A Worthy Encore Performance, With A Few Sour Notes: Thoughts on Mortal Shell’s “The Virtuous Cycle” DLC

Born from the void and still pristine

Tranquil, vast, and cold

See the orb of blue and green

When he spake, the light shone gold

. . . .

Joy and delight forever ceased

Sufferings abloom

Eaten alive by the cauldron beast

Let the drones ring to the sound of doom

-       Apocalypse Orchestra, “The Garden of Earthly Delights” (2017)

 

 

This essay offers a detailed look at the downloadable “Virtuous Cycle” expansion released back in August 2021 for the action-adventure “Soulslike” game Mortal Shell, coming out about a year after the base game’s original release. Fittingly, perhaps, this piece is going up about a year after that, though it wasn’t my intention and I’ll get into the reasons for what ended up being an especially protracted writing process a bit below. This finished piece is partly a review of the Mortal Shell DLC but will also contain a blend of “thoughts” on the mechanics and design of both the base game and its expansion and on how this enhanced version of the Mortal Shell experience fits into the landscape of gaming at large, similar to my previous write-up. I recommend reading that piece first since I will reference it a few times here, and, like the game’s relationship with its own expansion, this writing sort of functions as an expansion on what I’ve already said to hopefully offer a complete picture of my current (as of this writing) feelings about Mortal Shell. Like the first piece, this one is pretty long, so I have broken it up into sections to make it easier to read.

After working on this essay for so many months, it has to be one of my most-revisited/most-revised pieces on this blog as of right now, and that process of trying to make it good (hell—of just reading through it) has been exhausting, but also fulfilling. As much as it marks me as a nerd, there’s a joy in long-form critical writing for me: in, for instance, the delightful synthesis that occurs when I find other people’s words, sometimes simply by accident, that work so well with what I want to say. Hopefully the end-result is interesting and feels appropriately considered.

 

Sections:

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

 

The “RPG” Issue Revisited (“The Virtuous Cycle’s” Role as DLC and an Overview/Review of the New Roguelike Mode, Character, and Weapon)

PART ONE: THE DLC AND ITS MESSAGE

PART TWO: THAT OVERVIEW/REVIEW

PART THREE: A QUESTION OF BALANCE

Trying Times, Tumultuous Terrain ("The Virtuous Cycle's" Level and Encounter Design and Final Boss, Plus a Glitchy Interlude and Something Like A Final Assessment)

PART ONE: LEVEL AND ENCOUNTER DESIGN IN “THE VIRTUOUS CYCLE”: THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE RANDOM

PART TWO: THE GAME AND ITS GLITCHES, THE CRITIC AND HIS CRISIS

PART THREE: TWIN-FINALE: “THE VIRTUOUS CYCLE’S” FINAL BOSS AND MY FINAL ASSESSMENT

What Color is Motivation? (“The Virtuous Cycle,” Game Design Trends, and Psychological Manipulation)

The “RPG” Issue Revisited ("The Virtuous Cycle's" Role as DLC and an Overview/Review of the New Roguelike Mode, Character, and Weapon)

PART ONE: THE DLC AND ITS MESSAGE

The role that downloadable content plays in the modern videogaming landscape is an interesting and fraught one. DLC can serve many different functions—from meaningfully expanding on a base game (as is the case with the three paid updates for Team Ninja’s Nioh 2), providing story content some might see as an essential addition to the original release (like “Trespasser” for BioWare’s Dragon Age: Inquisition), and down to adding largely frivolous cosmetic items (like the many, many costumes available for Dead or Alive 6—Team Ninja again). There’s an argument to be made that releasing DLC is always a profit-focused choice first and foremost, regardless of how essential (or not) it is to a given game’s play experience, but what about free DLC?

While DLC (paid or not) could possibly exist to improve or add to a game for artistic reasons, a more cynical and likely interpretation, which could very well sit alongside the desire to further improve the art, would be that DLC keeps the game in the public consciousness. It means that the game will likely get new write-ups in gaming publications, providing free advertising and possibly fresh rounds of word-of-mouth discussion that get additional people to purchase the game for the first time or else to keep playing it or be drawn back to it again. For games that make their big bucks off repeated “microtransactions” that may be freshened up with new options via what could be considered “updates” or “expansions,” there’s a sort of self-sustaining cycle that might emerge via this model—as new and old players alike might find themselves drawn to, say, Genshin Impact when the hottest new anime twink gets added in post-release and his face is plastered on gaming news sites. DLC (especially free) could also build consumer goodwill toward the specific game and toward the developer. If the game is actively updated and if those updates give players things they want, then they obviously might think more highly of the game and its creators. In the case of the 2020 action-adventure game Mortal Shell specifically, you have a smaller team and a smaller title. While I don’t doubt that Cold Symmetry is already working on their next big project—likely Mortal Shell II, logically—in some capacity, the continued updates to the original game demonstrate a care for that game and, by extension and through implication, for the people still playing it and also keep that game in the public consciousness. Maybe it’s also about making good art better, but, if nothing else, it seems like a smart business decision in the long run to keep Mortal Shell, as a product, in people’s minds.

Released back in August of last year (2021), Mortal Shell’s “Virtuous Cycle” DLC feels like a proper expansion in terms of size: featuring a new, overhauled mode of play (pictured above), as well as some other new additions like the transforming “Axatana” weapon (also pictured above) that can be used in both the game’s classic/story(?) mode and in the new roguelike mode.

Having said all that, it’s also worth thinking about what a given bit of DLC says about the developers’ intentions for the game in question. What has been added to the experience, and what does it change or clarify about the original game? To look again at Dragon Age: Inquisition, a DLC expansion like “Trespasser” clarifies and (possibly) rectifies certain faults with the base game’s design. Where the various large zones the player could explore in the original release of that game were seen as pretty empty of meaningful content and were filled instead with low-impact, check-list-style busywork of the sort commonly associated with “open-world” titles, “Trespasser” could be said to offer a competing vision of what the game might have been if the backlash to Dragon Age II’s more focused (or, “limited”?) design hadn’t been so severe, resulting in the devs chasing after Skyrim-style size and freedom of exploration during what proved to be a troubled development for a variety of reasons. Then you have something like Nioh 2’s three expansions which suggest great confidence in the original vision. These content packs just add more to the game—more difficulty levels and missions, more loot, and more enemies. They double- (or even triple-) down on Nioh 2 as a game with a long, long arc of statistical progression for truly dedicated players to chase. Nioh 2 is designed to monopolize your time, and the DLC provides compelling reasons to keep playing it if you already love its particular gameplay. By being so in line with the original experience, the DLC offers no compromises or suggestions that the base game was anything other than what the devs wanted it to be. How about Mortal Shell, then? What do its current (as of this writing) DLC packs suggest about its developers’ feelings regarding the original experience? What do they have to say for themselves?

Mortal Shell’s free "Rotten Autumn" update from 2020 was all about confirming the game's aesthetic tastes. That's how you can read into it, at least, though it's only fair to acknowledge that this update was also a quick and easy (looking) one, including an alternative soundtrack limited to boss fights, new skins for the characters, and a new NPC with a simple quest-like interaction and dialogue but without any new voice work. It's what you might reasonably expect from a free update in the sense that it's pretty small and simple and something you could imagine a studio putting together while working on a larger project like Mortal Shell II or even just "The Virtuous Cycle" DLC that we now have. To go back to reading into the first DLC, however: Like I already said, it clarifies Mortal Shell's aesthetic priorities. I argued in my original write-up that the new skins make the characters look like members of a metal band, while the new soundtrack from black metal group Rotting Christ confirms the game's interest in metal beyond just using it as a marketing choice for its trailers. If the DLC is a statement, it's one confirming that, yes, Mortal Shell has a heavy metal influence, which is a good thing from my perspective since I think this style of game meshes well with metal as a genre.

The more recent "Virtuous Cycle" is a much bigger DLC update—and one with a price tag—which means it takes longer to break down. If I had to once again try to sum up the statement being made here, though, I would say it's something along the lines of "Yes, Mortal Shell is an action-RPG," which is a statement I will explore in some depth momentarily. While this DLC does add further new content onto the base game experience, the real draw is how it offers an alternative way to play through the game that removes certain elements like most friendly NPCs and the original ability unlock system while radically altering others in the service of turning Mortal Shell into a roguelike: an offshoot of RPG design where death forces you to start the entire playthrough over again and with the game world randomly generating some elements with each attempted playthrough, though certain types of progress carry over across your various "runs.” In some ways, this new mode represents the ultimate challenge designed for Mortal Shell fans who have exhausted what the original release could offer: Sure, you can play through the base game with the extremely fragile “Foundling” or Tiel characters, but you had checkpoints then! Are you hardcore enough to get through the entire game without dying ever? There are more lenient characters to choose (like Eredrím, with his massive starting health pool), but this new way of playing Mortal Shell definitely feels like it's meant as a remix geared toward returning players and less like a way for newcomers to experience the game for the first time. I'll come back to that thought later, but, for now, I want to focus on the new RPG elements.

 

I was curious how “The Virtuous Cycle” DLC would be integrated into the existing game. The answer is that it’s via a newly-added NPC in the tower at the center of the swamp hub. The “Twin-Sister,” who seems to be a relative of the Foundling but who looks eerily like the base game’s final boss femmed up and in miniature, is the access point for the DLC and is also the character its narrative revolves around. Unlike the large frog NPC added with “Rotten Autumn,” your likely-sister has substantial new dialogue that is also voice-acted. She also memes it up if you fail a run sometimes, coaxing you to “get good,” the old Soulslike mantra.

 

PART TWO: THAT OVERVIEW/REVIEW

In my original write-up, I argued that Mortal Shell is not actually an RPG, and I stand by that assessment where the base game experience is concerned. That designation has lost more and more of its original meaning over the years, but calling Mortal Shell as it originally released an “RPG” feels like even more of a stretch than usual. Enter “The Virtuous Cycle,” though! The new playable character, Hadern, does have some actual choices to make between various active and passive upgrades in his skill web so that you can’t just have everything without making trade-offs like you can with the other characters in what could now be at least sort of accurately classified as the game’s “story mode.” That being said, the overall experience of playing through the game in its normal state still has little that feels meaningfully RPG-like. Hadern’s flexibility is just an outlier, characterizing him (appropriately) as special and very powerful. The new "Virtuous Cycle" mode proper, however, adds a lot more numbers and percentages to manage and tweak for all characters and skews the difficulty in such a way that those numbers matter more. Certain values are persistent across all characters and runs, and it's the steady but slow improvement of these ever-present numbers that ultimately will allow most players to go from playthroughs that end after a few minutes to complete "cycles" that may take hours. Meanwhile, within a run, the game's familiar zones are now littered with new interactables and pickups that award the player "Instincts," which are passive buffs rated and appealingly color-coded based on their rarity: common and gray, uncommon and green, rare and blue, epic and purple, legendary and orange/yellow, alongside red upgrades for core stats and yellow-green tokens tied to run progress. All of these, except for that final category, can tweak a character’s stats or the way that they play, and all types of Instincts/tokens are lost upon death.

This is where Mortal Shell finally becomes something like an RPG since you can specifically choose Instincts that work with a particular character or weapon or can buff certain core stats over others to cover your weaknesses—like you would in other RPGs. Here are some easy examples: The aforementioned Eredrím has a lot of health but very low stamina, so when given a choice of Instincts, you would probably want ones that extend his maximum stamina or potentially lower stamina costs for the types of actions you perform most regularly. Or you could focus on attack power and not worry so much about stamina since each hit will deal more damage. Meanwhile, the character Tiel has such low health, it may be worth taking and then upgrading the Instinct that gives you a chance to lose stamina instead of health or the one that can prevent the Foundling from being knocked out of the character “Shell” (and potentially killed) in exchange for Resolve energy since Tiel has such low Resolve that you probably won't be using it much for other actions anyway. Or, say you're using the game's new transforming "Axatana" weapon primarily in axe mode and not in katana mode—If you were given a choice of Instincts, you would want to take the ones that pertain to the axe and not to the katanas. Since Instincts usually have multiple levels as well and can be upgraded by choosing the same Instinct again and again over time, you are required to choose just how much to invest in a particular stat or skill over others.

 

On the left above is a shot of the “Runic Gate” menu where you slowly improve your odds statistically across runs. You can access the gate before starting a playthrough and also after each boss fight, allowing you to spend your earned resources before potentially losing them in death. On the right is an example of the game’s altered landscape and display. Additional pillars and chests now exist in the game to provide Instincts, and you can also acquire these upgrades from item drops found in the environment or left behind by defeated enemies. The collected Instincts’ icons accumulate on the right side of the screen, serving as a constant reminder of your progress through a run. As you progress, you might get more confident (as the numbers increase and rarer upgrades are added to the mix) or more nervous (as you have that much more to lose if you mess up).

 

Critically, certain Instincts are also mutually exclusive since you can only have one or two attached to each specific normal action (like the evasive roll) and have to choose how you think those core abilities would be best altered. And since there is a degree of randomization to what you’ll even find, you can’t necessarily plan out any of this in advance and have to try to choose Instincts that complement what you do have or do find over time. If you start a run with a randomly-selected Instinct that buffs a particular weapon ability, then you would naturally want to use that skill more during the run, thus changing your playstyle a bit and altering how you might choose to progress when given a choice of other Instincts in the future. The ultimate point here is that, with all this possible variation that includes meaningful mechanical/numerical choices that require accepting trade-offs, there are now actual "builds" possible in the game, and while some Instincts just seem better than others (specifically those that are significantly more likely or guaranteed to activate over those with something like a single-digit percentage chance), the addition of these numerical elements to Mortal Shell does actually make it an action-RPG, at last.

