I Love Rock ‘n Roll!—or, “Lute is Life”: Thoughts on Mortal Shell (2020)

 

He’s using you so he can live

Where is the honor in this?

. . . .

End all the cowardice now!

Boy, I know you’re there; you hide behind a wall of men

-          Unleash the Archers, “Ten Thousand Against One” (2017)

This post is a long analysis of the action-adventure game Mortal Shell. I had mixed feelings about this game for a while since I’d only watched other people review or play it, and I saw a lot of praise for it while I felt that it wasn’t quite so remarkable-looking from a distance. When I was looking for something to play this summer, however, I ultimately settled on the game since it was pretty reasonably priced and wasn’t supposed to take too long to complete.

Mortal Shell is a sort of Double-A or middle-shelf game. I think it caught a lot of people’s attention initially with its visuals, which aren’t always Triple-A quality when you see it in motion and up close but are still good enough to allow it stand side by side with big studio titles with much larger budgets and teams. It’s kind of a bigger indie game that doesn’t really look like an indie game, which probably appeals to people since it feels that extra bit more mainstream and contemporary, where titles with smaller teams typically go with a simpler or retro visual approach that makes them seem separate from the year’s tent pole releases. I wanted to confirm for myself whether Mortal Shell was actually good or not, though, and I would say that it’s more good than not. I enjoyed myself, and after I had finished the game and initially felt I might be done with it for a while, I found myself going back to it again the next day. That might be some of the highest praise you can offer a piece of media—that it stuck with you and pulled you back in. Having established my general feelings about Mortal Shell, I have some more specific thoughts about certain aspects of it to dig into.

Similar to my recent God of War write-up, this piece is very long, which makes dividing it into sections seems like a good choice since reading it in one go could be a daunting prospect. You also have the option of just reading my thoughts on a particular element of the game or even reading out of order if you want. The piece is also written to be read straight through and in order, of course:

 

Sections:

*If you want to CTRL + F to pick up somewhere or (I guess) find a topic that is of interest…

 

What’s in an Action-RPG Anyway? (Mortal Shell and Genre)

A Land of Contrasts (Mortal Shell’s Level and Encounter Design)

            PART ONE: FROM FALLGRIM WITH LOVE (THE DESIGN OF THE HUB)

            PART TWO: THE TUMULT OF FIRE AND ICE (THE DESIGN OF THE FIRST TWO TEMPLES)

            PART THREE: ENDEARING, ENDURING EARTH (THE DESIGN OF THE THIRD TEMPLE)

PART FOUR: PROFANING THE SACRED (TEMPLE ESCAPE SEQUENCES AND FINAL THOUGHTS ON GENERAL ENCOUNTER DESIGN)

Getting Hard (The Combat of Mortal Shell)

The Heaviest of Metal (Mortal Shell’s Musical Influence)

 

 This bit of art for Mortal Shell looks cool and also captures the premise and central mechanic of the game: You play as a sort of skeletal gremlin that can take control of the bodies of dead warriors to protect itself and use their abilities. (This image comes from the Mortal Shell announcement trailer.)

What’s in an Action-RPG Anyway? (Mortal Shell and Genre)

            Mortal Shell has been prominently classified as an action-RPG—on the Steam storefront, on Wikipedia, on the game’s website, and so on. I’ve also seen people talk about the game in RPG terms by referring to “builds” you can create. That term typically refers to a particular combination of character class, core stats, armor, weaponry, and abilities (passive or active) that results in a sort of synergy that lets you perform more effectively. It’s true that Mortal Shell has sets of predefined stats you can switch between in the form of four dead warriors your creepy “foundling” main character can possess that each have somewhat different amounts of health, stamina, and the resource Resolve that is required for special abilities and some other things; however, there are not actual stats you can impact beyond increasing the damage you deal with the game’s four available melee weapons and the health you can recover using a special parry ability. There is also only one ranged weapon in the game. Each warrior has a skill tree of passive and active abilities, but there are few of these compared to what you would see in most games classified as RPGs. What I’m trying to demonstrate here is that there aren’t really enough elements associated with role-playing games in Mortal Shell to classify it as such. It certainly isn’t an RPG in the old sense of actually taking on a role and making narrative choices that shape that character and that can be made with an intent to embody a specific personality consistently. The term “RPG” has been used more and more loosely over the years as more and more games incorporate stats and loot of some kind and as it becomes more and more costly to develop an actual role-playing experience. I don’t think Mortal Shell is a role-playing game in any sense of the word, and that’s fine!

            This possible misclassification of Mortal Shell, even by its creators, strikes me as a consequence of an unfortunate trend in modern gaming that prioritizes player freedom and flexibility (see the ubiquitous “open world” focus of so many titles today) to the point that a game that is too focused or too short or that requires you to play it in a specific way is seen as a dangerous proposition. Well before I sat down to write this post, I’ve been mulling over these sorts of thoughts. One thing that prompted this thinking was the back-of-the-box description for the survival horror game The Evil Within 2. The first Evil Within is a brutally difficult game, even on the supposedly easy difficulty setting, requiring a dedication to stealth and judicious use of resources to survive. It eases up somewhat as you progress to give the player a greater sense of power since that’s often the trajectory of these sorts of games, but what’s important is that the game does require a careful approach and will actively punish you for playing it differently. Enemies are too sturdy to be reliably killed in a frontal assault early on with the slight resources you have, so you have to play the way the game wants or else die over and over again until you learn. That first Evil Within game was criticized for a number of reasons, but difficulty was one potentially off-putting element, so the sequel seems determined to impress upon the player its flexibility.

            The back of the box for The Evil Within 2 says, “Will you face adversity head on with weapons and traps, or sneak through the shadows to survive?” It also has a caption reading “CHOOSE HOW TO SURVIVE.” It’s true that the game has been balanced differently than the first one, but what I found in playing it was that it was still ultimately not really a choice. Starting out you have to play carefully and build up a stock of weapons and resources to make your way along the power curve. It’s a great survival horror experience like the first game, but the perceived lack of flexibility in that first game—as well as other things like its linear structure—were apparently negatives to be addressed (even if only in the promotional materials). Mortal Shell is a similar victim of trendy classification. Action-RPGs are in, and the game takes a lot of clear inspiration from the preeminent Dark Souls series, which are action-RPGs, so Mortal Shell needs to be an action-RPG too! Except, it doesn’t… and isn’t. Mortal Shell more accurately falls into the pretty nebulous category of action-adventure. This actually grants it certain advantages from both a developer and player perspective, as the two halves of “action-RPG” are both incredibly difficult to develop in their own right since they have much more concrete expectations attached to them than “adventure,” and, more often than not, the two halves directly conflict with one another in aggregate. Put simply, action games are all about player skill, including reaction times and knowledge of elements of the game like the specific combos used by enemies and what to do to deal with them, while RPGs are focused on numbers. Victory in an RPG typically involves some level of skill (positioning and picking the right ability at the right time, for example), but they ultimately still boil down to a test of numbers—the player’s and the enemy’s.

            There is an obvious appeal in mixing the two genres, as the addition of real-time combat with elements from the action genre like combos, dodge timings, and enemy juggling seems like a great way to make an RPG’s combat more dynamic and exciting. There are problems with this approach, though. Like I said, either genre alone takes a lot of time and care. Action games need exciting but still readable animations and precise, consistent hit detection (among other things). Because RPGs are stat-focused, you have to work hard to (among other things) balance the difficulty to make sure that players are rewarded for investing in a specific stat but also that particular stats don’t break the game. Action games will often offer some degree of flexibility in the form of multiple weapon choices, but they are typically focused on a single character or small stable of characters with a specific playstyle. Meanwhile, RPGs also focus on flexibility but tend to offer more freedom with character creation and customization. The goal is often to allow players to create unique builds, possibly with the help of a randomized loot system. Putting the requirements of both genres together on the developer end means essentially doubling your workload in a sense, giving yourself even more avenues for failure if the end-result doesn’t meet the standards of one of its two halves.

            From a dev perspective, an action-RPG is a very large undertaking, and even if the creators of Mortal Shell might have wanted to make it one, it’s unlikely they could have accomplished it effectively as an indie project—at least not without possibly sacrificing the no doubt time-intensive high-fidelity graphical style. Leaving out the RPG stats and loot and builds means significantly less that needs to be done during development. There are fewer variables at play that might result in bugs or imbalance. You can also design a bit more easily around the knowledge of exactly what (or at least close to what) the player will have access to. In Mortal Shell, for example, each dead warrior has specific, largely unchanging amounts of health, which means that you don’t have to worry about the player pumping a bunch of levels into health and trivializing encounters that way.

