![]() There’s lots of little design decisions that add up to bigger problems here. Soulslikes have always struggled with having a high barrier to entry, but MORTAL SHELL is a whole-ass case study on letting your barrier to entry get way too high - to the extent where it relies almost entirely on other games vouching for it to provide most of the incentive to actually keep playing. Given the time commitment and effort involved, it’s not only fair, but important to evaluate how a game tries to bring you over the threshold to the good parts of it.Īnd hoooooo boy, I have definitely played enough MORTAL SHELL to be able to talk about that. And video games have another layer here, because you have to consistently put in an additional type of effort to fully experience it: you gotta git gud at the game. When someone says “Stick it out, it’s worth it in the end!” about a long piece of media, what they often mean is closer to “Hey, would you like an 80-hour experience where you enjoy 35 of them?” (to borrow a phrasing from badass media critic and video essayist Jenny Nicholson, talking about how the task of recommending long-running TV shows is tough). But some important info is lost by emphasizing that sort of summation. Someone who sat through it all will have to round things up or down to be able to decide if the good parts were worth the bad parts. ![]() It’s often tempting to overlook the beginning of a game, and to consider it almost a footnote in the “full” experience, but that’s not really a sensible way to look at media that takes double-digit hours to fully experience. Is it just that I’m bad? How can I review a game I didn’t beat? Tons of reviewers and popular Soulslike streamers loved MORTAL SHELL, with some even calling it the new gold standard for indie Soulslikes. I even picked up the remastered edition of the original DARK SOULS when it came out for the Nintendo Switch in 2018.) (By comparison, I’ve beaten all three Dark Souls games, BLOODBORNE, and SEKIRO multiple times each, and happily play them again from time to time. HELLPOINT didn’t end up being anything to write home about, and after beating it 1.5 times I’m not picking that one back up either. Right?”Īnother couple hours later, I gave up and just downloaded HELLPOINT - another stylish Soulslike from a different indie studio that came out in the same month (must’ve been something in the air). A voice was whispering in my ear: “Sure, you’re hitting a wall now - but you’ve hit a wall before, and you made it through then, and you ended up really loving those games, right? It’ll just take some more practice, but the reward will be worth it, just like before. For instance, I struggled hard early on with SEKIRO in 2019, and now it’s one of my favorite games. But as I started to struggle with it, the main thing keeping me going was that other games I’d played were kinda “vouching for” MORTAL SHELL. Although the game very loudly wants you to compare it to DARK SOULS, I wanted to judge it on its own merits. ![]() I started writing this review after a few hours of gameplay, with every intent to give the game a fair shake. I love Soulslikes, and was excited when MORTAL SHELL came out. Which is a little unfair, because I haven’t finished the game. Released in 2020 and built by a team of only fifteen people, MORTAL SHELL is an impressive game: it’s very lovingly made, has a ton of visual polish, and is generally regarded as a strong new Soulslike (a genre of challenging action-RPGs spawned by and named after the runaway success of DARK SOULS). MORTAL SHELL is the debut game of young indie developer Cold Symmetry. ![]()
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