Morbid: The Seven Acolytes Review
Morbid: The Seven Acolytes—a December 2020 indie game from Merge Games—is a short and sweet 2D Cronenbergian Lovecraftian Soulslike chock full of gore, insanity, challenging sword-and-board, and some hardcore navigation.
Starting Off
Morbid: The Seven Acolytes is about a plague spreading throughout the land turning nearly everyone into mutilated creatures, and, of course, your role is to stop whatever is causing the plague by killing everything. Hey, wait a minute—this sounds a lot like Bloodborne… Come to think of it, there's also no blocking, only parrying and rolling… Anyway, kill everything to stop the plague.
Grotesque flesh monsters populate the world of Morbid which is about the extent of the horror in the game. Given the pixel art style, there's no real fear or dread to be felt; it's simply gruesome-looking.
Systems
Combat in Morbid: The Seven Acolytes is fairly punishing; enemies hit hard, but the attack patterns are also somewhat easy to learn; or, if running is more your style, most of the enemies are slow enough to blaze past. There's also a Sanity mechanic which is sparsely explained that supposedly affects your damage output and experience (although, it's not exactly obvious).
The game is somewhat hard to navigate, which I imagine is why so many players never actually finished the game. A map piece first needs to be found for each area, but even then, you can only view the map from the save point statue. To make things even more difficult, there's no “you are here” icon; so, if you were born after GPS got integrated into smart phones, you're pretty much fucked, sorry. Ok, fine; it's not that hard, but I imagine some users would become terribly lost and give up all hope—which is rather fitting given the Lovecraftian theme. Personally, I liked it.
For some reason, there's a Diablo-style stash-and-inventory system for all the weapons you can find. Personally, I found the inventory management aspect a bit distracting: playing Tetris with all the different shapes to jam in some shiny new piece of junk that just dropped instead of remembering where the hell I am in the world. There are so many consumable drops that I can't use them fast enough, and they end up littering the ground like turds at a dog park.
Conclusion
Morbid: The Seven Acolytes is fun and a great game worth playing for fans of the Souls genre: it has big Bloodborne and Hollow Knight vibes and an art style similar to Binding of Isaac. Overally, the game is very retro in its art and selection of features, so don't expect anything truly groundbreaking. The game is fairly short, though, so keep that in mind when you pick it up.
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