A trek across a plague ridden medieval Italy to save your beloved. Is it worth the excursion? Find out in our 1348 Ex Voto Review.

Medieval times certainly seemed like a bleak time for the common-folk. Not only did you a feudal system that kept you in squalor, but you a ruling class that seemingly despised and oppressed you. And, on top of that, you had to worry about crusades, wars and disease. Apart from covering some of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, 1348 Ex Voto isn’t a Darksiders game. It is a quest of hope, even when the odds are against you; something that feels fitting given the obstacles you face in enjoying 1348: Ex Voto.

The All is Lost Moment

1348 Ex Voto is a story about love, honour and vows (Ex Voto translates to ‘from a vow’). You play as Aeta, a young knight-errant. A young woman in a patriarchal world, Aeta’s appearance leads many to think she is a young male, and often make comments to this affect throughout the game. Very much in the vein of Mulan, presenting herself as more masculine is the way to achieve her goals of becoming a fully-fledged knight proper.

At the beginning of the game, Aeta is training with her close friend, and romantic interest, Bianca. Voiced by Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s Jennifer English, Bianca is a young servant at the castle where Aeta is a knight-errant, though to be honest, I never felt this was properly established. We learn that Bianca is being shipped off to a convent as her parents cannot afford to raise her.

It isn’t long before your town is under siege by raiders. Aeta, who let Bianca return ahead of her, now rushes through the town to learn that she has been taken. Thus begins the game proper, with Aeta (played confidently by Alby Baldwin) swearing a vow (Ex Voto) to track down Bianca and hold those responsible to justice. The closing cutscene of the first chapter is an impressive watch and seems to set the tone for the rest of the game. After my time with the demo, it certainly left me wanting more.

Questing, Not Coasting

What follows is a quest across medieval Italy to find Bianca. You will cross the Italian countryside, mountains, ruins and castles, slaughtering enemies and seeking Bianca. The story is endearing enough to want to see how it resolves itself. The emotion and drive from Aeta throughout is a constant in the story. You want her to succeed. Encountering enemies and NPCs, you feel put in her shoes and feel the ongoing barriers that are put in her way. Constantly put down and belittled and underestimated, it makes her successes feel more triumphant and defiant.

She is the face of humanity in the face of some unspeakable horrors, both in terms of the actions of the Flagellanti, the raiders who are butchering innocents, and the unfortunate consequences of a Europe plagued by the ‘pestilence’ a disease that is ripping through the populace. Given that the game is set in 1348, we can assume that this is the Black Death, or the bubonic plague. White crosses adorn the door ways of plague ridden residents and should feel familiar for any Plague Tale fans. Occasionally, you’ll happen upon wrapped corpses (plural) or fly-ridden horse cadavers. Painting a pretty grim picture of what ravages folk are facing.

At the end of some chapters, you get a feel of ‘your princess is another castle’ as you often ‘just missed’ Bianca. Thankfully, that is not the case for the story. It has a genuinely surprising twist towards the end, but if I’m honest I found some of the rest of the game a little questionable as a result of that. I’m not going to post any spoilers here, but given the world we’re in, in 1348, how has this setup happened?

Combat’s All Folks

Of course, you’re not just going for a romp through a plague-ridden medieval Italy. You’ll be entering into combat with many an enemy. The combat in the game is touted as being based on medieval European martial arts, and to the games credit, when it works, it feel really satisfying.

Aeta has just the one weapon, a long sword. You can fight in one-handed or two-handed stances. You have a guard bar, which acts as a sort of stamina bar before your guard is broken and leaves you open for attack. Enemies also have this, and you’ll need to stagger them before you can do damage to their actual health.

You can unlock several new abilities, including additional attacks for your combos, as well as abilities such as ‘Perfect Parry’ and ‘Perfect Dodge’ that give you an edge in battle. These abilities are great additions, and the parrying in particular feels great when you’re in flow of combat.

Blunted Blade

The combat, though, is often infuriating. One on one, it largely works and is a satisfying experience. Throw more than one enemy into the mix though, oh boy. The targeting system is a bit all over the place. In combat, the game automatically focuses on a target. You can use the right stick to switch targets but it isn’t overly intuitive or clear which target it’ll focus on immediately. That’d be fine, to degree, if you had the control of the targeting, but unfortunately, you don’t. The game tries to priorities the enemy it thinks is a threat, which makes sense on paper. If someone’s going to attack you, they should be the person you focus on.

The problem is that the enemies surround and swarm you when there’s multiples of them and the camera and targeting doesn’t react until the person is already attacking. This means you are guessing when to defend. You end up having to create space yourself and are often wrestling with a combo of the targeting and the camera. Occasionally I found myself backed into a corner, stuck on the environment, or against another enemy and just taking endless hits.