            From a player perspective, action-RPGs can be extremely uneven and frustrating experiences since, as previously mentioned, the goals of the two genres separately are very different: victory that comes via skill versus victory that comes via higher numbers. An action-RPG that makes player skill meaningful risks making its numbers meaningless, while an action-RPG that makes the numbers meaningful risks making skill meaningless instead. Trying to make both halves feel substantial and meaningfully represented is hard, and I can think of few examples that actually strike a perfect balance because, to belabor the point, they are at odds with one another. Even the “good” games in the genre usually fail at this. Capcom’s Dragon’s Dogma has some very stylish active abilities available to its many classes, as well as a grappling system that lets players hold and/or carry and throw smaller enemies while actually scaling the larger beasts to target weak points like eyes and wings. Despite some solid action elements, however, the game is ultimately mostly about numbers. If you’re under-leveled, enemies can one-shot you while taking no (or next to no) damage in return, meaning that even a skilled player can run into situations they can’t realistically win, even with good manual control and an encyclopedic knowledge of the creature(s) involved and their character’s abilities. Conversely, being over-leveled means that even the strongest enemies can be felled incredibly quickly and without finesse, resulting in fights that are not satisfying and don’t push the player to do more than charge in mindlessly. When you find the sweet spot, Dragon’s Dogma has some incredible encounters—some of my favorite in any video game—but that balanced sweet spot between action and RPG is hard to find and almost impossible to stick with for long.

            PlatinumGames’ NieR: Automata is another example of a game that buckles under the weight of the balancing act. It also has a solid enough action foundation, with perhaps even more of a classic action focus than Dragon’s Dogma thanks to staples like the ability to launch and juggle enemies. The problem, again, is the numbers. Under-leveled players can’t launch or stun higher-leveled enemies, which renders the action combat effectively meaningless. Likewise, being over-leveled means enemies die so quickly that there’s no challenge and no push to actually use the systems of the game to fight stylishly. The 2018 God of War game, a sequel to a series that has traditionally fallen into the action or action-adventure genres, dabbles in RPG-style gear and leveling to similar disappointing results. In that game, enemy attacks fall into three broad categories: attacks you can block or parry, attacks that can only be parried, and attacks that cannot be blocked or parried. These designations are influenced by level, however, which means that trying to win hard fights early in the game with skill is rendered virtually impossible due to the player’s low damage output and the fact that every attack by an over-leveled enemy could be both unblockable and unparry-able. There’s always the argument that players just need to “git gud” to master these games in an under-leveled state, but that doesn’t change the fact that the presence of numbers skews the challenge in such a way that a player can technically have the skill but can’t win due to the sheer numerical difference where an enemy only needs to hit them once where they need to hit the enemy a lot over a long period of time.

 

While there are stats to influence in the game—mainly weapon damage—Mortal Shell doesn’t have the array of variables typically present in an RPG. There are no levels to gain or specific character stats to improve or prioritize. Upgrades are limited to a few discrete options in each warrior’s skill tree. More interesting than the upgrades themselves are the mixed up snippets of each character’s former life you unlock. The way that the player controls predetermined personalities without the option to define them, either narratively or statistically, suggests to me that Mortal Shell is not an RPG.

            To bring this discussion back to Mortal Shell specifically, I think it benefits from not trying to achieve this balance in general but especially as a smaller project. What Mortal Shell actually also proves is just how well the Souls formula functions without the RPG elements and that what that series has done isn’t prove the superiority of action-RPGs but that there is a much larger audience for hardcore action games than developers and publishers may have expected and that it’s about finding the right packaging for that action to get people in the door. Since that packaging seems to be the “deep action-RPG” approach, however, that’s why Mortal Shell is misclassified everywhere. I would like to see a future where we work our way back around to just making challenging hack and slash games again without the marketing pretense. I’ve seen the argument made that the Ninja Gaiden HD collection coming later this summer (2021) is only happening because games like The Surge and Nioh—action-RPGs, yes—proved that there’s still an audience for that sort of game. I would like to think the success of Devil May Cry 5, which is openly an action game and not an RPG, a couple years back also proved this, but I do also agree with the general sentiment. Action games provide a sense of mastery that RPGs can’t because there aren’t any (or at least many) numbers to tweak to skew things overwhelmingly in your favor. The sense of a personal, mechanical victory over the odds that people have praised in the “Soulslike” sub-genre is the same one that historically comes from the action half of the action-RPG hybrid. What games that tinker with FromSoftware’s formula help to prove is that the RPG half of that hybrid isn’t really necessary to achieve the same results.

            Mortal Shell is not an action-RPG in any meaningful sense of the term, but it’s better for it. It was no doubt somewhat less of a colossal and risky undertaking on the dev side and, on the player side of things, presents a much more balanced game where there are some numbers (in the form of weapon upgrades, mainly) but where the experience still technically favors a skillful rather than mathematical approach to dealing out defeat and victory. This isn’t completely true since those weapon upgrade levels do change your advantage in combat significantly, and most straightforward action games like Bayonetta avoid simply giving you damage upgrades outright. There are still fewer numbers involved, though, which means that the design of the game and its challenges relies a bit less on math and a bit more on skillful execution.

 

 

A Land of Contrasts (Mortal Shell’s Level and Encounter Design)

PART ONE: FROM FALLGRIM WITH LOVE (THE DESIGN OF THE HUB)      

            Mortal Shell’s level and encounter design are ultimately a very mixed bag, but I want to start with the positives—not just because I want to balance criticism, but because it’s useful to have a highpoint to reference as things go downhill and because it better reflects my—and likely others’—experience with the game. It makes a good first impression, I feel, though the openness of the design means that not everyone will have the same experience I did. Depending on how players approach the hub area’s content in particular, they may have a different experience. The hub area is the strongest in terms of design, and taking a completionist approach to it means that you see a great deal of the game’s best self and then a lot more of its worst as you focus on the dungeons that branch from the hub, but dipping in and out of the hub zone in between completing the other areas might create a different impression.

            As I said already, the “Fallgrim” and “Fallgrim Outskirts” swamp areas that serve as the hub of Mortal Shell, from which you access the three elemental-themed dungeons you have to clear to complete the game, are excellent. The swamp is large and looping, with sections connecting back to one another through pathways and also via small tunnels that can be concealed both by their size and by flimsy wooden barricades you have to first notice and then destroy. There are notable changes in elevation as well, so the area isn’t exactly vertical but has enough variation to feel like a credible place and so that encounters can be designed around natural platforms and barriers. The hub zone(s) are filled with tucked away secrets—items to collect, a couple of miniboss encounters, the entrances to the three dungeons, and the bodies of the warriors that your creepy player character can possess to play through the game. There is also a hidden altar inside an otherwise innocuous-looking tunnel that allows you to lock yourself into a no-damage challenge run, and there’s a sort of side quest you can complete that gives you a joke ending. The free “Rotten Autumn” update from last year adds another quest/puzzle element to the hub in the form of an NPC that will grant you new skins (“Shades”) for your various bodies that add a bit more character to the designs.

 

The sounds, visuals, and level/encounter design of the Fallgrim swamp make a good first impression.

            In terms of things to collect and do alone, the hub can provide hours of engaging exploration before you ever step foot in a dungeon. Making a mental map of the zone on a first play-through is challenging thanks to the design, but it’s a satisfying challenge where you’re consistently rewarded for poking your nose into every available nook and cranny of the environment. I spent over five hours tracking down as much as I could and understanding the layout. Again, this time was rewarding, and it didn’t feel like a slog to spend so much time in the same place because of the aforementioned rewards but also because the atmosphere and encounter design of the swamp hub are both excellent. Visually, there are a lot of earthy, green tones, and a pale mist hangs in the area, more prominently in some sections than others. Frogs croak and leap near the water, and, on the wind, you can hear the lute-playing of brigands and sometimes the unusual groans and growls of some larger beast. Looking up at certain massive trees overhead can reveal a giant bat swarm nesting, and you might feel that you’re in the open, only to look up and find that there is actually a colossal rocky ceiling far, far above. The atmosphere, in short, is thick and compelling.

            The enemy encounters that take place in Fallgrim also feel equally well-crafted. There isn’t a huge variety of opponents, but they are well-used. Most of your enemies in the swamp are the previously mentioned brigands, of which there are really just four (maybe three) types: a basic small melee guy, with varying appearances; a much larger masked melee enemy with greater reach and power; and two archers made distinct not just visually but primarily in terms of health. Naturally, the archer wearing more clothing/armor has more health/defense. Both archers have more health than you might expect from a ranged fighter, though, which is a neat little twist that makes rushing them down in encounters harder than you might expect and can leave you in a tight spot if you bypassed other enemies to prioritize them. As I said, the enemies are used wisely, and there’s a great escalation in terms of encounter design within this one level.

