Vincent Cassel Voices Napoleon in English for a Polish Horror Game. French Voices Come Only If Players Ask

A French star is playing the French emperor in English. Vincent Cassel, 59, voices Napoleon Bonaparte in Valor Mortis, a first-person horror game from the Polish studio One More Level that launched on 13 October. The studio’s co-founder says the English-only voice track was a business decision, and that French voices will come only if enough players ask for them.

Valor Mortis is a soulslike set in an alternate 19th century. Napoleon’s army marches east across Europe, a mysterious substance makes his soldiers stronger, and then it turns them into zombies and half-animal creatures. Players take the part of William, a soldier brought back from the dead. Lyrical Games publishes it for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S, and it went onto Game Pass on day one.

The voice cast was the headline from the start. Cassel plays Napoleon, Jennifer English plays The Shrike, a resistance leader, and James Alexander plays William. Behind them sit a few more names, including the Polish musician Adam “Nergal” Darski as Captain Raphael.

“A cousin of the family”

Cassel says the role found him through his mother’s side. He told AFP it “did ring a bell” for him because of his Corsican origins, and in the game’s own promotional film he explains why: “My grandmother and my auntie used to tell me that he’s a cousin of the family.” Napoleon was born in Corsica, and the actor grew up hearing the stories.

Image: Lyrical Games, from the official Vincent Cassel film.

The studio’s side of the casting is the part that makes people smile. Radoslaw Ratusznik, the One More Level co-founder, told AFP the team first contacted Cassel’s agents almost as a joke. “We reached the agent and we had some conversations. And they were on board. And we were, ‘oh, my God, that’s so amazing’,” he said. For a small studio best known for Ghostrunner, a Black Swan and Ocean’s Twelve actor saying yes was the kind of surprise a project remembers.

The official behind-the-scenes film shows how the sessions looked. Cassel sits in a dark studio in front of a screen carrying the logo of a Paris audio company, and the film credits Jason Baughan as voice director. A shot of the script shows it living in a spreadsheet, one line per row, with soldier’s lines such as “Get up, soldier! Scrub the bloody muck from your eyes.” The film does not say whose line that is.

Image: Lyrical Games, from the official Vincent Cassel film.

English first, French if players ask

The odd part is the language. A Corsican-rooted French actor is giving Napoleon an English voice, and the game ships with no French track. Ratusznik did not hide the reason. “As a small team we have to make tough decisions about what we can ship,” he said. According to AFP, the English voices were a commercial decision, and French voices will be added only if enough players want them.

That is a sentence worth reading twice if you voice characters for a living in a language other than English. A studio of that size does not treat a local voice track as part of the game. It treats it as an extra to be earned by demand, after launch, with demand as the test. Whether a French cast is ever recorded, and who would play Napoleon in it, is an open question. The official announcement does not say whether Cassel recorded the emperor’s lines in French as well.

The other lead played Shadowheart

Jennifer English is the second name the studio put in front. She is known to players as Shadowheart in Baldur’s Gate 3 and Maelle in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and she gets a film of her own in the same series, released on 6 October, a day before Cassel’s.

Image: Lyrical Games, from the official Jennifer English film.

Her film, like his, was made by the publisher and posted on its own channel. The name card reads “The Shrike, Jennifer English”, and behind her a monitor shows character art of the resistance leader in four poses. The idea is plain. If a voice is the reason someone buys a game, give the voice a face and a name on screen.

What working voices can take from it

There are two lessons here that have nothing to do with a Napoleon who turns his army into monsters. The first is that the name sells. A studio with a modest budget put its two best-known voices in their own films, a day apart, in the week of launch. If you are a game voice, your credits are part of the marketing, and these films are the proof.

Image: Lyrical Games and One More Level.

The second is the one that stings. The best-known voice in the game is speaking a language the emperor never spoke, and the market that would hear him in his own language gets nothing until it speaks up. That is what “ship first, localise on demand” looks like in practice. It is now an openly stated plan, from the person running the studio.

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For the French voice community, the practical point is easy to state. A French track for Valor Mortis, if it happens, will be a fresh set of jobs created by players asking for them. Nobody outside the studio can say yet whether that happens.

Sources: AFP via Kuwait Times, 13 Oct 2026; GamingTrend, 9 Oct 2026; eXputer; Minute Mirror, 12 Oct 2026; ixbt.games citing The Talks, 28 Sep 2026; Lyrical Games’ official Valor Mortis behind-the-scenes films with Jennifer English (6 Oct 2026) and Vincent Cassel (7 Oct 2026). Images: frames from those films, Lyrical Games and One More Level.

Lee este artículo en español: Vincent Cassel da voz a Napoleón en inglés en un juego de terror polaco. Las voces en francés llegan solo si los jugadores las piden

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