By S. R. Auras

An impartial review is a utopia. It simply doesn’t exist. Any review of a video game, film, book or any media or artistic product depends on the personal opinions and impressions of whoever is writing it. If you came here looking for an impartial review of Mortal Shell, that’s not what you’ll find. This is pretty much a rant from a Dark Souls fan who has followed the series since its beginnings with Demon’s Souls, and who has played plenty of games inspired by it – from great examples (Salt and Sanctuary is a personal favorite) to not-so-great ones (like the well-worn Lords of the Fallen). In other words, throughout this text I will, yes, compare Mortal Shell to the Souls series. There’s no other way.

Mortal Shell promised a lot. A small team doing its best to deliver an experience inspired by Dark Souls, but with its own flavor in the mechanics, the world and the visuals. I followed every Mortal Shell update closely. Every trailer, every bit of news, every preview. It all looked very promising. “Finally, a game not made by FromSoftware that will capture Dark Souls’ sense of exploration and combat!”, some said. And I believed it – everything looked great.

On launch day, I set my alarm to wake me up in the middle of the night so I could play as soon as it unlocked. I’ve done that with very few games in my life – Dark Souls 3 was one of them; I played from 1 a.m. until 6, when I finally had to stop and go to work, since it was a weekday. I woke up excited, fired up Mortal Shell, and the first impressions were good. The tutorial is very reminiscent of Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls, with a mysterious, fog-filled area and the same trick found in the first two Souls games – a boss that’s practically impossible to beat the first time, there to teach you something about the game. In Demon’s Souls, dying to the Vanguard teaches you that death takes you to the Nexus and moves the story forward. In Dark Souls, dying to the Asylum Demon teaches you that this isn’t a button-masher but a game of strategy, and that at that moment the best strategy is to run down a side corridor and gear up to return better prepared. In Mortal Shell, dying to the tutorial boss teaches you that… it teaches you that Mortal Shell will try to be Dark Souls in every corner of the game, without understanding what makes Dark Souls so good. After all, if Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls have bosses that are virtually impossible to beat the first time, Mortal Shell has to do the same, right? Right?

Then the game starts and you’re dropped into a world so, SO poorly planned that it’s hard to describe. You have to play it to understand (but don’t). Mortal Shell’s first area, which serves as the game’s hub (think Firelink Shrine in Dark Souls, a central area that connects the rest of the game), is so badly made it hurts. It’s excessively confusing, has no visual landmarks and shows you several different paths without any hint of where they lead. Again, think of Dark Souls. Dark Souls has no map, but it doesn’t need one, because Firelink Shrine speaks for itself. You FEEL you’re heading somewhere far too dangerous if you happen to wander into the Catacombs early on – right at the entrance you’re surrounded by skeletons that don’t stay dead. That’s the game telling you “hey, this isn’t the way” without actually saying it. It guides you in the right direction without a single word or a compass pointing the way. Mortal Shell has no map simply because Dark Souls doesn’t either – but I think Mortal Shell forgot that you need competent level design for that to work.

Honestly, I’m already a bit tired of writing about this game. That’s also how I felt while playing – after a short while I was already tired. The combat is weak, and the new “hardening” mechanic – which replaces blocking – is completely overpowered once you learn how to use it. It’s genuinely hard to die to any boss once you’ve learned how to play. Against the second-to-last boss, my HP never dropped below half and I beat it on the first try. Not because I’m good, but because the game never puts you in varied or difficult situations. Once you master hardening, which the whole game revolves around, you’re basically immortal.

Customization is practically nonexistent. You have FOUR weapons and FOUR “armors” at your disposal – the game’s “Shells”. Shells are bodies you inhabit – in practice, four characters you can choose to play as. Each has its own skill tree, but they’re so dull… Leveling up isn’t fun, and the way progression works pushes you to focus entirely on one character and abandon the others. So if you started with one and want to try another halfway through, good luck, because it’ll be completely weak, starting from scratch.

The level design outside the hub is laughable. Think of the original Dark Souls 2, only worse. Bland maps, with enemies waiting behind every wall to ambush you – and it happens SO many times that it gets annoying and loses any surprise. At least the enemies are dumb: the AI is terrible and their aggro range is tiny, so you can walk 5 meters in front of an enemy and it’ll just stand there waiting for you. That makes it extremely easy to “pull” enemies one by one, making the game far less challenging and far more boring.

But the best part of the Souls/Borne series is the multiplayer! Surely Mortal Shell, a game so inspired by the series, will have a well-crafted multiplayer. Nope. Mortal Shell is single-player, with no interaction between players at all.

The technical side, visuals and sound are average. Visually, the game isn’t ugly, but it isn’t pretty either. Technically, there are no game-breaking bugs, but there’s little attention to detail. The sound effects are good – probably the best part of the game; swords clashing against metal and the enemy sounds are all well done – but the soundtrack is nonexistent. In fact, it was a dirty trick to put SATANIC METAL in the launch trailer – I expected to hear something like that in the game and ended up hearing… nothing. After a while I opened Spotify and put on a Death Metal playlist, which improved my experience a bit, I must say.

Finally, the story. What story? Dark Souls and Bloodborne place their story in item descriptions, in character dialogue and, above all, in the game WORLD. You walk through Anor Londo in Dark Souls and see the story right there, stamped on the architecture, the statues, the paintings. You walk through Byrgenwerth (even after playing Bloodborne more times than I can remember, I’ll never be able to spell that name without looking it up) and see what happened in Bloodborne. In Mortal Shell… I honestly have no idea what happened, or why I did what I did, went where I went or beat the bosses I beat. You know that “Holy crap, it’s Artorias!” feeling, or “Whoa, Ludwig”, or the chill down your spine the first time you heard Gwyn’s “plink plink plonk”? That moment at the end of Dark Souls 3 when you enter a boss arena, find Gwyn’s lost son riding a dragon and, having played the whole series, understand the gravity of the situation? Nothing in Mortal Shell comes even close.

Anyway, as I said at the start, this wouldn’t be an impartial review. The game isn’t as bad as I may have made it sound. It’s not technically broken, the combat works (even if it’s dull), and the game is so short that just as you’re starting to get annoyed, it suddenly ends (about 15 hours on a first playthrough). But it’s undoubtedly a big disappointment. You’re better off playing Dark Souls or Bloodborne for the seventeenth time.

Narrative: 5.0
Mechanics: 5.0
Audiovisual: 5.0
OVERALL: 5.0