            You begin toward the center of the swamp with some basic melee brigands and some obviously placed bear traps between you and them. Around this same area, the big brigands tend to be more solitary so that they can be fought one-on-one. Things quickly ramp up as you radiate out toward the fringes of the level, however. You’ll encounter brigand camps where the small melee enemies can be partially concealed and lying on the ground. Traps will be placed less obviously in the grass, and you’ll start to find mixed groups of enemies—a heavy (or eventually multiple heavies) mixed in with the little guys and camps of enemies with archers placed at the back so that you’re forced to make a strategic choice about rushing them down or else fighting the other enemies while you’re pelted with arrows. As I already mentioned, the environment itself is used to great effect here, with one standout section being a long gauntlet where, if you approach it via the obvious, open path, you have to deal with small and large brigands on your level while multiple archers stand out of reach atop a ridge and fire down at you. In all of these situations, you’re generally rewarded for taking a cautious and thoughtful approach. You can pull enemies from groups to fight away from the others and with careful positioning can get enemies to step in their own traps. With the archers, you can fight in close-quarters behind cover in the area so that arrows can’t reach you. Deciding when and where to be aggressive and push forward hard and where to behave more passively is engaging and stressful when you’re first learning the ropes, and as you fight the same groups again and again while crisscrossing the map multiple times to find everything and complete the game, you can see yourself grow as a player as your knowledge of the enemies and specific encounters with them, more so than other upgrades, allows you to tackle them more quickly and effectively and to feel a great sense of satisfaction at having learned the game’s lessons and mastered its challenges.

            I feel like most players are going to do what I did and thoroughly explore Fallgrim before going into the dungeons, and, in that case, they would have the experience that I mentioned before. This is the game at its best, and my only negative feelings about Fallgrim came later on after I cleared a dungeon and the area got foggy. When the fog is out—which happens automatically after completing a dungeon, though you can also pay an NPC to bring on or disperse the fog after this first occurrence—the swamp’s normal enemies are replaced with a single ghoul enemy type which can be pretty stressful to fight early on. It’s not a badly-designed enemy by any means, but since the ghouls all fight the same, you lose that great encounter design I mentioned before when the diversity in enemy placements goes away. The fog also allows you to access certain chests that were previously locked, meaning that someone who did a completionist run-through of the area before would have to revisit the whole swamp again after completing at least the first dungeon to get the items from the chests. This could be a bad thing (since it can feel annoying to have to redo that exploration in a sense) or a good thing (since there’s a satisfaction to remembering chest locations and since the new visuals and enemy placements change things up a bit).

These ghoul enemies are genuinely intimidating at first. They’re pretty fast and can both poison and knock down the player. Their biting grab can do quite a bit of damage as well. That being said, they feel over-used and become a bit predictable and boring when Fallgrim is covered by fog.

            In an ideal world, maybe there could have been an additional enemy or two unique to the swamp’s foggy state to spice up and balance the encounters. Those giant bats lurking ominously overhead could have been interesting. My thought while playing the game was that each dungeon you cleared might have added new enemies to the hub. Once you essentially desecrate their temples, they might reasonably spill out into the wilderness lost and looking for revenge (or something like that). The game designer in me likes that second idea a lot since it means the devs could have reused those enemies while also making the hub more interesting/dangerous on repeat visits.

            The question of development costs and development time looms large in my feelings about the rest of the Mortal Shell experience. Possibly excepting the foggy state, Fallgrim is excellent and a high watermark for exploration- and combat-focused games of this type, not just in the specific context of Mortal Shell alone. The problem is that the rest of the game is significantly more uneven, with some questionable and outright bad design. There’s no escaping the question of cost/time, as this is a smaller project. As someone who tinkers with game design (and who is currently tinkering with game design), my best guess would be that Fallgrim got a lot of attention as the initial area and likely as a testing ground for the game’s basic mechanics, while the other areas might have been completed on a much tighter schedule since simply getting a game to a playable state takes a long time, much less actually producing the bulk of the game to be played. I’m unsure which dungeon was made first or last (or if they weren’t made concurrently), which makes figuring out exactly where time and resources were or weren’t allocated impossible to actually determine.

            The exact order in which the dungeons are meant to be completed is unclear, though the earth-themed area is hands-down the largest and the one with the hardest-hitting enemies, which suggests it’s meant to be last. I personally found the crypt/ice level first, and I feel that it is closest to the start of the game, but reaching it quickly requires choosing the path that I did, which involved crawling through a couple of tunnels and fighting a somewhat large pack of ghouls. I could easily see someone finding the fire dungeon first as well. The earth dungeon is on the far side of the map at a dead end following heavy resistance (that archer gauntlet I mentioned before), which would seem to make it the least likely for someone to reach first, though it’s definitely possible. The positioning of the lore entries for these locations in one menu and their order on another fast travel menu do not correspond with one another, so it’s not like there’s an answer in-game as to which one is meant to be first. And even if there was, it wouldn’t answer the question of which was made first. Were too many resources allocated to earth and ice? Were all of them completed in a comparative (to Fallgrim) rush later in development so that whatever was there ended up sticking regardless of quality? There aren’t answers to these questions, and even though I proposed one earlier—that Fallgrim was made first and was a possible focus for locking in the game’s basic systems as a sort of testing ground—I want to avoid making too many assumptions, at the risk of exposing my player’s ignorance of the development process. 

PART TWO: THE TUMULT OF FIRE AND ICE (THE DESIGN OF THE FIRST TWO TEMPLES)

            To be quite blunt, the first part of the crypt level and all of the fire level are either bad or at least very boring. I’ve tried to avoid constantly referencing Dark Souls in this piece since I wanted to try to push myself to find other connections between Mortal Shell and (possible) influences, and I know everyone is tired of the comparisons between games in this sub-genre—or whatever you want to call it—however, I feel that this one connection is an important one to make since some of Mortal Shell’s worst design choices (or accidents, if they weren’t so much choices as the result of rushed development) feel like they could have come directly from the much-maligned Dark Souls II. Some of the major criticism that’s been directed at Dark Souls II over the years has focused on a lack of interesting level and encounter design, arguing that too many areas are just rooms and corridors packed with enemies without a sense of strategy or even difficulty balance. This basically describes the crypt’s opening fifth/fourth and the entire fire stage in Mortal Shell, as they’re just rooms and corridors packed with enemies. If you try to play aggressively or even just move too boldly or quickly in these areas, you’ll be cut down by an overwhelming force of enemies. The only safe strategy is to inch forward, pulling individual targets away from clusters of enemies by getting just inside their aggro range so that you get one but not all of the monsters to follow you out of the area. 

 

The game’s fire-themed zone does have atmosphere, but the level’s design and the encounters you face make it feel flat and dull.

            The crypt redeems itself quite a bit once you beat its first (mini)boss and reach the actual icy part of the level where it displays a great sense of verticality, with downward looping paths that make developing a mental map challenging and satisfying like Fallgrim all over again. It has its own nooks and crannies to seek out as well where you can find hidden treasure chests. On the other hand, the fire dungeon is essentially a single horizontal layer—truly nothing but rooms and corridors and enemies in those rooms and corridors. Arriving at the end, I think I said out loud, “That’s it? Really?” The enemy defenses are spread more or less evenly throughout the area, but with a notably shocking lack of a presence in the room that actually holds the area’s boss, where you might expect the fiercest resistance. It just feels rushed and/or incomplete.

            Outside of visual flair, ice and fire factor into these two areas in very traditionally video game-y ways as well. You can be frozen solid temporarily and can have a damage-over-time effect applied by fire attacks, though it is functionally essentially the same as the poison status effect you can get in Fallgrim and the crypt. Theming areas in this way is a pretty old video game approach to level design at this point. That the game hews close to established tradition with these choices isn’t necessarily a “bad” thing—It’s just a bit predictable. Having some other mechanics involving the elements in the respective dungeons would have been more interesting. To an extent, the elemental theming ends up not amounting to much, though the way that the boss of the crypt actually moves by skating around atop a sheet of ice is visually interesting and mechanically a bit challenging since it has unusual movement patterns. In terms of lore, the fire and ice elements factor into the ritual practices of the worshippers in each temple as well that are fed to you via vague but gruesome dialogue and text, which I suppose makes the elements more than just window dressing.

 

The ice-themed zone starts off with an unremarkable and tedious crypt area but opens up relatively quickly. Much of the level is centered on this icy shaft that spirals down into the earth. Being able to see up and down the space lets the player look ahead or back and try to determine their position as they figure out where they have and haven’t been.

