Mortal Shell Review
If you love games with Souls-style combat and cryptic storytelling where you can barely heal and lose all your money when you die, then Mortal Shell—an indie Souls game released August 2020—may be just the punishing mysterious dark-fantasy Soulslike you should play next.
Starting Off
As the game starts off, the lore is fairly mysterious. Items need to be used before their effects are known, and even then, the effects are unclear—how the hell do I use “tar”? Aside from the controls, hardly anything is explained in a straightforward way; you need to simply use or eat it to discover for yourself (which I really like, actually). The more times an item is used, the more information about the item is revealed.
Mortal Shell feels like Dark Souls with more realistic physics. Difficulty is punishing like a true Soulslike; so, git gud. Straight out the gate: wrecked by tutorial boss, stepping on bear traps, savage damage from enemies. Enemies respawn on rest, of course. And, healing is extremely scarce, so strap in for this one… At least they give you a fun lute to play while you're waiting for the health shrooms to regrow.
One gripe I have with the game is that it tends to feel a little lonely. Only a handful of NPCs exist in the game, and they don't seem to move around very much, so the world can feel a bit empty at times—despite the droves of enemies all around. The character personalities and voice acting are solid, though—just wish there were more of them.
Combat
It's as if the developers started off with the question “how can we take Dark Souls and make it even harder?”; their answer was to slow the combat way down. You can only block once every 5 seconds, parry occasionally, and the bastard sword is heavy as fuck, along with all the other weapons. On the helpful side, though, enemies can be pushed into each other like bowling pins. Slower combat is actually a great feature; instead of smashing the attack button looking for when to start smashing the roll button, it forces you to think about whether you can complete the next attack before your insides become your outsides.
After dragging myself through a gauntlet of challenging foes through my first area over and over and over again, I finally faced my first boss and eventually won. It was at this point I realized there was no fast travel, as the area became very dark, and all of the enemies were swapped out for different, more deadly enemies—I mean all of them—as I had to fight my way back near the starting area.
At first, combat seemed incredibly difficult with awkward controls, but the more I played, the better I got until I could confidently cleave enemies left and right. Hardening (a.k.a. blocking) has a huge cool down, and parrying requires a resource called "resolve" to use; so, the combat feels punishing—but then it all clicks: the combat is designed around an ebb and flow. You mash buttons, you die; plain and simple. Mortal Shell forces you to think about every button press because that roll you pressed a fraction of a second after you blocked is going to happen, and honestly that makes it kind of beautiful.
Conclusion
The game's a bit short on content but well worth playing; Mortal Shell is a diamond in the rough for the off-brand Soulslikes. The unique combat mechanics give the game a fun twist, and I'm glad I spent some time on this one.
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