Because “The Virtuous Cycle” has no checkpoints and a greater reliance on numbers, the difficulty has been shifted to prioritize player skill a bit less. Granted, players familiar with every enemy and especially those who have learned to parry most enemies and bosses will still have an easier time, but Cold Symmetry have clearly made changes to the game to make it harder and to force the player to accept multiple failed runs and slow progress over time, which are mandatory to make a roguelike approach work. If players can easily beat the game without making incremental progress across runs, then it's not a good roguelike. Victory should come from practice and player knowledge but also from increasingly stacking the odds in favor of victory through numbers. Mortal Shell seems to handle this balancing act well, as I saw myself getting better at the game as a player even though the difficulty was also obviously influenced by, say, the fact that I was more likely to get my “Endless Unborn” second chance back after getting knocked out of a character rather than having that loss be an issue for the rest of a run. The presence of these persistent upgrades may actually indicate that “The Virtuous Cycle” is a “roguelite” rather than a true “roguelike” following the exact design specifications of the original Rogue game from the 1980s. I’m not about to argue the designation—since this is not my area of expertise, for one thing—and I also won’t argue against the designation mattering at all given that I just took time above to complain myself about the dilution of the term “RPG.” The fact that official descriptions of “The Virtuous Cycle” refer to it as “roguelike” (and not “lite”) is no real defense either since Mortal Shell was also labelled as an RPG well before it actually was one. It feels like the broader lingo of gaming has accepted “roguelike” as a catch-all in these cases, however, while ignoring the “lite” variant.  

In addition to the presence of something like roguelike/lite permadeath during runs, the most accessible healing items have almost entirely been removed from the game in “The Virtuous Cycle” mode as well. Players can no longer farm up and drip-feed themselves health from mushrooms or roasted rats and must instead rely on a couple of rarer items that require a bit more thought and/or finesse to use, as well as on the healing riposte move and on Instincts. In that last case, receiving a new Instinct often heals the player, and certain Instincts will increase the amount of healing received when you acquire another one, so as a run progresses, these upgrades can start to matter less as upgrades and more as sources of healing that you access strategically. Much like how the base game's “New Game-Plus” changes the way you have to approach playing Mortal Shell by allowing a bit of damage to slip through your block, "The Virtuous Cycle's" altered take on healing also requires a different approach. The randomness coupled with the way that the game seems programmed to spawn enemies in larger groups, with more dangerous combinations of opponents, also contributes to the difficulty being higher.

 

Instinct-granting pillars and item drops prompt you to choose between multiple upgrades, sometimes with an additional bonus thrown in. This added customization and choice regarding character abilities and stats through Instincts allows for the sort of progression and prioritization, with tangible trade-offs, that makes “The Virtuous Cycle” into an RPG.

As I said before, this doesn't feel like an ideal way to play Mortal Shell for the first time. At least you do have to get through the tutorial area and reach the tower at the heart of the Fallgrim hub to access "The Virtuous Cycle" initially, but since it doesn't really tutorialize anything else beyond the initial ability set available at the start of the game (like how to kick or "stomp" or use weapon abilities, or even what those weapon abilities are) that the base game doles out over time, it seems like starting your Mortal Shell experience with the expansion would be the equivalent of the old saying about a new swimmer diving straight into the deep end. When I first started getting the impression from trailers that this DLC would be a largely mechanical one, I felt that it wasn't appropriate for someone's first experience of Mortal Shell since it seemed that all narrative might be removed entirely. However, "The Virtuous Cycle" does still have narrative content which includes quite a bit of new insight into the whole state of the world and the major figures in it. Having actually played the expansion, I now feel that the DLC should have only been accessible if the player has a save file with a completed playthrough on their system, both because of its difficulty and general lack of a normal learning curve and because of how its narrative threads make the most sense in the context of everything you would learn across a playthrough (or two) of the base game. I can understand the business reasoning that has “The Virtuous Cycle” so accessible, though, since they could have had experienced players coming back without a save for some reason or new players specifically drawn in by the roguelike focus who could then be put off by the necessity of initial completion.

 

“The Virtuous Cycle” mode spawns larger groups of enemies in new locations and in more diverse configurations than in the base game, increasing the difficulty in a way that feels appropriate for the new roguelike approach but is perhaps not the best way to learn about Mortal Shell’s world and gameplay for the first time. I can definitely say that this mode made me better at the game, however. The original mode of play feels pretty easy by comparison now.

 

If the world of the base game of Mortal Shell felt like a hostile but still oddly tightly-knit one of warring factions that fit together like a Venn diagram, then "The Virtuous Cycle's" new insight makes me think of a family instead. Family is at the heart of the DLC, as the NPC you meet to access the content and with whom you have the most direct interaction in the game mode is the Foundling's "Twin-Sister." She reveals to you (at a pretty good rate, at least at first) more information about the origins of your kind, your mother, and the events that unfolded before the start of the base game while your character slept but your sister was awake and interacting with other figures like Solomon, one of the original playable Shells, and Hadern, who served as a sort of illusive mentor figure and mini-boss in that original release. If Mortal Shell felt like Dark Souls before, it now feels like Star Wars (to me) because of the revealed intimacy at the heart of the conflict. In retrospect, there were definitely hints of this before with the original principal antagonist, sometimes known as "The Old Prisoner" or “The Unchained” but also as "Dark Father" or "The Glandfather," depending on where you look, who was also Solomon's brother. Since everything is still presented in murky, vague ways, it's not completely possible to nail absolutely everything down, but "The Virtuous Cycle" does still feel like a look behind the curtain that the base game never did quite draw back, even at its (unsatisfying) conclusion. That situation is now made somewhat better with the addition of Hadern’s backstory that is unlocked via his skill web and which feels appropriately revelatory given how central he is to the plot. That new addition aside, the narrative exclusive to “The Virtuous Cycle” mode still fills in and clarifies in a way that works best if you already know the names and connections to some extent. The increased gamification of the landscape in this mode through the addition of the Instinct pillars and some notable streamlining of progression I’ll examine in detail later does detract from the atmosphere of the experience like I anticipated, which further reinforces my feeling that this DLC is best played by those with prior knowledge of the game's story and areas. Experiencing them first in the comparatively more subdued and immersive main game mode and then only later as more gamified stages in an arcade-adjacent challenge mode just feels like the most logical progression to me.

 

PART THREE: A QUESTION OF BALANCE

As mentioned previously, outside of the new roguelike mode, “The Virtuous Cycle” also adds the character Hadern and the Axatana weapon (and a new lute) to the game. These additions are theoretically unlockable early on in a traditional playthrough but require some effort to access. You have to do the three other Hadern fights (not counting the mandatory one in the tutorial) and acquire the Hammer and Chisel, Martyr’s Blade, and Smoldering Mace weapons. You then have to beat Hadern in a new two-phase encounter to unlock him as a playable character and the Axatana as a selectable weapon. While the simplest strategy for beating him still works (queue up an attack within Hadern’s reach, “Harden” to block his attack and then immediately release your own after the deflection), this test of endurance could still be challenging if someone wants to play primarily with Hadern or to make the Axatana their main weapon from the beginning since they would have to fight this boss early in the game, likely with fewer healing items and with a base-level other weapon to save upgrade materials for the Axatana itself. This level of challenge to gain access to Hadern and his weapon feels fitting since both could be considered “over-powered” to an extent compared with your other options. As I said before, the handling of Hadern (“The Deliverer”), including his signature weapon, feels appropriate given his status in the game, and it would make sense for him to be both challenging to unlock and noticeably powerful as a playable character. This is a definite advantage of Mortal Shell’s status as an exclusively single-player game—Nothing needs to be balanced for multiplayer.

As a character, Hadern has good health and stamina but somewhat lower special Resolve energy stores. This last attribute could potentially make him weaker than characters who can more easily use multiple weapon abilities in a row, but what makes Hadern so powerful overall is what I mentioned in passing before about how his skill tree has much more flexibility than the other characters’. Hadern has his own dedicated skills but can also take on skills from each of the other four Shells, meaning he can get the most powerful abilities from every other skill web. There are trade-offs, though. Namely, Hadern has to pay at least twice for each skill node: first to unlock it at all, then a second time to assign an ability, and then additional times if the player decides to switch abilities under that node. This means Hadern requires greater amounts of resources to fully equip than the other characters. As I also mentioned previously, his flexible design clearly supports the “statement” of sorts made by the DLC about Mortal Shell’s status as an RPG. The fact that Hadern’s development involves choice and that those choices come with consequences (in resources, in the loss of the abilities you don’t choose) makes developing him somewhat closer to levelling a character in a “proper” RPG. Narratively, Hadern’s upgrades also continue the trend from the roguelike mode and provide further background information about the nature of the world of Mortal Shell that incentivizes players to unlock and upgrade him. I stand by what I said in the previous piece about not finding the skills themselves all that interesting and definitely like how you still get something of value out of the upgrade process if your interests are more character- and story-focused.

 

It’s worth noting that the Axatana, seen here in axe mode along with its initial wielder, Hadern, feels like a “twin-sister” of sorts to the original release’s “Ballistazooka” weapon. The name is a similarly playful portmanteau that suggests Mortal Shell doesn’t take itself too seriously. (See also: meme-ing it up when the game just outright tells you to “get good.”)

 

The first and most noticeable thing that makes the Axatana itself so powerful is that it is essentially two new weapons rather than just one, filling out the middle reaches of the light to heavy weapon spectrum with both lighter dual swords and a somewhat heavier axe. While obtaining the right key items could allow you to quick-swap between the other weapons in the story mode, doing so requires first getting those key items and then assigning them to quick slots that you could be using for other things. Accessing multiple weapons in this manner also requires more fiddling with the quick slots while playing, and possibly under fire if you switch mid-encounter. And you can’t use those items to swap the other weapons during a “Virtuous Cycle” run. Meanwhile, the Axatana swaps instantly from dual katana to axe mode by just pressing the two bumpers on the controller. This swapping animation also gives you invincibility frames, which can look like either an odd creative choice or an omission since switching weapons is something you would probably want the player to need to time properly. Alternatively: This is Hadern’s weapon, so it should be over-powered, and it making you invincible mid-swap is like that powerful figure flexing on his enemies in a manner reminiscent of the “taunt” move in some action games. There’s some support for this view of the transformation in “The Virtuous Cycle’s” announcement trailer, where we briefly see Hadern wield the Axatana—using it first in axe mode to knock an enemy down before transforming it into the dual swords and then immediately turning it back into the axe for a killing blow. There, it’s pretty clearly an act of intimidation or showing off, like a taunt. The game punctuates the Axatana switching modes with a muffled “dum” sound effect separate from the weapon transformation sounds to drive home the power of the switch, and actually standing in the path of danger and performing this flourish in lieu of a vanilla block or dodge certainly feels cool. You could see the generosity of the i-frames as over-powered, and the simple fact that this one weapon has additional tactical options the others don’t could also contribute to that impression. It turns out that same flourish lets you cancel out of basic offensive and evasive actions by entering the transformation state, allowing you to be defensive at basically any moment—not unlike the regular block/Harden ability—and meaning skilled players or those in desperate need of a defensive stance while the block is on cooldown have this extra option if they’re using the Axatana. The two modes of the weapon also seem to have additional offensive options—a running light attack with the katanas and the ability to chain the heavy combo finisher into the light combo finisher with the axe.

The two modes of the Axatana cover one another’s (theoretical) weaknesses well, in that way where having both so easily accessible contributes to the sense of the weapon being over-powered. The dual katanas are faster but light, while the axe is somewhat slower but heavy. Their individual weapon abilities also strike a good balance, where the katanas’ dashing strike has more range and is better for multiple weaker enemies, while the axe’s short-range spin and overhead slam has somewhat less crowd control potential and is better for single-target damage. The running heavy attacks specifically in both modes feel somewhat over-powered, any other theoretical balancing of the two halves of the weapon’s combined moveset aside. The dual katanas’ leaping spin attack in particular hits fast and hard multiple times, allowing you to essentially mow down enemies while in motion before they can even react, and with comparatively few damage upgrades required in either the story or roguelike modes. The axe version of the same move executes more slowly, like you’d expect, but is still a fast and damaging one-two punch (er, slash?) that can instantly eliminate some weaker enemies. As I said before, the lack of “balance” isn’t necessarily an issue in a single-player game, though I suppose the risk would be that the Axatana could be considered so good that it renders other weapons sub-optimal to the point that using them feels like a liability rather than just a different choice in playstyle.

I certainly got something like that impression playing “The Virtuous Cycle” mode, where the Axatana but also the Hammer and Chisel and Hallowed Sword all seem more powerful from the get-go, with zero upgrades, than the Smoldering Mace or the Martyr’s Blade. The Smoldering Mace is a lighter heavy weapon that I like a lot for how it can elicit a decent variety of hit reactions from enemies, with the final blow of its heavy combo being powerful enough to consistently get a strong response from even some of the tankiest opponents in the game. The Martyr’s Blade, which got me through my initial playthrough of the base game, has noticeably more pronounced and dramatic impact on enemies earlier in its light and heavy combos, which is to be expected from the heaviest weapon available. The main problems are with the damage output and stamina costs.

