Early on, enemies are punishing, watching for gaps in your movements and exploiting them accordingly. Combat is a weighty affair you'll generally be engaging in one-on-one sword duels, and if you find yourself up against a crowd, you've probably rushed through an area too quickly. Mortal Shell's lack of a cohesive narrative is a shame because the central gameplay loop is rewarding and satisfying. Combat In Mortal Shell Is Mostly Great Mortal Shell's combat is weighty and cathartic. I'm sure everything in Mortal Shell's world is deliberate and hand-crafted, but it feels cold and uninvolving. As such, it's hard to get interested in the characters or their struggles when you don't know who they are or why they're doing what they're doing. Although Mortal Shell does provide the player with goals, it doesn't sufficiently flesh out its world to make those goals feel emotionally involving. It's just unfortunate that Mortal Shell's world is so deliberately shrouded in unnecessary mystery.Įxemplars of the genre - Dark Souls, Hollow Knight, Salt and Sanctuary - execute ambiguity much more successfully because they don't feel the need to obscure even the most basic story details. That's all helped by the sumptuous visuals, which render shimmering obsidian and a crackling flame with jaw-dropping beauty. Atmospherically, it's a masterclass, all dank swamps and imposing temples bathed in eerie silence. It nails the sense of uneasy alliance when you meet a creature that looks like it could pound you into mulch but acts friendly towards you instead.
Mortal Shell does get some things right about its narrative. Ten hours in, I realized I had no idea what I was doing or why I was doing it, and that's a problem. Instead, Mortal Shell appears content to revel in its obscurity. There are scraps of lore available if you like to hunt, but they never feel like they coalesce into anything coherent. You're plonked into the world as a disgusting pile of barely-sentient ectoplasm and your essential direction is "keep moving forward". This is one of those games that confuse obscure backstory in Soulslike games for a lack of immediate plot. It's tricky to summarize the setup for Mortal Shell in a single sentence. Mortal Shell's Storytelling Feels Muddled Environmental details like these skeletons are great, but Mortal Shell does nothing with them. Mortal Shell is hugely ambitious, but will that make it a success? That means exploration of a hostile world with sporadic checkpoints, deliberate combat against powerful enemies, and obscure storytelling gleaned mostly through item descriptions and fragments of dialogue. The measure of a good Soulslike is twofold: one must consider how it executes the aspects of the genre that have arguably already been perfected alongside how its innovations augment the formula. In typical fashion, Mortal Shell takes the trappings of the Soulslike genre and adds its own ingredients to the mix. Usually, the soul is not forcibly removed from the body by a big hulking demon with a hammer, but that's likely to be how you go in developer Cold Symmetry's Mortal Shell. It's a Soulslike in which your character is an ugly blob of ectoplasm forced to crawl into corpses and use their skills in order to survive in a harsh, hostile world. Still, others reckon on reincarnation, in which our souls depart our bodies and inhabit different shells depending on how we lived. Some believe there's an afterlife, while others think all that awaits us is oblivion. What happens to us when we die? It's a question for which many people have their own answers.
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