Post-Game Game Post: Mortal Shell
The world is not as I left it a scant few hours ago.
I delved deep, heavy boots trudging through the Monument of Ash, facing brigands and heralds alike. Each stood tall, each cut down just the same by my hammer and poisoned chisel. I claimed my prize at this labyrinth’s end, drinking deep of the promised Nektar, but cold stone and the deep, yawning Mist was all that greeted me in turn. That, and the ghoulish nocteserpers…
Onward.
I remain wonderfully bewildered by the fact that “Soulslike” has become a genre unto itself. Most of the established tenets of 2011’s Dark Souls - bonfire checkpoints, limited use healing items, and a heavy priority on attack timings and animations - are still found in games like The Surge and Remnant: From the Ashes, but studios are finding their own ways to shake up the formula.
Cold Symmetry’s Mortal Shell takes the strongest steps away from what I’ve considered “necessary” for a Soulslike to date, to the point where my initial impressions were extremely negative, but the remarkable truth is that it manages to stake its own claim without feeling like an also-ran. Its small scope and economic approach to world design allows it to deliver all the highs of the genre without dragging on or getting stuck in the rut of currency grinding.
“MORTAL SHELL
(Epic Games Store,
Playstation 4, Xbox One)”
Mortal Shell trades on your knowledge of games of this ilk at a basic level, taking place in Fallgrim, a languid, dark fantasy world where humanity lives on its last leg in wasting swamps and sleek, otherworldly structures of obsidian. The world has, in a phrase, moved on, its inhabitants yearning for the sweet relief of Nektar. A titanic, imprisoned being implores you to travel to the temples of the devout, reclaiming sacred glands to free him. It’s a fairly straightforward setup, and the narrative’s never overly pushy or foregrounded.
Soulslikes often choose to spend very little time explaining their own world, but Mortal Shell manages to really emphasize the concept of “familiarity" in its item and world design. A helpful compendium in game allows you to scroll through lore tabs and item descriptions at will, which is a welcome addition to the genre. In a more literal sense, however, familiarity applies to items: any new object you pick up won’t tell you what it does at first. The more you use it and become familiar, that effect changes or amplifies. Healing mushrooms have their heal-over-time cut to a third while maintaining their effectiveness, while a mushroom that poisons you at first eventually confers immunity to poison effects. A humble lute you find early on exemplifies this system, starting you off with harsh twanging as further familiarity leads you to recite pleasant melodies. It’s a very clever system, encouraging you to experiment and mess around with a bunch of different items just to see how they change over time.
This concept of familiarity is just one of the ways Mortal Shell’s mechanical differences, both big and small, set it apart. It eschews the minutiae and bewilderment of dealing with heavy stat allocation and managing equipment, focusing instead on a more class-based system with the titular Shells: four different individuals possessed by your character, a lithe, apparition-like creature. Each Shell comes with their own list of traits and abilities to unlock that help flesh out their own distinct feel: the scholarly Solomon gains experience from reading lore, while the roguish Tiel (pictured above) can heal from poison damage.
In combat, your options are similarly streamlined. Mortal Shell’s four melee weapons offer no traditional sword-and-board defensive options, relying instead on a Bloodborne-esque parry-into-riposte or the wonderfully-named Harden, the latter turning you to impervious stone until you take a hit. The interplay of these two abilities push combat into a very aggressive, forward-momentum space: Hardening is an instant trigger, and can be fired mid-attack. Is a nine-foot-tall knight about to bring their hammer crashing down on you? Charge up a heavy attack, Harden to deflect his blow, and then finish your animation as you break free from your stone prison. There are points where it feels like it’s trivializing the encounter design, and the parrying is…occasionally a little fidgety, to be honest, with plenty of times where it felt like I had the time to deflect but met the sharp end of a scimitar instead. You’re often frail enough that the harden/parry dynamic remains vital throughout, and when the parry breaks bad, it’s fairly frustrating.
The bread-and-butter of a Soulslike remains its bosses, living and dying by their diversity and challenge, and Mortal Shell mostly succeeds in its spread. Its eight bosses are all diverse, genuinely fun encounters, and they all feel purposeful. One boss spars with you several times over your journey, serving as both a challenge and a weapon tutorial to showcase what the game’s arsenal can pull off. Apart from this mysterious tutorializing foe, your main opponents manage to strike the appropriate balance of tough-but-fair, with multiple phases, health bars, and a few clever twists throughout. I don’t think any of them necessarily rank in the all-time pantheon of Soulslike bosses: there’s no Ornstein & Smough moment to be found here, but they’re all fairly memorable and offer good codas to the different environments. If there’s one thing that I would’ve enjoyed seeing here, it’s a few more opportunities to go up against bigger beasties.
As I began my journey out into the dire world of Fallgrim, I’ll freely admit that my first few hours with Mortal Shell were straight-up fairly unenjoyable. I struggled with the pacing of a new combat paradigm, and was a bit lost as to what my narrative thrust was. It felt like my first encounter with Dark Souls nine years ago. After some time and a fair bit of practice, however, I fell into the groove, and found myself deeply appreciating the changes developer Cold Symmetry has made to a tried-and-true formula. It’s a fantastic foundation for a sequel, should they choose to keep down this path, and with its focus on sanding off much of the deeply incomprehensible facets of the genre, Mortal Shell makes for an easy recommendation.
Mortal Shell: “Recommended”
Mortal Shell is available on Xbox One, Playstation 4, and PC via the Epic Games Store.
Reviewed with a copy purchased on the Epic Games Store.