While these two weapons are quite capable at flinching and knocking around enemies compared with the other options, the DPS potential of those other weapons makes them feel more powerful at the start of a “Virtuous Cycle” run in my experience. I don’t know that the more pronounced hit stun you can inflict with the Mace and Blade balances out how much slower they can force you to play, drawing out encounters the other weapons could have finished much more quickly, albeit while not being able to lock down opponents as easily. The heavy weapons still have another major consideration that comes with choosing them and that plays into the sense of (im)balance, though: Health and stamina tend to be inversely proportional stats in the game’s characters. Only those with the least base health have the stamina to use these weapons effectively but still aren’t a good fit since they can’t tank damage. Meanwhile, the somewhat tankier characters lack the stamina to swing the weapons much, and you spend most of your time using them listening to the heavy breathing sound effect that plays when your stamina is low. I’m not saying the relationship between the stats is unintentional or some oversight—I think it’s pretty clearly meant to help make sure no particular character-weapon combination is too obviously “right.” Intentional or not, though, it’s worth thinking about whether that balance is achieved. With the Martyr’s Blade in particular, it seemed like the hit stun wasn’t so much a bonus of using the weapon as much as it was absolutely necessary to balance out the longer recovery animations and high stamina costs. You essentially trade one problem for another: Enemies falter more often, but stamina management is a near-constant concern. The health versus stamina problem remains pretty much throughout a playthrough of the game, though you might get lucky with HP- or endurance-boosting Instincts in “The Virtuous Cycle.” The damage problem eventually does get solved in both modes. By the end of a playthrough, the Smoldering Mace and (especially) the Martyr’s Blade are capable of dealing damage that feels of a kind with their size and stagger power and thus feel properly mighty. Of course, the lighter weapons also tear through enemies at max power (and still with the same high speed as before), so it ends up feeling a bit like choosing the Smoldering Mace or Martyr’s Blade is the equivalent of activating a hard mode of sorts, where the greater chance of flinching or knocking down enemies could be seen as a bonus combat tool but where it may not actually balance out the drawbacks.

 

One particularly… interesting character-weapon combination, seen here in this shot from “The Virtuous Cycle’s” launch trailer is Eredrím and the Martyr’s Blade. It’s one that has been officially showcased before, and showing it off makes sense given that the people behind the game would naturally want to highlight the versatility of the different approaches possible, but it also always struck me as a wild (read: likely frustrating) pairing given just how little stamina Eredrím has. The possibility of upgrading that stamina pool does now exist in “The Virtuous Cycle,” but it still seems like a combo for the truly masochistic and/or patient. I did such a run myself but unfortunately can’t remember how it went. My only notes for that playthrough are “P. unremarkable? Not wildly unfair” (in reference to the random generation of the game world). It does look like I (sensibly) used the “Anointed Butcher” skin for Eredrím which boosts his base damage a good bit, however.

 

You could certainly prove a power imbalance with math—by comparing the base damage values of each weapon and how many hits it takes from a given attack available to the weapon to put down a certain enemy type, for example. Timing how long it takes a weapon at a given upgrade level to take out one of the heaviest hammer-wielding basic enemies in the game could also be illustrative, or you could tackle the same enemy encounter with the same character and with each weapon and count how many times said character was rendered out of breath and had to back off to allow stamina to regenerate, or you could just time the fight… There are a lot of more or less objective ways to try to prove this point I’m making, but I’m not going to pursue them since they sound tedious. More subjectively, then, I can just say that any given “Virtuous Cycle” run for me with the Martyr’s Blade always takes a few minutes more than one where I use the other weapons. I also find myself relying more on kicks, weapon abilities, and items with the Martyr’s Blade compared with the others. Following up a playthrough with that weapon immediately with a run using the Axatana reveals a pretty stark contrast in terms of experience. My initial impressions of Mortal Shell are pretty far away in the past at this point, but I do wonder how I would have found the Axatana during that initial playthrough where I eventually gravitated toward the Martyr’s Blade because I did feel like I needed the additional hit stun to get through the game—where the Hallowed Sword but especially the Hammer and Chisel struck me as far too light for me to use back when I didn’t have such a thorough knowledge of the game’s enemies. What strikes me now as imbalance didn’t seem as such at that time, for what that observation is worth.

In the end, the surprising damage output of the Axatana’s supposedly “light” form kind of ties this section together: It doesn’t necessarily feel like a needed counterpart to the axe so much as it is just another weapon in its own right—as powerful as the axe mode if not more so thanks to the added speed. Like I was saying before, the power imbalance isn’t necessarily a critical flaw unless some weapons seem objectively worse to use in an extreme way. Playing Mortal Shell with one of the lighter weapons (especially the new addition) feels quite different from using the two heaviest. While I’m sure other players came to this conclusion already, the repeated playthroughs encouraged by “The Virtuous Cycle” gave me more opportunities to test things out and to think about the balancing act among the various weapons—as well as some other issues I’ll get to later that also, unfortunately, begin to emerge most clearly through repeated and/or long-term engagement with the game’s old and new content, solid though that content ultimately is.

 

 

Trying Times, Tumultuous Terrain ("The Virtuous Cycle's" Level and Encounter Design and Final Boss, Plus a Glitchy Interlude and Something Like A Final Assessment)

PART ONE: LEVEL AND ENCOUNTER DESIGN IN “THE VIRTUOUS CYCLE”: THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE RANDOM

One reason I think "The Virtuous Cycle" is an interesting update for Mortal Shell is because it actually does address some of the things I criticized in my original write-up. While they could have been addressed accidentally, it seems reasonable to assume that the devs were aware of these potential problems (or, flipped for positivity: potential avenues for improvement) with the game themselves, which rings true based on the stories I've read online from developers discussing their work. If a game has weaknesses, there's an extremely good chance those who worked on it already know (and intimately). It's just not always possible to make changes during development itself for any number of reasons.

This is the double-edged sword of post-release updates as an established and expected phenomenon: On the one hand, they allow developers to make ongoing changes to games, enabling them to fix and improve aspects of what is essentially part of their creative legacy; on the other hand, though, the expectation that updates (at least patches for issues with the game) will happen could serve as justification to push very rough games out the door early with the mentality that issues can just be fixed later. This element of modern gaming is a troubling one with any number of consequences, including but not limited to how players without internet connections (or without high-speed internet or that have limited data) might purchase a product they can’t even play in some extreme cases. And the acceptance of patches has undoubtedly also led to worse habits on the industry side of things as what is acceptable to print to a disc and ship has changed and has likely encouraged practices that couldn’t have been so sustainable back when the product was what it was and a bad or broken game was a permanent black mark on a company’s record. It’s no doubt harder than ever for the industry as an entity with standards, spoken or unspoken, to muster the collective will to purge things like mismanagement and crunch since there’s now always the option of updating an initial misfire later and a fair amount of proof that it’s a workable solution. The critical and consumer turnaround post-release on 2016’s No Man’s Sky, for instance, was certainly a good thing for the devs but has likely contributed to problems on both the industry and consumer sides of video games, with the industry better able to justify a “release it now, fix it later” mentality and consumers feeling like they’re owed a continuous stream of minor and major adjustments, fixes, and updates (and a game that launches and just is launched without ongoing changes is some kind of “dead”). This isn’t to insult a game I haven’t played and have no personal ill will against—just to say that once the seed has been planted that you can turn a negative reception around with time and enough updates, that’s bound to be weaponized, consciously or subconsciously. I’m not saying Mortal Shell falls into any such category, but it has certainly received its share of post-launch fixes in addition to the DLC updates.

I'm going to start off this section of the essay by trying to work through the changes "The Virtuous Cycle" brings to the game—good and not so good—in the same order I discussed them in my original piece on Mortal Shell. It is worth noting, however, that the changes appear exclusive to “The Virtuous Cycle” mode, while the base game seems largely unaltered. I don’t think this outright disproves what I was saying before about the team potentially reflecting on the game’s weaknesses and addressing them post-release, however. Since a lot of these alterations are not “invisible” (matters of numbers or balancing things behind the scenes), it could make sense not to tamper with the finished, more visible, experience of the game, in terms of things like level design and enemy placement, and to instead experiment or offer up a sort of “what-if” via the expansion content, which does re-use the world but still exists in its own space within the game, as a sort of alternate dimension version or “take” on the original content.

 

As noted before, “The Virtuous Cycle” remixes enemy placements throughout the game to (usually) offer a different and more difficult take on the original version. This is in addition to adding new sources of the Instincts central to the roguelike mode. There are other changes as well, though. The different color of the sky in the Seat of Infinity area is one of the subtler ones. Maybe there’s a lore reason someone can come up with?

 

First, "The Virtuous Cycle" makes some changes to the game’s areas or levels and how you progress through them. The Fallgrim swamp was and is, still, excellent in terms of its foundational geography, and it's potentially made better in "The Virtuous Cycle" thanks to the omission of the foggy state you normally encounter after completing a dungeon, where all the regular enemies are replaced with a single type and you’re expected to re-explore the whole area at least once to open chests that are arbitrarily sealed when the world isn’t foggy. The foggy state does not exist in the roguelike mode since you only complete Fallgrim once and then go through each dungeon one after the other in the order of your choosing without returning to the swamp. The expansion introduces a new enemy to the mix: another variant of the specter opponents previously found in the dungeons. Furthermore, enemies from each dungeon can now be found in the swamp in the general vicinity of the appropriate dungeon entrances, and the swamp enemy set has more of a presence in all of the dungeons as well, resulting in greater enemy variety throughout the game’s areas.

The ice and fire dungeons now begin with certain shortcuts already open to the player from the start. The ice dungeon was already quite good overall, perhaps barring the opening tunnel zone, but the entire fire dungeon was extremely flat, pretty linear, and fairly boring. Opening a door or two ahead of time doesn't exactly change that, but it does make the experience slightly more open-ended. On that note, this is probably a good place to point out that "The Virtuous Cycle" can't exactly go full roguelike since the game's environments aren't designed for proper random generation. The component parts just don't fit together in ways that would make flipping them around possible (I think), and, frankly, trying to randomly change the terrain would be a huge ask for a small team developing a piece of DLC that sells for under ten dollars.

The resulting repetition of the landscape is definitely going to contribute to some people burning out quickly on "The Virtuous Cycle," I feel, but a counter-argument could be that always knowing in advance exactly where the major landmarks are can make speedily playing through a run easier. The game's overall short length and the brevity of the fire dungeon specifically actually work in its favor with this DLC. They make turning the whole game into a roguelike more manageable since the content is brief enough that players can run through it quickly and repeatedly and without the threat of permadeath seeming unreasonable. As a point of contrast, consider Darksiders II: an action-RPG that I absolutely loved but whose permadeath difficulty I never touched since the game was incredibly long and had a good bit of dialogue and narrative, which made the prospect of dying to an attack with a fiddly hitbox and then having to start from scratch unbearable. Mortal Shell doesn’t have this problem (at least not the length and narrative heft), so what was originally a major shortcoming in the fire dungeon's length especially now becomes a strength in this reworked version of the game and now also presents an engaging strategic consideration for players: Maybe they want to do the area first since it's arguably the easiest of the three dungeons, or maybe they should do it last since that easiness means they’re less likely to lose their second chance to a random enemy or the boss, meaning they can then go into the pretty tough new final boss encounter at the end of a cycle in better shape. Even the fire area’s flatness and straightforwardness can be recast as strengths now that the game is a roguelike since those things facilitate repeat visits better, arguably, than the looping and varied landscape of Fallgrim or the sprawling obsidian wastes of the Seat of Infinity, which I still think of as the earth counterpart to the clearer elemental theming of the ice and fire zones, and which I referred to incorrectly as the Eternal Narthex, which is actually only the name of the dungeon’s opening area, throughout my previous write-up. (We all make mistakes, it turns out!)

This largest of the three dungeons has seen some of the biggest changes of the bunch. In addition to having the giant door gating the massive first area from the rest of the dungeon open from the start, the level now has more teleporters than before, which now work without the somewhat lengthy teleportation animation present in the base game, and most of those teleporters can now transport the player to multiple locations, meaning that it's much easier to fast travel across the game's largest zone that unfortunately happens to also be the most boring to traverse on foot. The empty, tedious space is still definitely there, but thanks to the added chests and pillars that grant the player Instincts in "The Virtuous Cycle," exploration of the area is more consistently rewarded and the space is a bit less empty. Add to that the fact that you only technically need a specific token from a random Instinct pillar in each dungeon to confront the boss, and that said token also functions as a teleport directly to the end of the dungeon, and you can clearly see the devs working to make all areas of the game—and not just the spacious Seat of Infinity—less of a slog on repeat playthroughs. Players who want every available Instinct or item are going to have to go everywhere, but it is theoretically possible to not have to go through the entirety of every stage for every run. Letting the random teleporters direct you throughout the Seat of Infinity can also shake up the order in which you visit sections of the level—a more dramatic version of opting to take a different loop to clear Fallgrim or the other two dungeons. The larger number of spawned enemies in the expansion also helps fill the space in the Seat of Infinity a bit more and makes traveling through it more interesting as well, but, if we look ahead somewhat to encounter design, some of these enemy configurations are really only manageable because the AI can be extremely passive where the player's presence is concerned.