            Going back to my individual experience progressing through the game, I dipped into the crypt/ice dungeon first and played up to the first boss there before exiting. I hadn’t really upgraded any weapons at that point, and just getting to the boss was a bit of a slog. The environment and encounters weren’t particularly inspiring either, so I left to go finish grinding the hub area to get enough currency to repair the game’s one ranged weapon so that I could use it. The brief foray into the crypt set my expectations low and was actually the inspiration for me to refer to the various areas of the game as “dungeons” since the rooms and corridors (and enemies) approach reminded me of a dungeon crawler. The first dungeon I actually completed was the fire one, and after my experience in the crypt, the entirety of the fire level cemented for me that I was not having a good time and potentially put into perspective those low trophy completion percentages I could see for PS4. After the fire level, though, I went back to the crypt and, thankfully, found the actual bulk of the level to be A) much more engaging in terms of design than the fire dungeon and B) also much longer, which is when I started wondering in earnest about the intended play order and what area had been built first.

PART THREE: ENDEARING, ENDURING EARTH (THE DESIGN OF THE THIRD TEMPLE)

            I’m going to give the earth zone its own separate analysis here because it has problems unique from the other two levels. It was the final area I completed, though I had just briefly stepped inside to see what it was like when I was doing my circuit of the dungeons earlier on to do the optional boss fights at their entrances to acquire every weapon in the game. Once I actually committed to the earth zone, coming off the positive impressions of the ice level, I found myself with even more insistent questions about the development of Mortal Shell. The earth dungeon—or “Eternal Narthex” to use its proper name—is larger than the other two dungeons combined, sprawling in a sometimes disorganized- and poorly-planned-feeling sort of way that makes it feel like bloat artificially lengthening the game. My first, gut instinct while playing was that they could have cut the Eternal Narthex in half and used the time to either better develop the fire dungeon or possibly even create a fourth dungeon, but I don’t think that instinct is a good or correct one—at least, not the bit about creating a fourth dungeon.

            As big as the earth zone is, it still uses a single enemy set and has a single weapon to acquire and a single boss to fight. Creating a whole new dungeon would not have been easy or fast, as the team would have needed a fifth weapon, as well as new enemies, a whole new two-phase boss fight, new cutscenes, new environmental assets, new sound effects (probably), new music, new dialogue and text related to the lore of the area, a new power to acquire from the “Sacred Gland” extracted at the end of the dungeon, not to mention the QA testing that would have to be done on the level and all of those elements… The list goes on and on. It’s easy from a player perspective to note the massive difference in size between the Eternal Narthex and the other areas and reason that the time and resources used could have been better allocated, but it’s harder to say that with conviction from a dev perspective. As my list above hopefully suggests, making a new level would have meant a huge time investment that I doubt creating the entire Eternal Narthex, large as it is, required. As for better using the time to improve the fire dungeon, that idea feels like a “maybe.” I suppose it depends on whether I’m right about one (or more) of these areas being developed in a rush. It’s still impossible to say.

            I do still feel that the Eternal Narthex could have been downsized a bit, though. There is a huge amount of dead space in this area where there’s simply ground to traverse and nothing much else to do. It’s an approach to level design that’s quite different from the other zones, including Fallgrim, in the sense that it relies on more isolated encounters spaced out across a great distance, as opposed to a natural string of encounters (Fallgrim) or a gauntlet (the entire fire dungeon and a chunk of the ice one). There is encounter design, but each encounter feels much more distinct and separate, at least in the level’s opening area. It becomes much more focused and less expansive as it goes on, but the first portion has you traversing a truly enormous obsidian plain in search of three flames to extinguish to open the way forward. Which you go for first is up to you. Because of this specific level design, another Dark Souls comparison is unavoidable. This time around, the first part of the Eternal Narthex most closely resembles Dark Souls III’s Farron Keep area, where you have a large swamp to traverse in search of three flames that must be extinguished to open the way forward. The similarities and differences between the two make this a really intriguing comparison for me. I think it helps highlight some things that the Dark Souls equivalent of this level does well but that the Mortal Shell version struggles with that I might never have appreciated if I hadn’t played this game.

            The basic act of traversal in Farron Keep is a tricky one. The area is one of Dark Souls’ notorious swamp levels where making your way forward means contending with water that often hampers your movement and evasive abilities while also poisoning you over time. It adds a whole other dimension to exploring and fighting since you have to approach combat in and around the water more carefully. Not only is your movement impacted, but you’re almost certainly taking unavoidable damage due to poison during most of your time spent in the area, whether you’re fighting or looking for items or just trying to get your bearings. Tackling these areas in the Souls games has always required an extra level of care and preparation—getting specific gear and items, for example, that can help combat the poison effect. The first Dark Souls even had a hidden ring accessory that would allow your character to move normally in deep water, negating some of the challenge in certain environments, albeit in exchange for the extra effort required to acquire the ring and at the cost of a ring slot, where you had to give up some other benefit for the enhanced movement in specific situations. The whole swamp scenario in the Souls games has become a point of criticism in and of itself and a meme at this point, but playing the Eternal Narthex gave me a better appreciation for it. The movement and poison elements, for example, make basic traversal a challenge and something that you have to monitor. The swamps in Souls games—but specifically Farron Keep in this comparison—tend to be large and open like the Eternal Narthex, but they don’t feel like as much of a chore because you have things that require your attention as you play. Just getting from point A to point B could require a certain engagement in a way that simply wandering the obsidian wastes of the Eternal Narthex does not.

 

The first part of the Eternal Narthex is pretty open-ended and takes place over a simply massive area. It succeeds at making the player feel small but can be boring to traverse and unrewarding to thoroughly explore since too much of the space is empty.

        

            Something else Farron Keep does that the Eternal Narthex does not is reward exploration consistently. There is a lot of dead space, but you still find things by poking around in the nooks and crannies of the world. Conversely, the Eternal Narthex simply feels like a lot of empty, wasted nothing since you find very little there. My feeling is that the devs could have preserved the existentially overwhelming vastness of the dungeon—since I think that was something they wanted the player to feel—but also streamlined and improved the level by making use of more pits to block off certain empty stretches of nothing. The fact that the player can reach those areas currently, coupled with the pathways and out of the way corners created by the obsidian blocks and spires that jut from the ground around the area, communicates that there may be something hidden there; however, there almost never is. I spent hours wandering the first part of the Eternal Narthex and did not feel rewarded the way that I did exploring Fallgrim or the icy crypt (or even the fire dungeon). It truly feels like bad level design to create this space that communicates a need to explore and then offers barely anything as a reward. Worse still, the Eternal Narthex doesn’t feel properly, thoroughly QA tested—likely because of its vastness and possibly because of time constraints—and I got stuck in it several times: once when I jumped down from a ledge where I had collected an item and got trapped inside an inescapable cage of obsidian blocks and twice when I happened to step down in a spot where my character could not step back up, despite the difference in elevation being pretty negligible.

            In the first and third instances, I used a consumable item to teleport myself out of trouble, allowing me to keep my accumulated “Tar” (one form of currency in the game). The second time, I actually devised a more ingenious solution because I was concerned about using up my teleportation items with so much level left to explore. When your character’s true form is ejected from the body it’s possessing, it flies out the back of the body and lands a short distance away. When I got stuck the second time, I turned my character’s back to the impassable ledge and used an item that forcibly ejects you from the body. I was able to fling myself backward over the barrier, and I then used another item to summon a new body to my location and went on about my business. Having executed all this, I felt like a genius, of course, but I shouldn’t have been in that position in the first place. There’s a real lack of care in the Eternal Narthex’s level design with regard to the fine details of the landscape—not just because it too frequently suggests rewarding exploration where there is none but because following your instincts can actually get you stuck.       

     

Admiring my handiwork… The step down that trapped me originally isn’t realistically too tall for the character to step back up, which makes this situation frustrating. Note the way that the formation of the obsidian blocks suggests there might be something to find in this little pocket as well.

            There may very well be an item or two or some hidden lore back on a wall somewhere in this dungeon that I missed because I wasn’t willing to push too far out of fear of getting stuck again. There are some spots in the level where the titanic slabs of obsidian that form the stage fit together in grooves that have some depth to them. I feared stepping on these because I wasn’t sure if I would find solid ground or a hole that I’d get stuck in. There are plenty of examples in other games of spotty collision leaving a character with half their body standing firmly on what looks like empty space, but elements of the environment like these ridiculous grooves in the Eternal Narthex push things a bit too far, especially when you’ve already gotten stuck in the dungeon before. Put simply, the design of the level shouldn’t have incorporated these features at all. The obsidian blocks or chunks and their tempting little corridors are simply everywhere, for example, asking for you to step inside and maybe get stuck.

