Mortal Shell, despite being a pretty shameless Dark Souls clone, shouldn’t be overlooked. The dozen or so hours you’ll invest into the game across its gorgeous but few areas are teaming with weighted combat, fierce encounters, and an unforgiving lust for your demise. For a game developed by a small team of just 15 people, it certainly has the promise to be considered one of the better takes on the Souls formula.
While there have been several games across the past few years to emulate Dark Souls, Mortal Shell feels the most similar to Hidetaka Miyazaki's beloved franchise. In fact, if you were simply to show most people even just a few seconds of Mortal Shell’s gameplay, you’d be hard-pressed to not have everyone walk away claiming you’ve just shown them footage from one of the few Dark Souls games. While that may come across as an insult, it’s actually a well-earned compliment, considering the size of the studio and just how polished and fluid this game can be at times. That said, it still does have a few issues that do hold it back.
Clocking in around 12-15 hours, Mortal Shell does not outstay its welcome. The overall gameplay is almost identical to that of a Souls game as you’ll kill hard-hitting enemies to collect Tar and Glimpses, instead of Souls, to then use those currencies to upgrade your character. You’ll do this all while trekking around dark and moody environments, encountering a few but intriguing NPC’s, and deciphering its intentionally vague narrative, reading every piece of lore you come in contact with as you attempt to put together the clues surrounding this mysterious land and the history of the Shells you’ll inhabit.
The biggest difference between Mortal Shell and most Dark Souls experiences is that there is no character creation or ability to make your character permanently stronger. You start the game off as a foundling, a weak, and frail body that while it has the ability and will to fight, will come to rely on Shells that you’ll discover for its survival. These Shells, who have their own name and history are lifeless bodies you’ll discover as you find them scattered across the opening area. They each have their own stats and variables on health, stamina, or resolve. Harros, for example, is your starting shell, a knight who comes to the table with a general balance of health and stamina. Then there is Tiel, a much faster Shell that is heavy on stamina, but weaker when it comes to taking hits. Eredrim, however; is the exact opposite, lacking stamina, but is overfilling with health reserves. Lastly is Solomon, who is built more around resolve, a meter that is crucial to pulling off some of your more impactful special attacks you get for upgrading your weapons.
This essentially means that you’ll take encounters on via the terms set by those Shells, rather than making builds that favor a variety of different stats working alongside one another. Builds are a big part of the Dark Souls series, so there isn’t as much of a character investment here when it comes to what you want from your Shell and what you can build towards. The upgrades do help in the grand scheme of things, boosting the main traits of each Shell, but these characters never truly feel like they are yours. These four Shells will protect you in various ways, and even take a mortal hit for you when you receive a fatal blow, giving you a few precious seconds to scramble back inside the Shell for one more attempt before you die and end up back at your most recently held checkpoint, lacking the Tar you’ve collected along the way. You can head back out and find a cocooned reminder of your Shell, a stone statue of your previous attempt, taking back your losses as well as refiling your health in the process. I actually used this to my advantage during the game’s first mini-boss encounter, intentionally dying so that I had this reserve in statue form for when I needed a last-second health boost.
As you collect Tar and Glimpses, you’ll sink those currencies into your character through the upgrades I’ve mentioned. They boost the overall traits of each Shell, such as Solomon’s upgrades focusing more on his resolve, or earning a Glimpse as he discovers lore for the first time. Harros, on the other hand, will upgrade his ability to harden, such as causing an area of impact blast when hardening in the air, or reducing the cooldown to use it more often, something that is incredibly beneficial. Tiel’s upgrade tree might be my favorite as you can cause poison damage across a variety of upgrades as well as his ability for sprinting not to consume his stamina gauge. Lastly, Eredrim, whose upgrade tree is built mostly around dealing additional damage or being resistant to being knocked back. Swapping to shells is something that became a bit frustrating as one location blocked me off from being able to head back to the tomb where I could pick my warrior, causing me to be stuck in a location where I only had access to Solomon, something that made one boss encounter frustrating to no end. While you can track down vials that allow you to switch forms, they are few and far between in most areas and are only a one-way trip.
As the foundling, you’ll start with the Hallowed Sword, a pretty common weapon that has a decent swing radius but lacks the power, range, or speed of the other three weapons; a mace, long sword, as well as a hammer and chisel, which in Tiel’s hands is incredibly fun due to his speed and core stats. Each of the other three weapons is won by defeating a warrior named Hadern at the entrance to the three included dungeons, and this lack of being able to pick your starting weapon at the beginning of the game is another unique take here and might be another design choice that may not sit too well with some. As you discover some additional NPCs, you’ll eventually be able to unlock the Ballistazooka, a ranged weapon that while powerful, has an incredibly long reload time that borders a bit on the ridiculous sometimes. It’s effective, but its speed makes it a hard weapon to really benefit from in most situations.