All three dungeons have also been shortened fairly considerably by removing the backtracking present in the base game when the player must return the way they came through each area with the "Sacred Gland" earned from that area's boss. While I thought these dungeon escapes could be more atmospheric and challenging with some tweaks (like a time limit rather than just new enemy groups and some added darkness), it's not unreasonable to see them as dead weight in the context of this streamlined reimagining. You still collect each Gland item but then only have to trade it in at a nearby pillar to leave the area. I kind of miss the escapes as a mechanical experience with narrative justification and that added to the mood and theming of the game, but I can understand the removal for purely mechanical reasons as well.

 

While the physical landscapes of Mortal Shell are not meaningfully different in “The Virtuous Cycle,” there is a certain openness and brevity introduced by the new design choices regarding progression. My runs through the roguelike mode, once I got comfortable with the gameplay and had a nice statistical cushion persisting across attempts, averaged around 3 hours and some change when approaching the playthroughs with a completionist mindset—picking up every available item and Instinct while fighting all enemies.

 

This is the point where we start to dip toward the negative aspects of “The Virtuous Cycle,” starting with one that is honestly more mixed in nature. As previously mentioned, enemy groups in the DLC are more varied and tend to appear in larger numbers than those found in the base game. To an extent, this change addresses some possible concerns that I had noted before. Areas have more diverse enemy combinations, of course, and the larger numbers tend to also force more intense fights against multiple opponents that can really test the player… though pulling single targets away from a group to slowly take down an encounter is still possible and sometimes even necessary if you get a particularly bad grouping. There are absolutely limits on the randomness that we can’t see as players, but balance isn’t necessarily something that’s easily achieved procedurally. I felt that the encounters in Fallgrim in the base game were excellent, for example, with a great feeling of escalating challenge throughout the zone despite its relative openness. “The Virtuous Cycle,” on the other hand, is obviously more random in how encounters are constructed and distributed. The viability of an entire run might come down to just how withering of an assault you have to contend with in the earliest parts of the game when you typically don’t have much (or anything) in the way of boosts.

The procedural generation loves the brigand archer enemies, which is kind of a good thing since they make encounters more challenging but also kind of a bad thing since you can sometimes end up with so many at once in a single bit of an area that it becomes hard to do anything without being bonked on the head with a projectile and interrupted. This is often merely an annoyance for Eredrím, Harros, Solomon, and Hadern, who just get their actions cut off short and take some chip damage from the arrows (and maybe a bit more if something else slips in an attack as well…), but it is a more threatening situation for the less hardy Tiel and an outright nightmare for the Shell-less Foundling. Sometimes you can start a run in Fallgrim and come under fire almost immediately from nearby brigands with ranged weapons. It can be thrilling but also frustrating, especially if you’re playing as the Foundling (who dies in one hit at the start of a run) or Tiel (who dies very quickly for pretty much an entire run).

Seeming inconsistencies in the AI also play a role here since certain enemies like those aforementioned brigand archers specifically can spot you and start attacking from what feels like a huge distance away, while others like the crossbow-wielding “sesters” of the Seat of Infinity feel like they’re asleep on their feet the majority of the time, though that inattentiveness makes some encounters with them doable if you end up with a bunch near one another. Their rapid volleys of arrows are absolutely lethal, while the evasive backstep they can perform once they’re active makes them hard to pin down as well, so their weird lethargy before the fight properly starts can make dealing with three or so of them grouped together in the open possible. A lot of enemies, including those at the Seat of Infinity, have little animations they play upon spotting the player as well, and you can sometimes rush them down during these animations before they have a chance to become properly hostile. Again, this makes some combinations of opponents manageable, but it just doesn’t feel the best since the AI doesn’t seem to be credibly fighting back sometimes. Occasionally, you can encounter enemies that seem to just not know what to do with themselves when they’re positioned randomly. They may get stuck in the terrain or wander off mid-encounter or attack thin air or even just move in jerky ways. Obviously, you can’t fully test and polish randomness, which is why even games from bigger teams that have some randomness to them, like the “Chalice Dungeons” of FromSoftware’s Bloodborne, can launch with problems that result from the random placement of elements.

Unfortunately, randomness continues to be a major problem with “The Virtuous Cycle’s” tunnels, and this is one area where the devs could actually have anticipated and avoided a major problem by just not allowing enemies to spawn in certain smaller areas only accessible via tunnel. There aren’t a lot of these little accessways in Mortal Shell, but you do periodically have to crawl through one to reach certain tucked-away areas to acquire their treasures. Keep in mind that you cannot back out of a tunnel that you’ve entered and also cannot use items while crawling. Upon emerging from a tunnel you are locked into an animation of the character standing up again and hefting their weapon that takes a nice little chunk of time and also feels kind of pointless, and, critically, during this animation, you can be attacked and take damage before you can do anything. You can watch an enemy approach your character and wind up to attack while you can’t defend yourself in any way. The randomness seems to be at fault here. I don’t think enemies are usually placed near tunnel exits in the base game, but they can appear near them in “The Virtuous Cycle.” Getting attacked while emerging from a tunnel as a character like Eredrím is (usually) just an inconvenience and is a hurdle you can bounce back from. Getting attacked like this when you’re the Foundling or Tiel can be simply lethal, though. This situation is even more frustrating since the animation that plays after exiting a tunnel breaks the otherwise consistent rule in the game that you can Harden to block at any time. All you can do if you enter a tunnel and see enemies waiting at the far end is hope for the best and maybe try to time your exit as they’re turned away from you if they’re patrolling. Or don’t even take the risk in the first place and avoid all tunnels, though this “option” isn’t something I can completely accept since Instinct pillars can appear on the other side of tunnels and could be randomly selected to hold the token you need to progress. As I said before, most of these rooms are enemy-free—or else don’t have enemies right inside the tunnel—in the base game, but the way tunnels and the animation for emerging from them work were possibly not taken into account when placing potential enemy spawn points in “The Virtuous Cycle.”

The tunnels, in general, upon reflection, are just a bad fit for the game. I don’t get the sense that they’re meant to disguise loading anywhere since they never gate off especially large areas, and their presence doesn’t add anything too substantial—just a slightly different traversal method, potential claustrophobia and/or moodiness, and maybe thematic weight given the birthing imagery that comes along with the first tunnel you exit in the base game that emerges from below the skeletal remains of what seems to be the Foundling’s dead mother. I don’t want to suggest the tunnels contribute nothing to the game experience, but they do break or make inaccessible certain aspects of gameplay. You’re unable to open menus in tunnels and also can’t be damaged, I realized after playing so much of “The Virtuous Cycle”—the (obvious in retrospect) reason being that taking damage or using items from the menus require specific character animations to play, which is not possible in a tunnel where you’re forced to crawl and there are no special animations for those other actions that account for that posture. This bit of weirdness is actually useful because you can enter tunnels to avoid taking poison damage while the poison status effect still counts down and wears off. This exploit isn’t something I noticed in the base game but did discover while playing “The Virtuous Cycle” since poison is more common with the typically greater number of ghouls and hostile toads that can be spawned. Diving into a tunnel to wait out a status effect is a highly situational strategy, still, but it feels like a cheat and may not be intentional. These problems are not unsolvable, but if they couldn’t be solved, it seems hard to justify the inclusion of the handful of tunnels that exist in the game. They have their role in the Mortal Shell experience, but gameplay is paramount in a… game. That the tunnels interfere with gameplay makes them a major, if also only intermittent, problem.

 

A harbinger of things to come… almost immediately in the next paragraph: Why is the game giving me the option to trade my “Damaging Kick” for the exact same Instinct?

 

PART TWO: THE GAME AND ITS GLITCHES, THE CRITIC AND HIS CRISIS

. . . [S]omething always gets left out. What gets omitted or focused on tells you as much about the critic as it does about the game. . . . [C]riticism is creative work. It just, unfortunately, happens to be creative work where the creativity is the least important part.

-       Matthewmatosis, “Meta Microvideos: An Esoteric Text on Criticism” and “Seven Years Earlier” (3 Jan. 2021)

 

Equally annoying and perhaps even more unfair than the previous elements of the game I’ve covered are the glitches or technical issues that you can come across in Mortal Shell. These are not all restricted to “The Virtuous Cycle” but are worth mentioning since they obviously become even more troublesome when you’re playing a mode with permadeath. Seemingly as of a couple of patches ago (as of around fall 2021), I noticed that pop-in for enemies got especially bad for me in story mode while playing on PS4. It’s not consistent but can be severe, with some enemies only appearing as you’re almost right on top of them and others essentially spawning in behind you as an unintended ambush. Replaying the base game, I have only been able to smoothly work around the issue in spots because I already knew what enemies to expect. In “The Virtuous Cycle,” it’s made worse thanks to the randomization. You can have an unexpected enemy quite literally materialize out of thin air in front of or behind you, and, unfortunately, it can sometimes be hard to tell whether this is just an intentionally silent spawn (which does also happen) or the result of the awful enemy pop-in. Again, this issue can be absolutely lethal if you’re low on health or playing a character that can’t take the abuse you often suffer when you’re surprised like this. I’ve had ghoul enemies grab me from out of nowhere because I couldn’t see them as I approached, though they may have also dropped on me silently from above since that appears to be a thing in “The Virtuous Cycle” as well—no more branch-breaking sound, snarl, and warning from the “Tarnished Seal” on your character’s back: You’re just walking along, and then a ghoul plays a short landing animation nearby and, if you’re unlucky, you’re already under attack before you can react. This problem alone makes me unwilling to seriously attempt beating “The Virtuous Cycle” as the Foundling since any single occurrence of these (unintentional?) ambushes could potentially result in a full, unfair reset. And there are plenty of other issues, some of which aren’t necessarily run-ending (and none of which, that I’ve found, have been game-breaking) but that can still be varying degrees of annoying. I originally devoted a pretty good chunk of this essay to covering them in some detail but have decided to largely omit them from this final version.

Except: Absolutely, completely, utterly FUCK the instant kill trigger that was (or still is—I’m not “testing” it) under an open grate high in the later stages of the Seat of Infinity. I tried to take a shortcut at one point by dropping through it and had a good run spoiled by unexpected instant death. I could have dropped through and Hardened in the air to survive the fall damage were it not for the fact that that spot was arbitrarily ruled to be an Unsurvivable Fall, and falling in such a hole counts as complete death and the end of your run even if you still have your second chance available. This instant death trigger is more like an “oversight” than a glitch, but I feel it belongs to a similar category of unexpected, weird, unfair, rough edges, and it was once part of the aforementioned exhaustive list that I’ve since opted against including.

Put simply, I know that it’s risky to immortalize even the few issues I have mentioned since patches can (hopefully) resolve them and make all the cataloguing pointless. I don’t think this is going to happen for some of these given that they’re still around even after all the time I’ve spent on this essay, but still! In the first Mortal Shell piece, I made a big deal about getting stuck in the environment at points, but I found out more recently that quitting to the main menu and reloading will take you to the last checkpoint you activated in the main game and either back to your spawn at the start of a zone or to a recent checkpoint you passed in “The Virtuous Cycle.” Setting aside how this trivializes the teleportation items built into the story mode that are meant to warp you to checkpoints, I now have to wonder if this feature was always in the game and I just overlooked it or if it was added with a patch. Ill-considered for gameplay reasons or not, this built-in solution to getting stuck in the game makes my criticisms seem foolish in retrospect. Given just how long it’s taken me to finish this piece, that concern over criticizing a problem that no longer exists has just kept growing in size, and I went back and forth on whether I should cut any mention of the issues I’ve encountered entirely to avoid being obviously out of date with my statements and therefore unfair, if not possibly just ill-informed or outright wrong in my more minute criticisms. There are parts of the first Mortal Shell piece that still haunt me—especially the line about the Seat of Infinity, where I got stuck several times, not being “thoroughly QA tested,” but also the criticism of certain sound effects in the game incorrectly suggesting enemy positions. The latter might not even be a problem (I’m still not sure), but the former really bothers me since despite my best efforts to not do the Gamer Thing of proving my lack of personal experience with (professional) game dev while simultaneously coming off as kind of a jerk, I think I still ended up doing that, at least at points, and I’ve probably done it again at points here.

One of the reasons this piece has taken so long to come out is that it's been a sort of patchwork affair for months. I started working on it almost immediately back in August 2021 and added onto it over time, which naturally meant that my feelings toward the game were changing, resulting in what has been, frankly, an intimidating mess to revise, and this was on top of me getting burned out on the game as well since I played it (and nothing else) for at least a month straight because I was so absorbed. The thoughts about glitches and rough edges made up a substantially large part of the mess of this piece—I had a whole “secret” more negative section at the end at one point that has since been either cut or threaded into other parts—and revising it has required spending a lot of time deciding what to keep as-written or keep as-written but rearrange and what to keep but revise and what to remove entirely as I try to unify my thoughts and produce something organized and coherent. As time has passed and my mood has changed and as I’ve reflected on the piece and tried not to make a fool of myself, regarding even the more egregious-feeling faults of the game, I now ask, What is the actual balance of critical issues to annoyances? And, Is there value in an extensive catalog of the game’s problems?