 

The obsidian chunks that create a ragged fringe around walls and structures in the area seem like they might conceal items but usually do not. The inviting little pathways are ultimately frustrating to probe since there’s little to find… and since you may risk getting stuck.

 

            To counteract the pretty heavy criticism of the level so far, I do want to say that the Eternal Narthex has a great progression of unsettling scenery compared to the other two dungeons. It’s very visually distinctive, and how it moves from a space that feels otherworldly but still grounded in the world to a sort of disintegrating, abstract nightmare space is really great. It’s so massive that you can’t see the next step along the path that climaxes by spiraling into a sort of warmly-lit oblivion until you’ve already reached it. The farther you progress, the more you do genuinely feel like you’re going somewhere you probably shouldn’t and that you’ve somehow stepped through the veil from the (comparatively) grounded other areas of the game to reach somewhere much weirder and more unknowable. That first open section has massive trees in it, for example, and from a distance they just look like particularly large trees. But then you reach them and realize they don’t even seem to be organic. They’re sort of oily and metallic, more like the obsidian they’re apparently growing from than anything like a normal tree. The slick black and gold of the architecture stand out visually; the slight scraping, squeaking sound of your character’s boots on the surface of the floor is just nails-on-the-chalkboard uncomfortable enough to make a point without making the area nauseating for people to play. Unlike the other two dungeons, the Eternal Narthex also has a distinct and unexpected gimmick, which is the use of teleporters to move around the area. The leaps across space can be disorienting thanks to the visual effects and distance covered, and they serve to make the Eternal Narthex feel even larger and more overwhelming. These teleporters are sometimes well hidden in ways that require you to go places you feel like you shouldn’t—which does tempt you to explore other places you genuinely shouldn’t go, leaving you stuck—and can leave you in high locations where the only escape is a drop to your potential death. It  can feel a bit haphazard and slapdash—a bit too game-y and maze-like as opposed to “realistic”—but I ultimately felt it was appropriate for the area, since the whole zone is themed around impossible spaces and the limits of mortal perception and also prominently features an NPC planning to jump to his death(?).

            The final stretch of the dungeon is gorgeous and unsettling in equal measure with its warm but lifeless void, floating chunks of obsidian corkscrewing away into nothing, and tattered banners fluttering in a breeze that might not even exist. Each dungeon seems to be focused on worshippers following a faith that tries to cheat death in some way, but the other two don’t quite manage to unsettle or integrate the worship into their visual and gameplay design as well as the Eternal Narthex. In some ways, it’s even more frustrating than the fire dungeon since it overstays its welcome and will trap you among its greasy pillars, but, in other ways, it represents another highpoint for Mortal Shell as its own thing separate from Dark Souls or other influences (except perhaps for heavy metal music, though I’ll touch on that later).

PART FOUR: PROFANING THE SACRED (TEMPLE ESCAPE SEQUENCES AND FINAL THOUGHTS ON GENERAL ENCOUNTER DESIGN)

            An interesting wrinkle to the level and encounter design of all three dungeons that feels like it might have been intended to extend playtimes but that isn’t without real merit as well is the fact that you have to actually traverse each level twice. The narrative conceit here is that you’re going to these so-called temples to acquire Sacred Glands from grotesque saintly figures called the Revered for someone called The Old Prisoner back in Fallgrim so that he can do… something. There are a lot of vague proper nouns involved in the framing, but the long and the short of it is that you’re essentially breaking into a perverse church to steal the body part of a venerated saint. The idea of retracing your footsteps isn’t a bad one because it makes sense in this context. You’ve got the item in question, but now that you’ve killed the object of worship of the creatures and people in the temple, it only makes sense that you’d have to then make your escape and face a unique resistance from when you first made your entrance. Fast travel is wisely disabled during these sequences so that you can’t cheat your way through them, and the levels themselves undergo some changes to make the act of replaying them more interesting and to better reflect the degraded state of the space. For one thing, the lights are significantly dimmer, which genuinely does make certain enemies harder to spot in the gloom. It’s not a massive game-changer, but the new darkness lit by the ruddy glow of the twisted organ fastened to your character’s belt creates more atmosphere while still having some gameplay implications.

            The level design of the dungeons also changes as you’re escaping. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the fire dungeon is mostly unremarkable in this regard. I think a single doorway was blocked during my escape. The ice dungeon also had at least one blocked path and had occasional tremors followed by some icicles falling from the ceiling at points, though they were almost never actually in a position to hit me or impact traversal or combat. The Eternal Narthex easily puts the other two to shame since it has a lot more paths blocked off and also gives off a stronger sense of having collapsed in some way thanks to your actions. You have to use teleporters to move between newly-disconnected chunks of level for a bit while making your escape in a way that helps suggest the previously suspended area is finally falling into the void. These escape sequences are an interesting idea that, like other parts of the game, could have used more development and refinement. Maybe those icicles could have fallen more frequently in the ice dungeon and in places where I actually had to fight enemies, for example? The retreats through each level are also undercut a bit by the fact that you can technically clear the whole thing with the lights still on, then claim the Sacred Gland and walk out unopposed without having to actually deal with the (admittedly pretty minor) new challenge posed by the darkness. I did this somewhat accidentally with the first two dungeons because I though the level might actually collapse behind me, and I wanted to look for items before leaving for good. Maybe forcing the player to escape within a time limit would even have been a good idea, to add urgency to the encounters and help better gloss over the fact that they were retreading the same ground.

 

While the in-game experience is not nearly as moody or intimidating as this shot from the game’s announcement trailer, the changes to each dungeon do add to the atmosphere as you make your escape. The increased darkness can help conceal enemies and cause you to be ambushed more easily.

 

            The escapes rely heavily on the enemies-and-corridors design approach I criticized earlier, which definitely makes the fire dungeon one extended low point from beginning to end, but that encounter design does make a bit more sense in the narrative context of the game after clearing a level: It actually does make sense that the worshippers of the Revered would flood the area in greater numbers than ever to take revenge on you after what you’ve done. Adding a timer or some additional environmental elements (like more frequent falling icicles in the crypt) on top of greater enemy numbers could have made for a more compelling experience, however. As it is, you retread more or less the same space and fight enemies the same way as always—carefully pulling single targets as much as possible to avoid being completely overwhelmed. There was one room of the crypt dungeon escape where I found something like a half-dozen or more of the ghoul enemies just crammed in there as a nasty ambush for players moving too quickly and decisively through the level. How exactly was I supposed to deal with them? The method of pulling one at a time out feels a bit like cheating, especially with the inconsistent aggro range of the enemies in Mortal Shell, but fighting that many opponents outright in a game like this one—that limits your actions using a stamina bar and is really built for one-on-one duels more than anything—feels like it strains the limits of fairness. It definitely recalls those criticisms of Dark Souls II in that way.

            My final note about level and encounter design before focusing on the combat system specifically is that the game outright cheats with some enemy ambushes. Other games of this type—yes, Dark Souls, but also stand-out titles like the Nioh duology—typically reward careful observation of the environment. Enemy ambushes are to be expected, so you get in the habit of checking corners, walls, ceilings, and the sides of ledges. You learn to expect an ambush when you enter an area and see a conspicuously placed single enemy or item drawing your eye. The reward for careful and observant play is that you don’t die as much (obviously), in large part because looking for traps lets you enter fights on your own terms and possibly disable ambushes from range. Mortal Shell has extremely limited ranged options, but you can still kill an enemy or so to even the odds. At times, however, the game essentially cheats.

            In Fallgrim in its foggy state, for example, the ghoul enemies will sometimes drop down on you from above. You’ll hear a branch cracking and a snarl, and then a ghoul will land in front of you. The catch is that the ghouls aren’t actually present in the environment before they drop down. They just spawn from the air in these specific locations. This happens in other areas as well. For example, in the ice dungeon, I entered a room and saw a treasure chest sitting invitingly at the other end. Naturally, I checked the corners, walls, and ceiling before advancing to open it. When I did open the chest, I turned and found myself fighting two ghouls. They spawned from thin air in the room, and I confirmed this by respawning the area’s enemies and approaching the end of the room with the chest with my camera facing backwards so that I could see the enemies materialize out of nothing. There are some enemies that exist in a bit of a gray area in this regard. The fire dungeon has knights that always appear from nothing, so they kind of get a pass; each dungeon also has the same sort of floating specter enemy that casts an AOE spell of the appropriate elemental type, and I noticed multiple points in the Eternal Narthex and in the fire dungeon where these specters spawned on my location after interacting with something in the environment. I said these enemies exist in a gray area before because they at least have a reason to appear from nowhere (unlike the ghouls), but I still think this type of design should be the exception and should be rare in this type of game.