Perhaps the biggest change in what Mortal Shell does here is through its hardening mechanic, an invincible stone skin that covers your entire body, even during a dodge or roll. Harros, for example, has an upgrade to reduce its cooldown, but even in its default state, it’s still rather generous. While this may come across as just like having a shield, it feels much more versatile to use than its comparison. You can even harden in mid-air or in mid-swing, allowing for an interesting risk-reward system. However, the ability to use it so frequently can often result in exploiting certain aspects of what the game attempts to challenge you with. While the system is rather clever, it can make several encounters far too trivial. Now, that said, this game still packs all the punch you’d expect from the genre with some truly punishing boss fights and a wide range of hard-hitting enemies.
Mixed in with the game’s variable weapon speeds and dodge systems is a parry and counter mechanic that is eventually unlocked when you encounter one of the games’ more interesting NPC’s. However, I found the timing to be rarely consistent, and considering this is one of the only ways to reliably heal without items, it’s frustrating when you clearly met the timing and the game just doesn’t feel like you did. To counter this counter system, I just sat at the nearby mushroom spawn and collected a ton of mushrooms as they reliably respawn every few minutes, allowing me to just worry about dodging and hardening as I slowly worked my way to victory chomping down on them when given a bit of breathing room.
Mushrooms are just one of many items, but Mortal Shell does something interesting and yet sometimes annoying as each item has an unknown purpose until you consume it. So in the example of using a vial to swap Shells, it caused me to summon a Shell I didn’t want to use given the boss I was just about to face. But, this air of mystery is still intriguing, and the more you consume an item, the more knowledge you gain from it. Poisonous mushroom may seem pointless to use given they initially damage you, but consuming enough of them and suddenly you’ll have better resilience to toxins, causing a brief immunity to poison. Some items will boost your Tar or Glimpse stash, so it’s recommended to not consume them until you’re ready to spend them as items remain on your body when you die, whereas your open spendable currency does not.
Mortal Shell has an interesting mechanic that is built into each of the three dungeons. As you defeat the foe at the end of each of these areas, you’ll be given a quest item called the Gland. This will cause the world to be engulfed in a red glow, a fog that is host to far more difficult foes and will only end when you return the Gland to an NPC at Fallgrim tower. You’ll also be able to finally open all the locked chests that have been confusing you on your journey. As you reach the tower for the first time via the fog, you’ll meet another NPC; Thestus, who can allow you to revisit the fog for a price, allowing you to traverse this more difficult version of the land to track down each and every one of those locked chests.
While I have a few issues with numerous design choices across the game, it’s the placement of enemies where I found the most frustration. Dark Souls often was methodical about where and why it placed enemies in certain locations, but Mortal Shell doesn’t feel as strategic, often placing enemies in locations where they are designed to either ambush you, attack you in vast numbers, or become part of a battle you’re having with another group due to a very distanced aggro system, something that is made more complicated with a targeting system that often picks the guy in the back of the room rather than the threat directly in front of you. There are several moments in the game where all of these examples play into the mix and just make the game more frustrating than challenging. It also sucks that since you cannot freely jump apart from your sprint attack, that you can get caught on parts of the environment, taking unnecessary hits as you’re simply trying to get a better angle on the situation. While you can often dodge roll past enemies, some foes, such as some floating spirits, have oddly shaped hitboxes than can block your movement, despite your body not actually touching them.
Mortal Shell, despite being made by such a small team, is filled with some gorgeous and wonderfully detailed locations. There are only a small handful of environments, but they each stand out and are flavored via different themes such as a dark and moody crypt, or a frozen series of caves, with one location as seen above where there are bodies floating under a patch of ice. Now, despite how stunning this game can look, I’ve had some locations flicker white as I’d move around corners, something I’ve noticed a lot with games running on the Unreal 4 engine. It doesn’t happen all the time, but it’s certainly noticeable when it does. While moving around each of the dungeons is pretty straight forward, the swamplands of Fallgrim have too many paths and locations that don’t have enough to differentiate between them, resulting in getting lost far too easy. There are a few landmarks to set you on the path, but it’s those paths where too much looks too similar.
There is also some pathing that the AI cannot navigate as they would often get stuck on logs or ridges and just stand there walking into it, causing me to have to guide them down the ramp in order to battle them, sometimes getting an arrow from a nearby archer shot into my face for my troubles. I also found a few areas in the game where the camera just didn’t want to cooperate in a small hallway, often allowing enemies to just stomp me to death as the game wouldn’t know where to position the camera until I was well and dead. There are also areas where you’ll climb through crawlspaces and more often than not, enemies will see me crawl out of them, attacking me during the unskippable cutscene of me exiting the tunnel, having half my health gone with nothing I could do about it. Apart from that, there are some odd animations or enemies adjusting to a default animation when in view, but these are mostly just visual blemishes than anything that directly affects gameplay.
Mortal Shell is not without its problems, but it does far more right than wrong, often resulting in a very faithful and sometimes unique take on the Dark Souls formula. While it is certainly tiring having to compare it to Fromsoft’s very popular series so often, this game is just far too similar in nature to not compare the two. The few things that Mortal Shell does to distanced itself are interesting and unique and allows the game to at least feel different in a few key ways. If this team is set on making a sequel, I’d love to see them detour more from the source material, giving this promising new franchise its own voice and identity, instead of being just looked and compared to its very apparent inspirations.
A review code for Mortal Shell was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review and played on an Xbox One X.
All screenshots were taken on an Xbox One X.