This is not actually a product review meant to help consumers decide to buy the game or not—It’s just my “thoughts,” whatever those might be. And I want to emphasize that I don’t think just listing off technical shortcomings or weird bugs is productive, and not only because they might get patched out. The fact is that I can make my point that Mortal Shell is/was rough around the edges without a comprehensive list, and, truthfully, it feels unfair to hold Cold Symmetry to the same standard as “AAA” (or “AAAA” at this point, given the amount of money involved) studio titles. This is ultimately a very fine middle-shelf-ish game in a world full of big, high-gloss works that often still come out buggy despite the extra manpower and money behind them. Issues are issues, but Mortal Shell is a little scrapper. It has charm and moxie, particularly in the way “The Virtuous Cycle” attempts such a comprehensive reworking of the game for what is such a small package and that, based on trophy completion percentages on the PlayStation Network, comparatively few people spent much time with. It is an ambitious work in that context, and ambition can cause problems even for bigger studios. The problems are what they are, but so is the ambition, and which ultimately matters more?

I’ve been thinking about the things I focus on in these video game essays over time. My models were, of course, the sorts of critical pieces on games that I’ve been watching on YouTube for years before I came back to blogging. One of my favorite YouTube critics, Joseph Anderson, has a Fallout 76 video just devoted to the glitches of the game that is around three times as long as the video focused on the whole game and his thoughts on it. Meanwhile, Noah Caldwell-Gervais, perhaps my favorite YouTube critic and one of my favorite writers (period), tends to look at entire series at once, so his Resident Evil video, for example, is just about 7 hours and 30 minutes in length. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, exactly, just that I thought of my models, like Anderson, as “exhaustive” in their critiques as a general rule and so naturally gravitated in that direction myself, opting for a completionist approach to these discussions that requires large time investments, lots of words, and carries with it the constant fear that I’m going to miss something or just get some thing of the many, many things covered wrong. (Does “Axatana,” an abnormal word I want to emphasize is part of Mortal Shell’s unique lingo, go in quotation marks just the first time I use it, or should I always punctuate it that way? And, assuming I did always handle it that way, did I get every instance of it or did I forget one?) The massive, hours-long video game analysis video, usually made by a white cishet man, is kind of a meme at this point, and I guess this giant text piece fits right in.

I feel bad, on some level, not talking about all of Mortal Shell’s issues that I’ve catalogued—like this piece is incomplete without them. And yet, there’s another part of me that feels that it’s unfair to do so and that doing so is also very boring. I think I like my previous two pieces about games—on Dragon’s Dogma and Sonic Forces, specifically—better than the others (even this one, satisfying as it has been to shape and ultimately complete) because they’re less needlessly comprehensive even if they’re still quite long: Dragon’s Dogma is equally or more about the anime adaptation than it is about picking over absolutely every facet of the game, and I tried with Sonic Forces to focus on only select elements like the story. This massive, lumbering, by this point downright primordial-feeling Thing is a throwback from that earlier period of inspiration that has felt more like a burden the longer I’ve gone on revisiting, tweaking, and worrying over it. I don’t want to mimic anyone, but I’ve recently been pretty inspired by the work of ThorHighHeels, whose YouTube output does include gameplay discussion but also often seems to prioritize things like aesthetics and even the vibes of games rather than focusing on strictly mechanics or the most literal, easily quantifiable elements. I also recently read an old text piece ostensibly about Final Fantasy VI written by musician, game developer, novelist, critic (etc.) Tim Rogers which he calls “an inverted review.” Objectively, he says comparatively little about the game from the title but does say so much about what the game meant to him at a specific point in his life.

Rogers’ ostensible review is in actuality a moving work of autobiography that includes Final Fantasy VI explicitly, of course, but also, I feel, without actually naming it a lot of the time. As much as there is this concept of enjoying media by “turning off” your brain—and how I do play some games for how all-consuming they can feel, blotting out the self—there is no truly playing a game in a vacuum, and even though Rogers’ review seems to be so much more about him, “a fifteen-year-old obese mute self-taught vegetarian living on the night shift,” than the Final Fantasy game from the title, that’s ultimately kind of how it always is anyway. I touched on something like this in my Forces essay, where I reflected on how my appreciation for Sonic Adventure 2’s story was heavily influenced by who I was at the time (a kid and inexperienced, essentially). What I sense from Rogers’ piece is a sort of osmosis-y state between his life and the game—the way the experience of one is necessarily colored by the other. Within that state, the destruction of “[his] high school’s brand-new six-million-dollar gymnasium” is as much an element of Final Fantasy VI worth reviewing as anything contained within the cartridge itself. I don’t know that I’m quite old/experienced enough yet to take such a compelling stance, but I’m still sitting here and thinking, There’s got to be a better (more concise, more appreciative, more appropriate) way to discuss Mortal Shell—and other games—than just working systematically and at great length through the usual suspects of games criticism: graphics, sound, gameplay, replayability, yawn, etc.

 

This tweet from one of the developers at Bungie, the original creators of the Halo series of shooters, crossed my timeline during the revision process for this piece, and it serves as confirmation of the idea that players, and, by extension, critics, of video games aren’t necessarily equipped to fully discuss problems and the solutions to said problems in those games. While I think the intended focus of the tweet is specifically on irate fans harassing developers directly with their gripes and proposed solutions (and then, sometimes, escalating to threats of real-world harm if they aren’t treated with enough “respect”), I’ve still tried to qualify my discussion of Mortal Shell’s flaws in such a way that I acknowledge my limited, outside perspective. And part of that qualification also now includes only alluding to a select few of the glitches I once planned to harp on directly and at length.

There’s another internet meme that says “I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I’m not kidding,” and I want to believe I’m on that wavelength as someone who likes to think of himself as kind of artistic and spiritual and not so bound by the obvious constraints of “reviewing” or even just appreciating media/art, but I’m also a gameplay guy, and so I’m drawn to breaking down the gameplay experience and highlighting things that impact it: like glitches. But I’m also a creative person in my own right, and there are problems with the pieces I’ve written and posted here. I had to fix a couple in the Sonic Forces write-up post-release, and I’ve alluded to some from the original Mortal Shell essay as well. I live in fear of what’s ultimately going to slip past me somewhere within the depths of this beast. I’m one person doing something I enjoy, and I’m willing to project constructively a little and say Cold Symmetry are as well—a few more than one person but still working creatively without the “Triple-A” budget or oversight. I’m giving myself too much credit if I say we’re kindred or that there ought to be some sort of mutual respect here, but it just seems like the right thing to say that a few (or more than a few) glitches and hitches aren’t the end of the world when there are so many things I do love about Mortal Shell and when I very obviously was drawn to it despite any problems. That I think the sum total or average of the experience of playing it transcends the problems may very well be the more salient point to make than exhaustively listing out the problems themselves. There was a time where I was very fed up with this game, but I’ve cooled off over the months it’s taken to finally get this piece out the door. My burnout has also subsided, and as I’ve been replaying Mortal Shell’s base content and the roguelike mode to finally finish this piece off, I’ve found myself enthralled by it all over again—all issues, regardless of severity, ultimately aside. I am still finding new (and old, unfixed) instances of roughness, however, and even after this essay is posted, I’ll probably still be questioning whether I made the right choices about what to include and what to gloss over or ignore.

 

PART THREE: TWIN-FINALE: “THE VIRTUOUS CYCLE’S” FINAL BOSS AND MY FINAL ASSESSMENT

I think I can make the case for at least acknowledging some of Mortal Shell’s problems on the grounds that, present now or since removed or excusable because of the size of the team or the scope of the project (plus the size of the team), it’s worth noting them, or at least some of them, anyway since this is the sort of fine-toothed criticism a game that presents the player with a stiff mechanical challenge is deservedly going to draw when said challenge has a hint of unfairness to it. There is a legitimate point to highlighting the number of problems that isn’t just about gamer boy critic nit-picking. High difficulty can be absolutely thrilling to overcome when a game is polished and consistent (see critically-acclaimed action games like Bayonetta), but when there’s so little separating a player from failure, which is a full restart of their progress through the game in the case of “The Virtuous Cycle,” any inconsistencies or issues that result in failure that are not the player’s fault are going to stick out all the more. As support for this point and because, if I’m totally honest, I can’t actually remember if I had this thought explicitly and coherently myself or got it from his video years ago, I’m going to transcribe a quote here from Joseph Anderson’s critique of the 2018 God of War. This bit comes from a later section of the essay where Anderson talks about the highest difficulty setting and how it impacts the player’s awareness of issues in the game:

“Give Me God of War” [difficulty] accidentally reveals that the game’s combat isn’t put together very well. This is separate from inputs and options. . . . The reason that this setting makes this apparent is that when numbers are tuned this tightly you really notice when something is a mistake on your part or not. For example, if something weird happens in combat that results in you taking a bit of damage or the enemy getting away from you, it doesn’t matter much if you carry on and win a few seconds later, but if that weirdness results in you dying and having to restart or the enemy glitching out of damage and prolonging the fight for another minute then it’s impossible to ignore.

In Mortal Shell’s case, one potentially unforeseen consequence of removing the go-to, easy healing options from the game is the sort of increased awareness of other elements of the design that Anderson describes. Those items weren’t just useful for players looking to make progress but who needed the extra health to overcome their own weakness or smooth the learning curve: Their presence also made it easier for players of all skill levels to forgive any inconsistencies or rough edges they might have encountered. Playing as the Foundling alone or as Tiel for the entire base game might bring some things to the forefront of your notice, but you would still have the checkpoints to fall back to after a death. “The Virtuous Cycle” changes this, and the new threat of a full restart on death highly incentivizes spotting the cracks, either to avoid unfair penalties or to exploit them for easier or faster progress.

“The Virtuous Cycle” is a hardcore challenge that sometimes feels unfair and unfun because of these problems, and because of the new roguelike mode and the way that it facilitates so much additional exposure to all the different areas and enemies and mechanics of the game, it ultimately makes it easier for players to notice issues they might have missed during an initial playthrough, like design problems with the bosses. For example, Crucix, the earth boss, gets weirdly easier in phase two when he loses all of his ranged abilities, which include a very important gap-closing attack from the air. You can just learn to recognize the ends of his melee combos and get in a quick hit or two before retreating. I also saw someone beat him with the “Ballistazooka” at range because he simply couldn’t counter it. Normally, casual players would likely miss these sorts of details that would probably only become apparent to the hardcore set who go through multiple rounds of New Game-Plus in the base game, but “The Virtuous Cycle” speeds up the rate at which these issues become apparent and can make them apparent to more people since its whole deal is playing the game over and over again to make statistical and narrative progress. It gives more tangible extrinsic incentives to re-encounter the content and at greater speeds, which offers more and more opportunities to discover problems and to reflect on what does and doesn’t work well about the game.

The new final boss fight against corrupted versions of the four main playable characters that concludes each “Virtuous Cycle” run is worth examining in detail because I have a lot of thoughts about it. These are either positive or mixed for the most part, with just some theoretical negatives at this point, but this fight was the major source of my frustration with the game at one point and that so soured me on the expansion that I wrote a bunch of critical stuff that further ballooned this piece, made it a nightmare to revise/edit, and delayed my finishing it. I’ll get to the specifics of that frustration later, but, for now, from a design/developer standpoint, this new fight is a very good one. It makes a lot of sense conceptually since the base game already has the Hadern fights where he uses the various melee weapons against you, so creating a sort of more advanced marathon encounter based on those individual mini-boss or boss battles is just a logical choice. It’s also an economical one since the assets needed for this fight—the location, the character models, movesets, and so on—largely already exist in the game. Comparatively minimal new material seems to have been needed to create the fight, which is great: It’s a clever remix, and I’m glad the devs were able to find ways to get new stuff into the game (hopefully) without too much strain. In terms of how the fight actually plays out, however, there are some things worth working through.

There are four opponents to ultimately deal with—each wielding one of the four main weapons—but only one or two will fight you at a time, while the others are invulnerable in a permanent state of Hardening. The first phase against a single opponent makes sense, as does the escalation in the second phase to two enemies; however, that leaves the final phase with only a single boss again. The marathon approach alone ensures that this setup is still difficult since it can wear you down over time, but it also just feels odd to end with another one-on-one instead of saving the two-on-one for that last phase. That could have actually been an even better “Oh Shit” moment than it already is since you’d have two phases’ worth of single-opponent rounds to lull you into a little bit of a sense of security before the game springs two enemies on you. Or they could have had the final opponent join in seamlessly during the second phase after one of the previous two enemies goes down, keeping the intensity more consistent for longer. Or, to backseat dev even further, maybe the initial waves of enemies could have had less health and the last one more, and/or maybe it could have been made more aggressive—more likely to use its weapon’s special abilities, perhaps… That Hadern, the one responsible for taking away the key items you’re trying to retrieve in this mode, is missing from this encounter also feels like a weird omission. It’s easy to imagine the first four enemies falling away, only for Hadern, wielding the Axatana, to pop up for a final surprise round.

 

While I had my issues with this boss fight for a while, the corrupted Shells boss is one I’ve also come to appreciate. I’m ultimately glad the developers were able to surprise players with a new boss that also seems to have been pretty economical to create. They did something similar elsewhere in the game, by promoting the dual-wielding flame knights of the fire temple to mini-boss status and creating another new mini-boss by combining the basic melee brigand’s moveset and the model for the friendly NPC “Baghead” from the base game to create “Evil Baghead”—another fun surprise for familiar players to stumble upon while playing this new mode, and yet another little bit of support for the idea that this is not meant to be anyone’s first experience with Mortal Shell. The remix doesn’t function well as a remix without the knowledge of the original.

