

Reflective of the rest of its sub-genre, Mortal Shell has a tight core gameplay loop that is simple to understand yet difficult to fully master. These descriptions will offer clues as to what happened in the game-world before you arrived. To discover more elements of the lore around the game’s characters and world, read item descriptions and reveal the name of the shell that you are currently playing as. The lore and world-building, in addition to the excellent combat, make the game a fun challenge that you will want to keep coming back to. And for this kind of game, that simple story works just fine. Essentially, your main quest (without spoilers) amounts to battling through the game’s different zones to find sacred items that will help another character out of a bad spot. One of the game’s ‘sesters’… But this one seems a bit different.Īs it is with most Souls-like games, Mortal Shell has a fairly limited main story, expanded upon by a treasure trove of rich and mysterious lore. In fact, Mortal Shell has done well enough in sales and reviews as of now, a bit less than a month after release, to warrant the mass-production of disc copies of the game for a physical release in October! While there are some outliers who didn’t much enjoy this game, many users and critics praise the title for its combination of a solid, straight-forward, and satisfying combat system, a beautiful graphics engine and art style, a mysterious and lore-rich world, and a decent amount of replay value.Ĭollectors, get psyched for the physical release!

Mortal Shell maintains this single-player focus and distills it even further, cutting out co-op and help messages entirely. The Dark Souls games have always offered co-op and online help messages from other players, but they have focused more on single-player. This sci-fi romp obviously looks and feels quite different from Dark Souls in terms of its game-world, even though it shares many of Dark Souls’ core mechanics.Īnd here’s Mortal Shell, sitting somewhere on the sub-genre’s spectrum that’s much closer to the original inspiration, Dark Souls, and much further from games like The Surge or Jedi: Fallen Order. Then, way off in another far-flung corner of the Souls-like universe, there’s The Surge. Ashen, for example, is another recent Souls-like, but its world is a bit less dark, it focuses on co-op gameplay, and it has an open game-world.
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Like Dark Souls, Mortal Shell takes place in a dark, mysterious, and violent game-world that’s full of enemies to fight and loot to collect!Įven within the Souls-like genre, though, there are some big differences from one entry to another.

Japanese game developer FromSoftware pioneered this sub-genre of tough action RPGs, starting with Demon’s Souls in 2009, and they perfected their formula with 2011’s Dark Souls. If you like talking your way out of every potentially bad situation, like you can in Obsidian’s The Outer Worlds, then not so much. If you like tight melee combat systems, this is for you. Well, for starters, Mortal Shell is an action role-playing game (RPG) with a somewhat slow pace that focuses on its combat system.

So, let’s say that you enjoy challenging games, and this one here is starting to pique your interest… But unlike me, perhaps you’re not obsessed with the niche video game genre of Souls-likes. And Mortal Shell absolutely has that secret sauce!
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Since I’ve played the Souls series and Sekiro multiple times, I know what makes a game in that genre good. It’s a welcome change from hit-scan shooters with aim-bot AI, in which the highest difficulty settings sometimes feel less like tests of skill and more like throwing yourself at the mercy of unfair super-bots and random number generators. That’s why I love Souls games! Dark Souls isn’t always easy, but it’s methodical, deliberate, mostly fair, and immersive. But I do like a good, fair challenge that can naturally extend a game’s play-time and increase my sense of accomplishment at the end, all without overstaying its welcome. I don’t do crazy, time-bound challenge runs on unbelievably high difficulty settings.