A particularly infuriating fight was when I was attacking one enemy, but the targeting system wanted to focus on another enemy who was on the floor above, and currently not in the combat with me. This made is incredibly hard to attack the enemy who was actually fighting me!

To Arms

There’s a good variety of enemies. Many have different weapons and this brings with them a variety of attacks and combos. This keeps you on your toes and keeps the combat interesting, when it’s not being buggy and weird!

Several boss fights take place throughout the game, and these revolve around reducing the boss’s guard bar several times. These are pretty fun, and are set up well, with both Aeta and the boss chatting to one another. Though some of the dialogue does get repeated fairly regularly.

Despite how much a menace the last boss was, and how annoying the Saint trophy was, I did enjoy the final fight. Punctuated with cutscenes between each phase, it was well played out and kept the stakes in your mind as you fought.

In between combat, you’ll solve simple puzzles, and navigate the chapters exploring for food and collectibles. Some of the chapters felt a bit sparse in places, but overall I think it had a good balance of combat and story-telling through the abandoned places you were exploring.

Parts, Trinkets, Treasures and Paper (oh my!)

As you work your way through the game’s nine chapters, you’ll find a variety of collectibles to upgrade Aeta or add to the lore. You’ll find treasure tokens that you add to a necklace for Bianca. Trinkets can be found in each chapter that gives you buffs in combat; unlock the charge attack instant kill was a game changer and felt accurate in terms of the combat too.

Your weapon can be upgraded by finding various weapon parts. These allow you to upgrade different parts of your sword. There are also scraps of papers to pick up. These give you skill points that you can use to upgrade your health, guard bar and food carrying capacity (food being how you recover your health when you’ve taken damage). You can also use paper to unlock new abilities in combat, as well as additional attacks to your combo.

A Sight for Eyesore Eyes

1348 Ex Voto looks great. The team Sedulo have done a great job capturing the medieval Italian landscape and its different environments, really well. I particularly noted the use of light and thought it was handled well. The contrast between running through a brightly lit vineyard, and the dark and dreary ruins was noticeable.

The character animations are a mixed bag. In-game they look fine and there’s some great detail. But, in cutscenes (not including the epic one at the end of Chapter 1), what are those faces! I can’t tell you exactly what, but they look weird or off, like the faces are a bit like plastecine, but not in a charming Wallace and Gromit way. I also noticed a lot of clipping in the character’s outfits, parts of cloth cutting through armour. It was fairly noticeable.

Sounds Good to Me

I have to give a special shoutout to the voice acting in the game. Of course, we’re familiar withthe excellent Jennifer English, but Alby Baldwin as Aeta was excellent too. I also thought that the enemies and NPCs brought a great level talent to the game. The standard was great.

The music and sound effects did a great job of setting the mood. Occasionally, the combat music ebbed in and out midst battle, as though the track ran out and needed to start again, but that’s a minor quibble.

Plagued

1348 Ex Voto has bugs and weirdness going on. In almost every chapter I encountered something off, or where I needed to restart checkpoint to sort an issue. Sometimes Aeta wouldn’t jump to climb up a crate. Other times she wouldn’t draw her weapon. Sometimes she would not attack whilst mid-combat. Other times I needed to press ‘x’ to crawl through a hole, but yet it wouldn’t respond. Or it would 180 me, instead of crawling through. Many climb areas / crawl spaces needed a very specific lining up to make it happen.

It’s safe to say that you’ll likely encounter a bug or two. Credit to Sedulo, they are putting out regular patches to make improvements, but there’s a fair few issues. Thankfully, there’s been nothing game breaking from my time with it. Though if you were like me you’ll find them annoying, particularly with the combat stuff.

Mapping the attack and charge attack to R2 makes sense, I suppose, but I found the button pushes crossed over each other, and sometimes a slightly held long press for a regular attack ended up an unwanted charge attack. Sometimes Aeta would just start charging up and not even release the attack, even if I wasn’t holding the attack button. I am also certain that there are some input issues when blocking and parrying. I know some of it will be my timing but sometimes she just did not move.

Avoid Like the Plague?

Much like Aeta’s quest, players of 1348 Ex Voto have some challenges to face in getting through to the end. If you power through the various bugs and design issues with the combat, you’ll find a decent 7 to 8 hour game that gives you a bleak look into a plague-ridden Europe. Buboes and all, 1348 Ex Voto’s strong voice cast, great environments and lighting might not be enough to avoid a big white X on it.

1348 Ex Voto was reviewed on PS5 Pro.

1348 Ex Voto is available on PC and PS5. It released on 12 March 2026.