 

As I’ve reflected on the game, it strikes me that this new final boss and, by extension, the Hadern fights function like the sort of “rival” bosses you can find in other action games like the aforementioned Bayonetta. A rival enemy in these cases is more or less what the word implies—an enemy that feels like a worthy counterpart to the player character, usually by virtue of having similar abilities (and likely a similar appearance to help further drive home the weight of the rivalry). A high watermark for this sort of boss design are definitely the Jeanne encounters in the first Bayonetta game. Jeanne and Bayonetta are from the same order of martial artist witches and ostensibly have the same abilities, but when you actually break down Jeanne’s behavior as a boss, you realize that she doesn’t fight exactly like Bayonetta. Her boss moveset is just designed to create the impression that she’s your true mechanical foil when she’s actually held back significantly to make beating her (period, but also without taking damage in order to earn the game’s highest rank) possible. An obvious example is how she fires her guns. As Bayonetta, you can fire a very fast stream of fairly “realistically”-sized bullets from your weapons quickly and near-constantly, but Jeanne’s bullet attacks appear as large, colorful, more video-game-y projectiles that she utilizes in a very recognizable, less fluid way because asking the player to avoid a stream of bullets equivalent to their own in size and speed would not be fair. This altered shooting makes Jeanne suitably like the player without giving her the player’s version of the attack. If she actually fought exactly like Bayonetta, with the same combo list and aggression, the encounters would be unfair since action game design obviously privileges the player character, typically allowing them to attack faster and recover more quickly than their enemies.

Attaching a player moveset to an enemy without some trade-offs creates ungainly results, and an example of where the developers of Bayonetta may have made this mistake themselves is with the much-beloved action-RPG NieR: Automata. In Automata, certain rival-like enemies later in the game seem to use some of the player moveset outright, which is, again, economical and probably great in terms of development workload but is awful to fight against since their quick attacks that mimic the player’s can leave little room to gauge what they’re doing to intentionally evade or slip in damage, meaning you have to either take damage to deal damage, just shoot them from a distance, or rely on getting perfect evade counters. Mortal Shell’s player kit is much less speedy, but applying it to an enemy directly could result in similar annoyance. Coincidentally, as I was working on finalizing this piece, well-known Dark Souls hacker Zullie the Witch posted a thread on Twitter reflecting on the design of “Player Model NPC” enemies in FromSoftware’s titles, and I’m going to quote a bit of that thread here as support:

. . . . It [the unfairness of enemies created from the player’s model] makes sense. The priority when designing the player is never going to be how fun or fair they are as an enemy, so they can’t compare to enemies who are designed as enemies. . . . The player model doesn’t really operate under the same rules as other characters, it has special advantages given for the sake of the player. When you give that model to an enemy, it’s able to do things other enemies can’t, and mechanics meant for enemies can interact awkwardly. . . . [T]hey’re the worst enemies from a mechanical design standpoint, because of the fundamental dissonance between them and other purpose-built enemies. It’s a natural consequence of the player model.

I no longer despise what, following on from Zullie’s phrasing, I would have once been tempted to call the “Player Model Boss Fight” in “The Virtuous Cycle,” but I still think it and the Hadern fights can potentially be some of the most frustrating encounters in the game because of the elements of their design that come from the player’s moveset. To start, their attack animations are the same as the player’s, which makes them generally harder to read and then dodge or parry, though you could make the argument that the added challenge of reacting to their moves (especially the faster ones on certain weapons) is appropriate given the rare status of these encounters, and a high-skill, high-danger approach like parrying these rival enemies would certainly reward a player with faster, flashier battles. Using the player’s moveset with at least some of its natural advantages could be said to raise the skill ceiling of the game or at least of the specific encounter. While these opponents might share the same animations and attack speeds as the player, they don’t share the player’s aggression or the necessity of performing combos to access certain individual moves. They can perform standard combos but can also seemingly select at will from the various hits you would normally have to perform as part of a sequence of attacks. I came to this conclusion after carefully watching other people’s footage of the rival battles to make sure the enemies weren’t just offsetting combos the way that the player can through blocking, dodging, and limited repositioning within a certain timeframe. These enemies appear to have access to the player’s moveset but seem programmed to prioritize single hits or shorter combos rather than constantly performing full attack chains (unless they’re right on top of you). This makes them harder to predict in a way, though you can safely assume any attack they use will be some version of what you can do but likely taken out of its position in a combo and rendered as a discrete move that better resembles something an enemy would have access to. And, furthermore, they have been given the usual audio and visual cues for unparryable enemy attacks where appropriate.

As such, considering these changes, Mortal Shell’s rival bosses feel less like one-for-one copies of the player and have been modified to function distinctly like enemies. They remain a hybrid of player- and enemy-focused design similar to what Zullie describes, but this is not actually an Automata scenario—though I had felt that way at points while working on this write-up. In fact, this section, while retaining many of the same observations and thoughts, had a more negative tone up until quite recently when, after more runs through “The Virtuous Cycle” and studying the footage of other players, I settled on something more like positivity, which then morphed into more or less just positivity after even more exposure to and careful study of the bosses.

Avoiding damage is one consideration when assessing this boss fight, but another is dealing it. This fight can also be frustrating because trying to push damage normally against these rival enemies presents a novel challenge given that they can Harden/block like the player can at any point. In addition to dealing with their attacks like you would with another enemy or boss, you also have to keep track of whether they’ve recently used their block. Like your own, it does seem to be tied to a cooldown, meaning the boss is more open right after using it, unless they use their evade. Against a single one of these rival-style enemies like Hadern or “The Virtuous Cycle” final boss gang, you can reliably use the old trick of letting them queue up an attack and Harden before doing so yourself so that their attack hits you and then your own attack goes off, dealing some damage during the foe’s brief moment of vulnerability before you get away, let your block recharge, and do the same thing over again. The enemy AI will always do the player the service of releasing their block and attacking first in this scenario. It’s kind of boring and tedious to essentially wait the enemy out this way, but it works and is clearly meant to be a viable option. In a protracted fight, which is what you get in “The Virtuous Cycle” via the marathon design, and assuming you don’t parry and don’t come in with certain over-powered Instincts that trivialize the encounter, there is a certain thrill to trying not to lose focus and screw up this most basic combo and/or to trying to sneak hits in at other moments. There’s a defense of the one-two-one pacing of the fight to this line of thought as well since the final phase may arguably still escalate the tension, as the threat of losing to a single foe after managing to beat two at once has a certain special sting to it. The fact that one enemy should theoretically be easy to overcome, combined with the length of the fight, could lead to even more pressure: You’re tired and right on the cusp of victory, so the true invisible second (or even third) opponent in phase three is yourself, and the battle is partly inside your own head. As far as the objectively harder second phase is concerned, though, against two enemies that can block and can also stagger their attacks to break your guard and prevent you from using the standard Hardening Showdown trick, you have to pick your moments to attack even more carefully, resulting in tension and friction that could be a good thing or could just result in feelings of awkwardness and frustration. If, for example, the two opponents can’t be separated effectively, one target can always Harden as you try to attack their partner, resulting in a deflection that can leave you open to damage as the two essentially cover one another. Their attacks can also overlap, meaning that you have fewer reasonable openings in which to launch your own offensive. In both cases, the player either has to have patience, and not act rashly, to slip in regular hits or else use special actions like weapon abilities or the options afforded by some Instincts to create an opening.

Like I said, I’m inclined toward positivity now. Early in my time with the “Virtuous Cycle” (like, through the point where its narrative officially ends), fighting this boss head-on left me feeling like I was accidentally getting in a hit here or there but was otherwise just mashing my head into a brick wall, hoping that it gave before my skull did. Probably, it just takes time and study to find the fairness in the fight, though. A few runs back (as of this writing) is when things started to turn around for me. While playing as the fragile Tiel, I had a pretty satisfying fight with the final boss gang by identifying openings to use the old Harden-and-then-attack trick while also dealing some chip damage with a short-range explosion attached to my dodge and occasional knife-flinging when I rolled. Then, as Harros I found I could use the reach of the Smoldering Mace to get some sneaky hits in on my enemies as they approached, but despite that advantage and also getting a couple of free shots in via “Enhanced Hardening” (an Instinct that makes your character temporarily invulnerable while still able to move and attack), I just found the fight in general more fair-feeling, like I was able to fight… normally, without necessarily abusing any one thing. That has been my experience with additional recent runs as well. I don’t feel like I need exploits to get through the boss and find myself getting in a lot more hits in a more improvisational and stylish sort of way. In the end, what I know for certain is that taking the time while writing this essay to study the AI’s behavior and discover what look like the clear attempts at balancing it, rather than just making it a computer-controlled player, has given me a lot more fondness for the boss. While this encounter isn’t as bombastic as the Jeanne fights in Bayonetta, it seems to me now that Cold Symmetry have done a good job creating something sort of equivalent: an opponent (or opponents) that give(s) off the impression of being true equals but, upon further study, operate in such a way so as to not actually apply the undue friction that simply making them AI-controlled player characters would.

 

A new menu in “The Virtuous Cycle” mode allows you to review your collected Instincts during a run in detail, arrayed around and within this interesting, mysterious, creepy handlike design. While skill is certainly a factor in making it through “The Virtuous Cycle” and in beating the boss at the end, getting the right Instincts (at the highest possible levels) by chance can make the difference between a stressful and a relaxing run, if not necessarily, absolutely guaranteeing success. This is not a problem in and of itself, as the random chance of getting an unforeseen big boost is part of what makes the mode so compelling, and raising your chances of getting the best Instincts is part of the roguelike(lite?)/RPG design that counts as a positive since the expectation that comes with the (sub-)genre is that the numbers are meant to be important (and they are here).

As I alluded to before, certain Instincts like Enhanced Hardening and/or throwing knives make this rival encounter significantly easier; however, they don’t necessarily make it satisfying, even if you’ve been struggling with it, since they can feel like cheating. A specific, somewhat less cheap-seeming, strategy that looks like a good one in theory is to get the freezing dodge Instinct that allows you to hop to avoid damage and simultaneously freeze the attacking enemy, giving you an opportunity to hit them. Unfortunately, this ability seemed to glitch(?) during this boss fight for me. It would cause a brief hitch in the game as my short-range frost explosion made contact with an enemy, and then they would immediately unfreeze, and I was essentially warped into damage since the boss was always right on top of me and attacking instantly, which could obviously be lethal if they did a combo and I couldn’t block just then to interrupt it. The huge frustration with this fight I’ve mentioned in passing came from when I had an otherwise very successful run ruined by this issue, which occurred every time the freezing effect contacted the boss, and it really put me off the prospect of playing further. Like I established before, when the punishment for failure is as harsh as it is here, anything that isn’t the player’s fault is going to stick out and compound any frustration. The freezing dodge not working properly and teleporting me into damage was a consistent problem with this fight (on PS4, at least) that definitely did not seem intentional, and the fact that this was in the finished game at all was very frustrating. Of course, I’m over it now and want to speak fairly about “The Virtuous Cycle” without getting too hung up on the rough edges. Coming back to the corrupted Shells boss and this piece, I’ve found a lot of outright positives and potential positives to reflect on. However, I also want to emphasize how I felt before—after the run where I lost everything because the game just didn’t do what it was supposed to. Here’s what I originally wrote at the end of this section (presented in italics to indicate the past):

Regarding the death-by-freezing-hop glitch: 3 hours and 30 minutes wasted because “The Virtuous Cycle” is still kind of a mess, and I’m thinking, How many literal hours of my life have I wasted in the Seat of Infinity alone at this point? As much as I kind of enjoy this game personally (subjectively), what would it score in an objective review?

And so, that led me to a sort of final overall assessment, which I have lightly revised and edited (for clarity and organization) but have mostly left intact. I do agree with a lot—though not all—of Past Monty’s words, but I still feel like I should leave them in italics to suggest the difference in feeling and tone. When I originally wrote these thoughts, I was mad and down on the game overall, but not now. I’d likely make many of the same observations but with a positive or at least more ambivalent tone: The more I played of “The Virtuous Cycle,” the less I liked it, despite my overall feelings about the game from a critical or designer perspective remaining “objectively” positive for the most part. I actually think that players who only dip into the DLC, who don’t even attempt to finish its narrative, will have the better time with it. At a glance, it has some excellent ideas and really shakes up the base game. When you dig in and get beyond the initial novelty, however, the cracks start to show. “The Virtuous Cycle” becomes incredibly repetitive over time, especially as new narrative revelations taper off quickly and you eventually just run out of uses for the “Tar” and “Glimpse” resources you collect during a run. The ability to increase the difficulty after finishing the DLC’s story is an interesting idea that feels under-developed, as there does not seem to be any incentive to do it. That the aforementioned narrative beats come so quickly early on may not be an accident, then. Maybe the devs knew most people wouldn’t stick with this mode very long, so they frontloaded the new developments so that more players would experience them.