            The ghouls that fall from the sky in Fallgrim do at least make a noise as they spawn, unlike the fiery knights and the various specters. I mentioned Nioh earlier as a good example to contrast Mortal Shell against somewhat, so it is worth noting that enemies do appear from thin air in that game. There are certain very weak enemies that will sometimes appear near corpses, and some rooms will seal and then spawn enemies for you to fight in waves. The difference between these enemy encounters in Nioh and Mortal Shell, however, is that the ones in Nioh always adhere to a design similar to the ghouls that fall from the air. Enemies appear with distinctive audio and visual flair, and since Nioh also plays music for major encounters, if multiple opponents appear at once in your immediate area, you’ll also often get the additional auditory warning. In Mortal Shell, on the other hand, there were some nasty little ambushes I avoided only because I learned to expect enemies to appear silently around me and prepared what I would do if they suddenly appeared in advance of interacting with specific objects or taking specific paths.

            Even if we disregard the standards set by other games with similar design, Mortal Shell ends up breaking its own sort of rules here. Fallgrim in its native state teaches you to study your environment to find and respond appropriately to threats from traps and enemies, but then the game actively prevents you from doing what it’s taught you to do by having enemies spawn from thin air. Is there any reason why the ghouls in the room with that chest couldn’t have been on the wall? Even if I couldn’t knock them off and fight them beforehand, I still could have seen them and had the reward of the foreknowledge that a trap was coming and that I knew what it was. Instead, you’re just arbitrarily ambushed, thrusting you into immediate combat in a way that might feel unfair. 

 

Since enemies can hit hard and since your attacks are deliberate and governed by the green stamina bar, the initial approach to an enemy encounter is key. You want to look for hidden dangers like additional enemies and environmental hazards so that you’re aware of all the elements involved in a fight before engaging. Aggression has to be tempered with caution, especially if you play as the actual “foundling” character which will die after only one hit. A “Shell” like the one pictured here has more health (the red bar) but can still wither quickly if you don’t play cautiously and skillfully.   

 

 

Getting Hard (The Combat of Mortal Shell)

            In terms of the fundamentals of its combat system, Mortal Shell should be familiar to anyone who plays action/hack and slash/beat ’em up games like Devil May Cry or Ninja Gaiden. You have a light and heavy attack and some short combos that can be performed by tapping one button repeatedly or by alternating between the two inputs. You can also modify the heavy attack by sprinting first to perform a different, harder-hitting attack. You have a descending attack from the air. You acquire new weapons and new moves for those weapons as you progress in the game, and killing enemies and exploring grants you resources you can use to purchase new abilities from a shop. You can block, parry, or evade attacks with proper timing to avoid damage. There is also a lock-on function that allows you to focus the camera and your character’s attacks on a single enemy. Actions like attacking and evading are governed by a stamina meter like other recent, similar action games—like the Nioh series or The Surge titles—or like the long-running Monster Hunter series. Unlike these other games, however, blocking in Mortal Shell does not interact with the stamina meter the way that it usually does. Usually, blocking an attack will consume a certain amount of stamina (basically a trade-off where you lose no—or at least less—health in exchange for stamina), and not having any stamina means that you can’t block effectively.

            One of Mortal Shell’s most obvious and highly-publicized twists on this established defensive mechanic is how its block is on a separate, short cooldown as opposed to being dependent on stamina and, critically, can also be used at any time. You can activate (and hold) block while evading, while using an item, during or after an attack animation, and so on. It’s an extremely powerful ability that can be abused to win a lot of fights pretty easily if you move toward an enemy, attack, block their counterattack even as you’re recovering from your own strike, and then dodge away to wait for the block (your ability to “harden” your body) to come off cooldown. Alternatively, an aggressive player can attack an enemy relentlessly, using all their stamina, and then block to avoid damage at the last possible moment. One of the most important lessons new players to games like Mortal Shell usually have to learn is that they need to remember to leave themselves enough stamina to block or evade enemy attacks even as they’re going on the offensive, but Mortal Shell separates blocking and stamina so that players of various skill levels can get something out of it. It can be used to fight more aggressively than usual or to cheese a lot of fights or as a sort of panic button for players who don’t watch their stamina closely enough or mistime item use.

            New players to highly-punishing action games like this one will also commonly mash the attack button in a panic, which causes more strikes to queue up to be executed, which uses up their stamina and also locks them into animations that prevent them from blocking or evading when whatever they’re hacking away at inevitably fights back. Again, Mortal Shell lets you block even in the middle of animations, though, which means those players get a little more leeway. On the other hand, you also can’t immediately block again in Mortal Shell, which means using your block at the wrong time or forgetting it’s still on cooldown can cause you to take a big hit as well. My feeling is that the hardening ability is a good one. Although it can be used to cheese encounters on a first play-through, it becomes somewhat less useful on “New Game+” where hardening no longer completely blocks incoming damage, meaning that evasion becomes a potentially better defensive option. The powerful block is still useful to players of various skill levels, and it also fits with the theming of the game. Your player character is a sort of ghastly humanoid hermit crab that can’t take a single hit on its own but can inhabit the bodies of specific dead warriors to gain their skills and stats. Calling these bodies “Shells” in the game just works well with the hardening mechanic’s naming and implementation and makes the game’s ideas feel that bit more coherent.

            As I said, this blocking mechanic is one of the defining features of Mortal Shell, though it also has some interesting applications beyond the obvious usefulness. Hardening in this game is essentially a form of “block offset” that allows you to block in the middle of a combo and then continue that combo by performing additional inputs immediately after you are done blocking. Since many of the game’s weapons are quite slow and since any attack requires you to commit to the entire animation before you can do anything else (except block), the ability to block and not have that actually interrupt your combo is an extremely useful one. Certain attacks like the final hit of the heavy combo for the enormous Martyr’s Blade would be very hard to actually use in most combat situations without the ability to offset the combo to reach them. I’m using the term “offset” here because this mechanic in Mortal Shell closely resembles a technique from the fast-paced action game Bayonetta. That series has “dodge offset,” where you can hold down an attack button while performing a dodge and then release that button and press the next one in the sequence after the evade to continue combos and reach the hard-hitting final blows at the end of the longer sequences. Incidentally, Mortal Shell also has dodge offset!

 

The ability to harden yourself and deflect attacks even in the middle of other animations is a crucial and unique part of combat in Mortal Shell. It’s useful to newcomers since it makes it easier to defend yourself quickly and can also be used more skillfully by veteran players. One of the benefits of the block is that it allows you to offset combos and perform attacks you wouldn’t necessarily be able to work into combat otherwise.

            All but one of the Shells in the game have access to a two-tiered dodge in all directions—a short hop that can then be chained into a more substantial roll with an additional press of the evade button. The trade-off is that the longer evade covers more distance and requires less precise timing, but the short hop leaves you in a better position to attack the enemy after avoiding their blows. This short hop also allows you to offset combos, though it’s not quite as effective as in Bayonetta. After some experimentation, I found that it seems to only work with the first hit of a combo, so you can hop to evade and still continue the combo as long as you had to evade after only the first hit. This ability is still a benefit of the hop, whereas, to the best of my knowledge, the roll does not allow you to continue your combo afterward. The fourth Shell I mentioned before performs the long roll by default in three of four directions but can still perform the two-tiered evasion (and therefore can also dodge-offset combos) by evading backwards. Mortal Shell also has a bit of an extra delay between the point that the animation for an attack ends and the point where you’re forced to start from the first hit of a combo rather than being able to continue it when you next press the attack button. You can actually move yourself a bit more than you can in games like Dark Souls between hits. It’s still not much time, but you can technically move around a little between strikes and not drop the combo. Mortal Shell doesn’t reward you for reaching the end of combos like Bayonetta does, but it’s still an interesting bit of nuance that offset is available here, and it can be legitimately useful for landing the slower and weightier strikes, even with the limitations on dodge offset specifically.

            There are some other small things to note about the game’s combat as well. The sprinting requirement for the modified heavy attack doesn’t actually require you to be visibly sprinting. You can just initiate the sprint (by holding evade or clicking in the left stick), move forward slightly, and unleash the special attack. This makes them easier to mix into combat since you can perform them from close range without having to actually sprint at the enemy. There is also what I think might be a glitch where if you perform an attack while holding sprint and release the evade button with the right timing during the attack animation, your character will perform the attack and then immediately transition into a backwards evade without additional input. Like I said, this last one might actually be unintentional, and I don’t know that I’ve ever done it strategically. I’ve wondered if it isn’t a problem with my PS4 controller, which is a few years old at this point; however, I don’t have problems with the circle button in other games, so I’m not sure. I did find myself accidentally performing this “technique” at times, though, but switching to clicking in the left stick to run instead resolves this problem (if you can call it that).

