedback to close exploits and smooth out inconsistent hit detection, not to make bosses easier outright. If a strategy you read about from launch week suddenly doesn't work, there's a good chance it's one of the specific fixes listed above.

05Should You Buy the Deluxe Edition, and What's Next

The base game sells for $39.99, and the $59.99 Deluxe Edition bundles a Major Story DLC, confirmed by One More Level for a 2027 release, along with several cosmetic packs delivered between now and then — including the free Halloween weapon skins everyone got regardless of edition. Beyond that confirmation, the studio hasn't detailed what the Story DLC actually adds: no new bosses, areas, or systems have been named yet, so treat anything you read about its contents elsewhere as unconfirmed until One More Level says otherwise. The safer buy today is the standard edition plus the $20 Deluxe upgrade later, once the DLC actually has a release window.

If you're still deciding whether the combat is for you, the developers' own Gameplay Overview trailer is the clearest official explanation of how Valor Mortis's systems fit together, narrated in character by William himself.

One More Level's Official Gameplay Overview trailer (released September 30, 2026), narrated in character by William, breaking down combat, weapon leveling and exploration.