“The Virtuous Cycle’s” new roguelike design also exacerbates a problem with the base game of Mortal Shell that I did note in my original write-up, and that is that most upgrades aren’t particularly interesting. Most character upgrades in the base game and all Instincts in the DLC are passive abilities that don’t give you much new. There are some valuable ones—like the over-powered knife-throwing or the Instinct that incentivizes finishing combos by allowing the final hits to potentially open enemies up to a riposte attack without the need to parry and use Resolve—but I will argue, whether Mortal Shell is meant to be an RPG or not, that miniscule percentage increases are not satisfying progression, at least not in the long term.

 

Even with the new RPG elements, which certainly did a lot to engage me, a big draw of “The Virtuous Cycle” is continuing to unlock bits of the narrative. There is a linear sequence you can experience by completing the number of runs required to help the Foundling’s Twin-Sister escape her bonds, but there may be non-linear revelations as well. The one pictured here only popped for me during one of my last playthroughs before publishing this piece and was a complete surprise given that I hadn’t had any new revelations appear for many hours at that point.

 

The more you play “The Virtuous Cycle,” the more you realize that some Instincts are also just better than others. The fall damage reduction upgrades are essentially useless once you figure out that using the stomp attack you activate by Hardening in the air prevents all fall damage anyway, and the lava-throwing roll Instinct seems to have upwards of a 90-percent chance of never hitting anything because of the size of the projectiles and the arc they travel in. Meanwhile, other upgrades feel downright vital if you actually want a chance at beating the DLC’s new final boss. The aforementioned knives make every fight (boss or otherwise) a joke if you can get the percentage chance to activate high enough, and the Enhanced Hardening basically guarantees a win. This goes back to what I was saying about “The Virtuous Cycle” possibly being better if you play it less. The dissatisfying or broken stuff doesn’t have as much time to become apparent.

As I’ve said before in the original Mortal Shell write-up, an action-RPG is an extremely demanding game to make, where the action and numbers both need to be impactful. The added stress of the high-quality visual style (as opposed to something 2D or retro) and now of the roguelike design as well means that you have a relatively small team of people responsible for something that might just be more than they can handle. The base game has potential but also a lot of flaws, and “The Virtuous Cycle” compounds all of that further—the good and the bad. Many of these bugs or hitches aren’t critical, but the freezing dodge glitch death made me feel a lot less charitable toward the game, and it is worth considering its current state as we theorize about its further potential (or a potential sequel).

Of course, the issues above are all things that could be addressed in a potential Mortal Shell II. And it’s important to keep in mind that “The Virtuous Cycle” is a $7.99 piece of DLC and very ambitious for what it is. While the criticisms above are still valid, it is important to keep that price point and the DLC status in mind, especially where questions regarding things like why the unlockable difficulty-select system isn’t more fully-featured are concerned. It would have been nice if there was somehow an infinite chain of incentives (even something as simple as further trophies) to make tinkering with the difficulty and earning more Tar and Glimpses extrinsically meaningful, but this is DLC (probably selling for less than it truly should), meaning the install base is almost certain to be notably small, and length and complexity should reflect this reality. And also, frankly, everything has to end sometime. Games that are hundreds of hours in length or continually updated so that you can never comfortably put them down and move on are not good things in my eyes, especially as they’ve threatened in recent years to become the standard for the industry rather than outliers in the broader landscape just for those folks who want them. That “The Virtuous Cycle” could have had some better-designed end- or post-game loop is probably true, but it’s not entirely unreasonable that the game is the way that it is, glitches and all, and it’s even a good thing that it eventually tapers off. Bad design or not, intentional or not, the game provides a clear point at which to walk away. The intrinsically motivated can keep going, but those who came for the novelty or just to free the Foundling’s Twin-Sister or to get all the trophies have a nice, limited number of boxes to formally check and a fair amount of space mentally in which to call the game “completed.”

Here’s a final synthesis—old thoughts more heavily revised to fit my new mood: Aesthetically, I love Mortal Shell. I like the style a lot, possibly better than anything either FromSoftware or Team Ninja or anyone else doing the Soulslike thing have produced. As much as I love Nioh for its more complex action gameplay that has to put it basically at the top of the heap in my eyes, the historical fantasy setting in Japan just doesn’t always work for me, though it has its compelling moments or elements, like its monster enemies. I would have liked to have seen more actual monsters and fewer humanoids in Mortal Shell, but this sort of heavy metal-infused muddy hellscape just has a personal appeal to it, which is one reason why I’ve stuck with the game as long as I have. There is something infinitely screenshot-able about it, and while the official Mortal Shell Twitter account has shared a fair number of more intentionally artful shots taken from the game by players, even a casual snap or some light fiddling with the built-in photo mode seems to yield compelling results. This quality is a testament to the power behind Mortal Shell’s art direction and visual design. As someone with [redacted body issues], I also just like the fucky nature of the Foundling as this vaguely human but also weirdly sexless, feature-less, bones-and-sorta-translucent-skin ghoul thing that hides behind various macabre facades it can shuck off and exchange at will. It’s not quite Bloodborne levels of explicit horror, but there are elements of horrific weirdness in Mortal Shell that are really only suggested or seen briefly (like the checkpoint woman suddenly appearing as a giant at the end of the Seat of Infinity) that are compelling to me. It’s a very “wet” game like Bloodborne and not “dry” in its overall presentation like I find most of the Souls games to be.

For all those reasons and more, I’d personally love to see Mortal Shell thrive as a series, but some of my feelings about the game remind me of how I felt about the release of Devil May Cry 4 Special Edition back in 2015. The original release of that game, though functionally complete, was notoriously under-developed in terms of levels and bosses, specifically in the back half, and the special edition just built on top of that uneven foundation, adding new characters but without any new substantial content, resulting in a game that felt simultaneously over-stuffed while also being undercooked. Broadly, there was a fundamental problem that, unaddressed, just became even more prominent with the new additions. That’s kind of the final revelation of “The Virtuous Cycle” as DLC: It’s good new stuff added to good old stuff, but it also ends up highlighting more than ever the foundational issues of the whole. If those issues can be addressed, then a theoretical Mortal Shell II could be a huge improvement over what we have now and a true classic in its own right. I’ll probably end up playing it—and enjoying it—either way.

 

One thing that’s worth stressing here is that I haven’t been able to stop playing Mortal Shell. Even as I’ve repeatedly over the past several weeks entered what I felt was the final phase of my time with it and my work on this piece, I’ve found myself going back—to confirm and test things in the game for this essay, but also because “The Virtuous Cycle” has its hooks in me. It’s an instance of a once-vague feeling I’ve managed to will into coherency in recent years: that most games, regardless of how clearly they reflect the influences of a genre or just a particular design trend, always have their own unique blend or feel. As such, no game is really a substitute for another. I can’t bring myself to leave Mortal Shell behind because I know there truly is nothing else like it. Short of burning myself out again, the separation has to be a forcible one…

 

 

What Color is Motivation? (“The Virtuous Cycle,” Game Design Trends, and Psychological Manipulation)

People used to play Quake 3 all the time just because they enjoyed it. It didn’t need anything else to keep them hooked. Now, if we imagine two identical versions of Quake happen to release on the same day, one with a progress system and one without, it’s easy to guess which one would win a larger player base. . . . While some players won’t care about the difference, others will be drawn to the progression system, in which case that version has a greater chance of surviving while the more minimalist one fades into irrelevancy. Economics fuel much of this problem. With a progression system comes unlockables, and with unlockables comes microtransactions to acquire them immediately. . . . In a sense, games are evolving to exploit us. . . . [Progression systems] tap into a simple desire we all have to one degree or another.

-       Matthewmatosis, “Meta Microvideos: Clickerbait” (3 Jan. 2021)

 

It feels important to emphasize after all that criticism that I have been playing Mortal Shell for a lot of hours now. It took me just under 30 to play through the base game the first time, with all the extra backtracking and struggling to acclimate I did as part of that initial playthrough. I also spent 16 hours in New Game-Plus and invested close to 11 to play through the base game from the start again to see what new narrative details I might get from Hadern as a playable character there. And I have spent at least 74 hours in “The Virtuous Cycle” roguelike mode at this point. I don’t have an exact figure since the game’s count of my cumulative playtime glitched out several times and started from scratch, so I had to do the math myself. What I want to stress alongside the numbers above, though, is that for a few weeks (over the course of at least a month right after launch), all of my game time was spent on Mortal Shell and “The Virtuous Cycle.” I don’t doubt that there are people out there with higher numbers they could brag about—and I saw some longer playtimes in the reviews for the game on Steam—but I feel at least somewhat comfortable saying these stats (never mind the thousands of words here…) probably make me one of the game’s more dedicated players. I could also point to the low trophy completion rates for the DLC (completing even a single run is rated “Ultra Rare,” with 0.1% of players earning it on PS4; the Steam version is at 2.0%, though that is roughly equivalently low). The fact is that the game and this new mode kept me invested and held my attention for a lot of hours. I really did feel like I wanted to unlock everything in “The Virtuous Cycle” because I enjoyed what I was playing, and I did have a lot of fun with it before I eventually got to the point where I was only coming back to it sporadically and briefly to check things off for this write-up as I burned out. Then, I experienced a noticeable resurgence in interest after months away from the game and as I returned one last time to finish this piece of writing, which was a good experience to have in the end since it confirms that I do actually enjoy the game. Hopefully all that combined time alongside these thoughts helps get at my true feelings: I was willing to play Mortal Shell a lot, blogpost or no blogpost. The time doesn’t yet touch the literal hundreds of hours I put into Nioh 2 before I finally seemed to break away from that game in a similar way, though.

 

Here’s further evidence of my investment in “The Virtuous Cycle.” I took notes about the “seeds” I played, including details that might help me decide to replay or avoid certain versions of the game world, as well as notes to myself about what seeds had been cleared by which characters (and with which weapons). That last detail especially suggests my intention to do a lot of playthroughs with different combinations.

   

I say all of this for two reasons: First, like I mentioned a moment ago, the amount of time I’ve spent with Mortal Shell is perhaps a more compelling testament to how I feel about it than any long-form prose essay might be, and, second, I wanted to talk about my time spent playing the game so that I could specifically bring up Nioh again in that context. Mortal Shell now has a lot in common with that other game, I feel. Put simply, Nioh and Mortal Shell stand out to me as Soulslike games that have successfully taken the gameplay core of Dark Souls and married it to something unlikely while producing devastatingly compelling results. Yes, the negative connotation of “devastating” is deliberate, though I’ll circle back to why I used it that way in a bit. In Nioh’s case, I was initially uncertain how well the exacting combat of a Souls-esque game would pair with a Diablo-style loot grind since grinding for loot requires replaying areas again and again, often quickly and effectively, and the weighty combat with stamina limits Nioh was trying to meld with a looter’s pacing seemed to be an inappropriate pairing at first blush. In the end, though, the Nioh series contains some truly compelling gameplay, and Nioh 2 is one of my favorite action games of all time. I’ll probably never write about it exclusively since it feels impossible (or at least very frustrating and time-consuming) to try to untangle all of its systems, but the mix of demanding combat and a heavy helping of intermittent positive reinforcement via the loot system allowed it to solve the main issue that I had with Diablo III. This is to say that the looting and upgrading in that game were good, but the combat was weightless and not engaging for me. The unlikely pairing of the Souls-y fighting and the Diablo-like looting worked out for Nioh.

           The same is now true of Mortal Shell. While I haven’t actually played Supergiant Games’ roguelike Hades, it’s hard not to look at the timing of that game’s staggered release across “early access” on PC and its well-received more recent final release and the resulting acclaim and not draw a line to “The Virtuous Cycle’s” status as a roguelike and its design. The way that your accumulated Instincts slowly build up on the side of the screen looks like the mirror image of a screenshot from Hades, for example. Watching people play Hades, however, reveals an immediately apparent focus on speed. The main character, Zagreus, moves around and attacks incredibly swiftly, and that speed also translates to the game’s length and how quickly you seem to be able to regain lost ground if you do die and get sent back to the start. In the roguelike sub-genre, where dying many times is certain, giving the player a lot of speed makes sense. Mortal Shell doesn’t initially seem like a good fit for this type of game since it is also drawing from the design of Dark Souls, meaning normal movement is slow and combat is exacting and deliberate and governed by stamina limits. Like Nioh before it, however, I think the creative risk in combining unlikely elements in “The Virtuous Cycle” pays off. The satisfying combat, metal-infused aesthetic, and intermittent positive reinforcement via the Instinct system make for a potent combination for me. I also think the devs did still clearly take some elements of “speed” into consideration based on the way that “The Virtuous Cycle” is structured to cut out certain parts of the base game (like foggy Fallgrim and the dungeon escape sequences) that would have slowed it down.

 

In both Hades (on the left) and Mortal Shell (on the right), your accumulated upgrades build up on the side of the screen as a new element of the HUD. These have some practical function as a quick reference for your current loadout and your progress through a run, but they also serve a more subjective, psychological function as your color-coded, glittering prizes—showing you how much you’ve won, how much you might still win, and how much you stand to lose with failure. The presentation is similar enough that I have to wonder if there wasn’t some inspiration taken from left to right (so to speak).

Further proof of inspiration taken from Hades: The Instinct-select screen from Mortal Shell bears a very strong resemblance to the equivalent screen from Hades, down to the phrasing “CHOOSE ONE” and its positioning. This isn’t a criticism, as Mortal Shell is very much still its own thing, and there’s nothing wrong with taking inspiration from others. It is a little wild just how close some of these elements are to Hades, though… which may itself be taking inspiration from somewhere I’m not aware of.