            Ultimately, I wish Mortal Shell had a bit more going on in terms of basic combos. Veterans of these sorts of games will likely try various other inputs to modify attacks (pauses between strikes, alternating attack buttons, moving the left stick forward while pressing an attack, etc.) and will probably be disappointed a bit by the simplicity. Of course, Mortal Shell is also a smaller game, which justifies these limits somewhat. You do also get some new powers as you play through the game—There are four weapons, with two weapon abilities each to unlock, as well as different forms of riposte you can perform after a parry, starting with a pretty standard big attack that also heals you and progressing, as you acquire the appropriate “Sacred Gland” key items required to complete the game, to include things like planting an explosive on an enemy or a focus attack that hits a lot of enemies at once in a row. These sorts of big abilities are likely the intended solution to some of the corridors and rooms filled with enemies the game sometimes over-relies on.

            Each Shell can also acquire a kick with a lot more power behind it than you would expect when you see the word “kick,” a slightly different descending attack using the hardening ability, and a whole host of passive abilities, many of which aren’t actually game changers or all that exciting, though some provide substantial benefits—like the Shell who gets a nearly instantaneous stamina refill upon activating block. I ultimately found the bits of background about each Shell’s past life that you acquire along with the character-specific abilities to be more interesting than the upgrades themselves—in part thanks to excellent voice work—and think the game could have used more actual active abilities to acquire, but as I’ve been putting this piece together and tabulating what you have available to you, I’ve softened (ha) a bit on that point. There are still some indisputable issues, however, like how there is so little verticality in the game most of the time that the descending attacks you can perform in the air are hard to use in combat consistently since you can’t jump and have to fall to get airborne.

            On that note, I also think Mortal Shell could have done more to push the player to actually use their full move set. As I covered in the encounter design section above, there are a lot of enemies in the game, but the arrangement of those enemies is typically handled in such a way that prolonged combat is easy to avoid by pulling individuals away from groups and proceeding cautiously. Like other modern action titles, Mortal Shell’s lineage traces back to older games like Onimusha and Devil May Cry, both of which will periodically lock the player into an area and require them to defeat enemies to proceed, a design which goes even further back to 2D beat ‘em ups. Other contemporary games with similar combat to Mortal Shell, like Nioh and Code Vein, do something similar to great effect. Both of those games give your character a lot of special skills that make normal encounters easy for the most part, but throwing large numbers of different enemy types at you in an enclosed space forces you to play more aggressively and use your entire skill set to survive. Mortal Shell is significantly more ponderous than any of those other titles (a sort of mediation between the truly absurd sluggishness of Lords of the Fallen and the altogether snappier combat of Dark Souls, which is itself still nowhere near as fast as Nioh), so such an approach to enemy encounters would have to be somewhat more conservative to not completely, unfairly overwhelm the player, but there’s definitely an argument to be made that Mortal Shell is too “easy” for veterans of this type of game because standard enemies are easy to pick apart with even a little forethought and care since pulling individual opponents away from groups and using basic combos can resolve most encounters easily. There are likely resources and skills that a lot of players simply won’t use.

            One such resource that powers most of your special abilities is Resolve. Each Shell has a different number of slim bars above their health gauge that you fill by attacking enemies, and a filled bar of resolve can be expended to do various things. Kicks and riposte powers require one bar per use, and weapon abilities require two. Certain healing items also consume Resolve if there is any available, which makes it a relatively versatile resource. I like this a lot since it requires the player to make choices about how they use their power. A connection I could make here would be to the character of Vergil in the Devil May Cry series, who can use accumulated magic energy to enter a powered up state and heal or spend a bit here and there to fuel powerful ranged attacks instead. Bayonetta’s magic meter also has diverse applications. An interesting quirk of Resolve is that a bar must be filled to stay that way. While some actions that consume Resolve seem to be performable with less than a full bar, the powerful weapon abilities seem to require filled bars to activate. A bar that’s less than filled will drain over time, meaning that you want to try to top each bar off quickly to lock in that Resolve. One way you can intentionally fill a bar that’s close to the end is by attacking enemy corpses, as those hits still count toward your Resolve up until the corpse actually despawns. A similar mechanic exists in Bloodborne with that game’s “rally” system that lets you get back health after taking a hit if you attack an enemy during a short grace period. Attacks against dying enemies with no health left still count, so you can strategically attack what is already essentially a corpse to get the effect as well if there are no other living enemies in the immediate vicinity. The original release of Ninja Gaiden 3 also had a similar system with dying enemies where you could execute them with a nasty flourish to gain additional Ki/magic energy.

 

Different Shells have different numbers of Resolve bars (the slim segments pictured here toward the bottom-left of the screen) to fill by attacking enemies. Resolve is used for a variety of actions in the game, including the powerful weapon-specific abilities that can deal a lot of damage and keep you safe with invincibility frames. Since Resolve has multiple functions, though, players have to think about where and when to expend it and make sure they’re fully filling each segment if they want to have that energy available to use later.

            Here’s an example of some of these mechanics in Mortal Shell working together: During the escape sequence from the Eternal Narthex temple, there’s a point where there is a narrow bridge you need to cross. There are two heavy enemies on your side, and on the other side are two dangerous archer enemies and two of their speedy melee counterparts. Starting from the nearby checkpoint with no Resolve, I built up a full set of four bars (for my current Shell) fighting the heavy enemies one by one. Since they take a lot of hits to kill normally, I was able to build up a good bit of energy, but I chose to use a roasted rat item (minus one bar) to heal a bit since I screwed up and got thrashed by one of the big guys. At that point, I had to cross the bridge and deal with the archers. After playing so much of the Eternal Narthex area, I knew very well how dangerous they could be on open ground. They can fire several arrows in quick succession, and when there’s more than one, they can cover each other to some extent so that even blocking the arrows won’t necessarily create a great opening. It can take them time to actually start firing, though, so I was able to use that knowledge to sprint across the bridge, running between and past the melee enemies and back to between the archers. At that point, I used two bars of Resolve to perform the freezing area of effect weapon skill of the Martyr’s Blade. From there, I targeted one archer and used a kick (consuming my last bar of Resolve) to knock her off the bridge for an instant kill and then finished off the remaining enemies, who grouped together thanks to the narrow space, with a single light combo—a wide-angled sweep followed by two long-reaching forward thrusts. I was pretty pleased with myself in the end. The feeling of skillfully and sometimes stylishly overcoming enemy encounters is one that isn’t unique to the so-called “Soulslike” sub-genre and can be traced to other games and other genres.

            One final flaw I’ll cover here that could also potentially fit under the encounter and level design section but does also intersect with the game’s combat systems since it plays a role in engaging enemies has to do with sound in the game. Generally, I think the sound effects themselves are great—barring perhaps a single button-pressing noise in the Eternal Narthex that is too “light” for the mighty gold button you’re supposed to be depressing—but the issue is with the way that sounds suggest enemy positions. I’m not a sound person, so I’ll have to describe this rather than use a technical term, but enemies sometimes aren’t where they sound like they are. You’ll hear grunts and growls to your right like the enemy is nearly on top of you on that side, only to look around and realize it’s actually standing atop a flight of stairs to your left. You can’t always reliably guess at where enemies are around you. It especially becomes an issue with the teleporting, skating boss of the crypt/ice dungeon. That enemy likes to disappear and then reappear somewhere in the arena before performing a rapid dashing strike across the space. Because of the sound issue, however, I couldn’t reliably tell where the boss had appeared and ended up listening for the sound effect for the attack itself and then performing a hop and roll to avoid the attack without knowing the exact point of origin when I would ideally have heard the boss reappear, rotated the camera appropriately, and then dodged with better timing and less stamina spent. I hate to invoke Dark Souls again, but there is a teleporting boss in the third game that I can reliably locate using sound alone, without rotating the camera desperately. If I’m honest, however, I debated removing this section. After playing Mortal Shell some more, I’m not confident that this issue is a consistent one. I experimented with standing in spots near enemies and listening to the sounds they made to see if their positioning sounded right, and it often did. There were just some specific cases, like how the one idle noise the first Grisha miniboss in Fallgrim makes sounds like it’s coming from a different spot entirely, while another idle sound seems appropriately localized on the miniboss. While staring directly at the enemy, it sounded like there were actually two creatures in the room—the one I could see and another somewhere off to the right.