 

             Having praised the games for their design, I’m going to now skew negative on it. I chose “devastatingly compelling” very intentionally before, the same way I have been using “intermittent positive reinforcement” throughout this section. I do genuinely enjoy Nioh 2 and “The Virtuous Cycle,” but there is a part of me that is suspicious of that enjoyment. I worry about how much of that enjoyment has a foundation rooted in the games engineering a receptive psychological state in players and to what degree those design hooks might be some level of unscrupulous. There has recently been an increased awareness of and discourse around design tricks in games that may include elements of gambling and psychological manipulation, with a heavy focus on free-to-play titles like Fortnite that cater heavily to younger players but also on any games that are loaded with microtransactions and mind games designed to push people toward making those transactions. The mainstream line of thinking on the issue is that these games insidiously target children (with their naiveté and even greater susceptibility to peer pressure) and anyone with problems moderating their behavior where gambling is concerned. This consensus is apparent in the amount of real-world (even “normie,” if you will) legislation that’s been popping up to try to curtail things like “loot boxes”—essentially treasure chests, bought or earned, that are designed to open in some form or another in an attention-grabbing way and dispense some sort of randomized reward. These little hits of Reward take various other forms that twine together with one another: microtransactions, the aforementioned boxes, so-called “battle passes” where you work your way through an unfurling tapestry of rewards and where the paid version of the pass hands out better stuff at a faster clip… While neither Nioh 2 or Mortal Shell have microtransactions or the sort of gambling mechanics you might find in “gacha” games like the free-to-play Genshin Impact, which use attractive character designs and sometimes time-sensitive events to push players into repeated microtransactions for just a chance to acquire said characters, there are still elements of the above in these two games and in other titles with similar designs. Should these design tricks be regarded as benign (or not) based on the full context of their implementation? Or is there something inherently foul at their core?

 

In terms of positive reinforcement, “The Virtuous Cycle” has avenues for rewarding players even if they fail a run. The alternative costumes (“Shades”) from the base game, for example, are unlocked by accomplishing various goals for each character across runs (mostly killing specific things). Getting a reward—or at least progress towards one, emphasized in the results screen at the end of a run—even for failing helps players feel like they’re making some progress even if they’re struggling, and, of course, getting that periodic treat helps keep them playing the game. It’s not hard to imagine a version of “The Virtuous Cycle” with “seasons” of content or battle passes, where new rewards with new unlock conditions could be added (and then taken away) over time. Some of the “Rotten Autumn” DLC content technically appears and disappears around the bottom of the year, but there’s no meaningful progression tied to it, as far as I can see—just an updated main title screen, some new pumpkin-like growths around Fallgrim, a gourd consumable item, and certain enemies with pumpkin hats. You can miss out on it, but there’s not necessarily anything to grind and certainly nothing to pay for.

Nioh 2—like Diablo and other loot-focused games—hands out rewards usually at random and from any number of potential sources, and a huge amount of player investment is generated by trying to tip the odds of a good payout in their favor. Getting a reward in response to that effort just confirms the effort was worthwhile and leads to further effort to keep getting rewards. There are standard missions to play through, during which you can acquire potentially useful loot from enemies, chests, and environmental objects in addition to the end-of-mission rewards, but then there are daily “Twilight Missions” which are time-sensitive and tend to give better rewards during and after. And after beating the final boss of the base game you unlock the option to spend a resource before missions to increase your chances of getting good loot, and you can further maximize your chances of finding it by getting specific passive bonuses on your five armor pieces, three accessories, four weapons, three special “Yokai ability” “Soul Cores,” and two “Guardian Spirits.” And you can also level up a “Stone of Penance” to make your loot chances better (while also rolling for a chance to upgrade the power of a chosen accessory!), and sometimes the blacksmith will have a rare item for sale, or you can use resources to craft equipment with the chance to get something you actually need… It just keeps going like that. There are so many avenues for potential progression, and each action is like pulling the lever on a slot machine. Or, given the sheer number of avenues available, it’s more like running up and down and repeatedly pulling the levers of a whole row of slot machines. Since the loot you earn is also color-coded to denote rarity, there’s an immediate and visceral thrill to seeing the color purple or green or orange, that signal a higher-tier drop, appear. As much as I genuinely do enjoy the combat challenge of Nioh 2 and find maximizing my character’s effectiveness through the above systems engaging, I can’t help but worry that part of that “enjoyment” is actually involuntary—a result of the game’s design hooking me in unseemly ways.

            The extremely negative and controversial thing that I’m going to say now is that Mortal Shell feels, in some ways, even more potentially manipulative since its Instincts are also color-coded and rated and doled out in ways that lasso the brain, but those rewards are also entirely temporary—gone after an untimely death and even after what is technically a “successful” run. At least in Nioh the “Divine” and “Ethereal” equipment you earn is yours to keep unless you lose access to the save file. Mortal Shell joins the likes of other session-based games like Apex Legends and Fortnite and, to some extent, with regard to certain items, Dead By Daylight in utilizing the psychological tricks of loot-focused games but where said loot will be temporary, the bait taken away and then set on the hook again essentially in an endlessly renewable cycle. While a player could theoretically reach a point in Nioh where their character is as kitted-out as they’ll get, the same cannot happen in games where the loot is always taken away. Even if a game isn’t selling anything to its players, there’s an argument to be made that using these design tricks is still manipulative. The 2018 God of War color-coded and rated its items and equipment in that way as well, even though those things were really not randomized and/or acquired in the manner of the above titles. In this case, it certainly felt like an unnecessarily needling trick—an extra layer of inducement to play a game primarily about its action and narrative and not loot. To reference my previous write-up about Mortal Shell again, I think the 2018 God of War is also a victim of trendy classification and design choices. I do think its world was more open and its items color-coded and its progression paths mangled by the addition of RPG elements for at least partially cynical reasons related to marketing. An open approach to world design, color-coded and rated gear and items, and RPG systems are “in” right now. Mortal Shell has been the same way: chasing the action-RPG clout of a Soulslike with its original release despite the lack of RPG elements, and now chasing the success of Hades (seemingly—and successfully, I feel!) and using systems of progression that are very popular in gaming right now and that feel designed to perhaps hook players in a way that isn’t entirely seemly and may be downright unethical in the right circumstances. As much as I genuinely do enjoy the combat challenge of “The Virtuous Cycle” and find maximizing my character’s effectiveness through Instincts engaging, I can’t help but worry that part of that “enjoyment” is actually involuntary—a result of the game’s design hooking me in unseemly ways.

 

I don’t want to guess at the originator of color-coding denoting the value of items in games, but it’s certainly become a widespread staple design feature in modern titles where RPG elements are often present in some form. Nioh, Mortal Shell, Apex Legends, Dead by Daylight, and the 2018 God of War are contemporary examples featured in the above collage.

 

            The launch of “The Virtuous Cycle” also incorporated an online feature I hadn’t previously heard about called “Twitch Drops.” Apparently, you can earn rewards for certain games by watching content related to that game on the streaming platform Twitch. In the case of Mortal Shell, these rewards were additional Tar and Glimpse resources and skins for the Foundling character, Axatana weapon, and at least one of the lutes. While the Tar and Glimpses could give you an actual edge in the game, the other items seem to have been purely cosmetic, which is the defense people will often offer when they see criticism of this sort of scummy design that relies on a player’s fear of missing out (FOMO) to drive engagement with a game. True, these things didn’t cost money, but they’re FREE, and having those skins makes you undeniably different or special compared with players that don’t have them! And you’ve got to watch now because they won’t be available forever! It’s not the scummiest use of these psychological tricks in gaming by any means, but it is still scummy. Even if the rewards are ultimately inconsequential, it’s still driving engagement through manipulation. Despite what I said before, I don’t actually (completely) think there’s something unscrupulous to “The Virtuous Cycle’s” loot, since it doesn’t involve real money, but I do think the “drops” are/were problematic. For one thing, as with a fair number of similar items available for a price or as time-sensitive unlockables in other games, there is an argument that the cosmetics should have been rewards for playing the game itself, regardless of the timeframe, rather than being acquired for unrelated reasons. The Foundling skin, in particular, should have been in the game as a normal unlock since it is clearly visually that character’s version of the “corrupted” skin (with a darker body and an eerie, almost liquid, glow applied to the face) that the other characters earn in-game by finishing a run of “The Virtuous Cycle,” but it has apparently been carved out and rendered, eventually, unobtainable in the game at all once the active period on these so-called drops expires and the moment passes. Thus, the FOMO.

 

Source of the above image.

 

The previous screenshot shows off the drops players could unlock during the launch period for “The Virtuous Cycle.” Note the framing of these rewards as “rare” and the emphasis on “right NOW.” This tweet also follows immediately after the announcement that “The Virtuous Cycle” would be free for the first five days after its launch. The intention here is pretty obvious: to build hype and drive players toward the game. Not only is the update out but it’s also free for a limited time! And there are also limited-time rewards! It’s meant to push people who might have otherwise waited on the expansion toward being excited for its release, even if that excitement has to come at least in part from the prospect of getting free stuff. I guess it’s a somewhat less nasty hook because the update itself was free… at least for players who already owned a copy of the original game. The base game was newly-released on Steam back in August 2021 when “The Virtuous Cycle” premiered, and, of course, anyone on any platform wanting to take advantage of this deal but who hadn’t yet bought the base game would need to do that to get/make use of the “free” stuff and would arguably have this extra, time-sensitive inducement to now do so. I suspect that the new launch on the Steam platform, which might result in a lot of new sales of the game, helped justify the original price point (of $0) for the DLC since it was balanced out in a way. The DLC and the emphasis on “free” surrounding it also ties in with what I was saying way back at the beginning of this essay about the value of updates to games in that it cultivates the sense among players that they are valued, which they may very well be! But: It’s a relationship that is very manipulatable from the industry side and can turn toxic on the player side, when players feel entitled to a certain responsiveness to their wants or that they’re not being “appropriately” catered to. I’m not accusing Mortal Shell and the people behind it of doing anything specific here beyond the relatively honest motivation of moving copies of their game. I just want to place the attempts to create hype around that game within the larger conversations that can be had about these marketing tactics and what they say about the state of the games industry.

Also, just as an aside, I personally found the “100% discount” on the DLC more annoying than anything since I wanted to pay for it (because I got Mortal Shell at a bit of a discount originally and felt the enjoyment I got from the game was worth more than what I paid) and had to wait about a week to actually get it because there was no way that I found to opt to pay for it on the PlayStation Store. There’s a certain irony there that someone who considers themselves a fan of the game—see my big-ass original essay again—and that wanted to support the launch of “The Virtuous Cycle” monetarily actually had to wait longer to play it.

            Just to be clear, none of this criticism is intended as some sort of absolute indictment (some kind of definitive “gotcha” meant to “unmask” the evil devs or something) of Mortal Shell or any of the other games I mentioned. These are just my thoughts, and this is my attempt to try to bring Mortal Shell into conversation with the industry around it and to possibly offer some sort of interesting and thought-provoking take on the game. Ultimately, I do like it, and “The Virtuous Cycle” has made me like it even more—for better or for worse! The question now is whether this DLC is just an interesting novelty or whether it’s something more like a proof of concept for a potential Mortal Shell II. Personally, like I said already, I think the pairing of the original game’s existing mechanics with the roguelike/lite elements is a winning one. I think Cold Symmetry’s original game had some interesting ideas (like being able to block during any animation—except when leaving a tunnel, of course…) but that it still felt pretty close to Dark Souls in terms of the overall package. With “The Virtuous Cycle,” the pairing of the original mechanics with the new systems makes for something greater than the sum of its parts. If the Foundling and Twin-Sister and the weird, twisted, worshipped monstrosities you encounter in Mortal Shell represent a sort of alien infestation—and they may quite literally be aliens based on what “The Virtuous Cycle” reveals—then it is at least a compelling and cool one. The same could be said of “The Virtuous Cycle” as a whole.

I think that a theoretical sequel designed from the ground up to accommodate procedural generation could be something really special. After you play “The Virtuous Cycle” enough, it starts to become too familiar. Items found in the environment are randomized but always seem to appear in the same spots, and you start to recognize where the enemy spawn points will always potentially be even if the enemies vary. You run through Fallgrim one too many times and start to forget if you killed the “Grisha” mini-boss on this run yet or if you’re thinking of the previous one. A whole game focused around a “Virtuous Cycle”-like approach would almost certainly have more compelling randomization, a longer arc of progression, and (hopefully) less imbalance in the Instincts. There are still issues with this game, but, shortcomings aside, I can sense even more strongly than before something special in Mortal Shell with “The Virtuous Cycle.” Like its own “Seeds of Infinity” key items that the Twin-Sister ultimately uses to transcend her previous constrained existence, there’s possibly still something even more miraculous waiting in there to be born.

 

An image of the results screen for one of my last “Virtuous Cycle” playthroughs before finalizing things here and perhaps the fitting capper for this piece with a running theme of rough edges: I had a great run going, with (I think) more legendary Instincts than I had gotten previously at the time, but then I propelled myself into a hole performing a basic combo and died. Run over, essay over.