 

 

The Heaviest of Metal (Mortal Shell’s Musical Influence)

            Speaking of sound: One of the things that caught my attention about Mortal Shell well before I ever played it was the release date trailer which uses music from the Greek black metal band Rotting Christ. Even back when I felt that the gameplay and visuals of Mortal Shell weren’t necessarily all that interesting, the musical choice for the trailer stuck out to me. The harsh vocals, the loud and driving instruments—Metal is such a great musical choice tonally to represent a game like this about an unforgiving fantasy world where it’s likely that repeated deaths will get players mad and make them crave violent revenge on the enemy AI. Metal as a genre also shares a lot of preoccupations common to these types of games in its iconography and themes that focus on elements of fantasy, science fiction, and horror and on religions, knights, demons, angels, death, and the like. There’s an obvious kinship between the music and the game design to the point that I’ve been wanting a metal-influenced “Soulslike” for a while. So, even though Mortal Shell itself didn’t necessarily seem explicitly metal-influenced at all times, the trailer stuck with me. It’s a great pairing of visuals and music on its own.

            Having actually played the game itself now, I feel like the question of the metal influence is a sort of chicken-and-the-egg situation. As I noted above, metal uses a lot of elements that you find in games like this, so it can be hard to tell what in the game might have been influenced by metal and what comes from a more general dark fantasy space. The fact of the matter is that you could probably take some creatures and designs from Dark Souls and put them on the cover of a metal album as well. As I’ve been thinking about Mortal Shell and the influence of metal music on its design, I’ve essentially been doing that—imagining what, say, the boss Imrod, the Unrepentant might look like on an album cover. If I had any graphic design skills, I might have done some experimenting. The one area of the game that “feels” the most metal to me is the Eternal Narthex. There’s something about the particular structures there—that slick obsidian and gold—that feels like it belongs on an album cover.

            Similarly, some of the enemy and character designs associated with that area seem like particularly good fits as well. There’s a sort of leather-clad, almost bondage-adjacent, design trend apparent with friendly NPCs and enemies there. The hammer-wielding “brethers” strike me as similar in their silhouettes to the sort of stereotypical male member of a metal band. The black hood they wear and the way that it falls to their shoulders suggests long, dark hair. Meanwhile, their faces are partially obscured by strips of cloth that suggest a bit of kink. The “sesters”—friendly or otherwise—are even more explicit. They’re wearing heels for one thing and seem to have some sort of full-body harness incorporated into their garb. The designs of this handful of characters feel the most modern to me, which kind of fits with the slightly futuristic teleporter technology of the Eternal Narthex, and it makes them look perhaps the closest out of the other designs in the game to something you might see on the cover of a metal album or in a metal band’s music video.

Here we have one of the enemies from the Eternal Narthex area alongside the character Nathan Explosion, the frontman for the metal band Dethklok from the animated series Metalocalypse. It’s not an exact resemblance, but Nathan has always struck me as quintessentially metal, and the brether with the hammer has some broad similarities. (The “Faceless Clerik” image comes from the Fextralife wiki for Mortal Shell; the “Nathan Explosion” image comes from the Williams Street Wiki.)

 

 

Like the hammer-wielding brethers, the sesters you encounter in the Eternal Narthex are much more modern-looking in their design than some of the more traditional fantasy-inspired characters and enemies in the game. The mix of the “medieval” (crossbow or swords) and the modern (leather harness and high heels) combine to create an amalgamation not unlike something you would see in a music video for a metal song. (The “Sublime Sester” and “Sester of the Order” images come from the Fextralife wiki for Mortal Shell.)

            The cover of Mortal Shell also strikes me as particularly album-like. Video games seem to favor covers depicting a single character in clear view, usually facing toward or away from the audience. Mortal Shell, instead, has two characters partially shrouded in darkness. The scene the cover depicts is of the “foundling” main character possessing one of the four dead warriors’ bodies, but someone who hadn’t played the game or paid much attention to trailers or pre-release promotion or buzz wouldn’t have that context. Even if you did, there are still some mysteries—namely the strange appendages behind the foundling that radiate outward, disappearing into darkness and off the edge of the cover. The tentacles or limbs or whatever have an appropriately ominous and grotesque and ill-defined look to them. Whether this little scene is or isn’t “metal” is highly subjective, but what I keep thinking about is being a kid and maybe getting a quick glance at the CDs inside a Walmart. The metal albums were the creepy ones usually, with people or monsters that looked a bit scary, a bit hard to parse properly. The imagery on the cover of the Mortal Shell box and especially the font used strikes me as very like one of those metal albums I might have gotten a quick look at years and years ago, the kind of strange thing that taps into those elements of fantasy and horror and that, yes, looks totally hardcore. My imagined mockups for metal album covers using assets from Mortal Shell were only complete with the title (in that font) on them. 

 

The game’s cover art, from the characters and imagery to the title font, reminds me of an album. (This image of the Mortal Shell case comes from the Walmart website.)

 

            Going back to the game itself, though, the “Rotten Autumn” update back in 2020 added different skins you can unlock for each warrior in the game that make them look a bit less like traditional fantasy figures and more like members of a metal band in costumes. That update also added an alternative metal boss soundtrack by Rotting Christ, which gives the actual game an explicit link to the genre. Using pop or rock songs for video game trailers isn’t that uncommon, but generally the music itself isn’t representative of the game. With the addition of the alternative soundtrack, Mortal Shell confirms a commitment to the style of the earlier trailer—that it was more than just an attention-grabbing promotional choice. And then there are the musical instrument items that have always been in the game. You can obtain a lute not long after starting Mortal Shell, and when you use that item, your character will sit down and start plucking away, doing a pretty bad job at it at first. With repeated usage, though, the item’s “familiarity” meter will fill and the playing becomes more skillful. The idea of slowly learning to play an instrument like a guitar is something that works so well with the game’s whole familiarity system, which exists on all items, that it makes me wonder if the idea of mastering a musical instrument wasn’t the origin of the whole thing. Whatever the case, there’s still a great synergy between music and the idea of doing or using or practicing something until you master it.

            If you explore all of Fallgrim, you can also find an indestructible lute item that cannot be broken and seems to function as an electric guitar to the basic lute’s acoustic guitar based on the sound and appearance of both—The former has more of an electric sound and has a shiny, metallic look, while the latter sounds more acoustic and is made of wood. While there’s only one indestructible lute—played by a brigand with an appropriately large crowd gathered around him—you can find enemies playing the acoustic lute all over the swamp. A fun little feature within the game is the ability to “jam” with these brigands. You can pull out your own lute and start playing along with them. You’ll aggro the non-musical enemies in the vicinity, but the lute-player will pacify and won’t try to attack you even if you kill everyone around him. When you’re attacked while playing the lute, you can still “harden”/block to defend yourself. It’s a funny little touch but also noteworthy since it stems from the game’s commitment to consistency with its systems. You can harden during any animation, so of course you can do it while playing the lute. If you play your lute for the friendly sester who acts as a shop and checkpoint for you throughout your adventure, she’ll bob her head slightly along with the music. The game’s somewhat hidden joke ending, which I think is ultimately better than the actual vague and brief conclusion, is to join up with the brigands and spend your days just hanging out in the swamp eating rats, drinking moonshine, and playing the lute.

            The mechanics associated with the lute and the way that your character, who is a hardened warrior and/or some sort of immortal and magical creature, just plops down and starts playing like a mortal dude on a college campus when you use the item also remind me of metal—of the way that the genre is kind of cringe because of just how over-the-top edgy it can be with its lyrics and imagery (not to mention the whole try-hard soundscape of that loud and severe noise) but also how it’s ultimately incredibly earnest and even fun. I did actually have a Sunday school teacher tell me that rock and roll was the Devil’s music when I was a kid, but it just seems a bit too silly for that. When I think of metal, one of the things I think of is Jack Black, who is not representative of the entire genre, I guess, but who represents a formative experience of mine when I learned to enjoy metal music while playing the game Brütal Legend, which is essentially a big tribute to the music, iconography, and themes of the genre. I associate metal to some extent with the spirit of Black—with the idea that you can rock and roll all hardcore, but maybe you’re just kind of a fun-loving dude under all that. I think it’s fair to assume that most metal musicians are just normal dudes (and ladies) and aren’t actually werewolves or vampires in their private lives. The whole idea of the costuming and the posturing that come with the genre just seems simultaneously very silly but also a lot of fun to me. It winks without winking. That’s Mortal Shell in a way. It’s got hardcore action and imagery, but stuff like the lute and the one ranged weapon in the game being called the “Ballistazooka,” melding the medieval and the modern once again, helps suggest there’s a sense of humor and fun in there too.

 

To quote the item description for the Impervious Lute in Mortal Shell, “Lute is life.” Rock on, wayward spirit!