Mortal Shell review

Reviewed on: PC

By Samuel R. Auras

An impartial review is utopian. 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. If you came here looking for an impartial review of Mortal Shell, that’s not what you’ll find. What’s here is practically a vent from a Dark Souls fan, who has followed the series since its beginnings in Demon’s Souls, and who has played a lot of inspired games, from great examples (Salt and Sanctuary is a personal favorite) to not-so-great ones (like the already tired Lords of the Fallen). In other words, throughout the following text I will, yes, compare Mortal Shell with the Souls series. There’s no way around it.

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, the visuals. I followed every Mortal Shell update closely. Every trailer, every new piece of news, every preview. It all looked very promising. “Finally, a non-From Software game will manage to deliver the exploration and combat feel of Dark Souls!”, some said. And I believed it; everything looked great.

On launch day, I set the alarm to wake me up in the middle of the night, to play as soon as the game became available. I’ve done that with few games in my life; Dark Souls 3 was one of them, I played from 1 AM to 6 AM, when I finally had to stop and go to work, since it was a midweek day. I woke up excited, booted up Mortal Shell, and the first impressions are cool. The tutorial strongly resembles Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls, with a foggy, all mysterious area, and with the same trick present in the first two Souls games: a practically impossible boss to beat the first time, which is 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 advances the story. In Dark Souls, dying to the Asylum Demon teaches you that this is not a brawler but a game of strategy, and, at that moment, the best strategy is to run down a side corridor and gear up to return to the fight 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, but 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 you play, we have to do the same in Mortal Shell, right? Right?

Then the game starts and you’re placed in a world so, but SO poorly planned, that it’s hard to describe. You have to play to understand (but don’t). Mortal Shell’s first area, which serves as the “hub” of the game (think Firelink Shrine in Dark Souls, a central area that connects the entire rest of the game), is so badly made it hurts. It’s excessively confusing, has no visual references, and shows you several distinct paths without any indication of where they lead. Again, let’s think about Dark Souls. Dark Souls doesn’t have a map, but it isn’t needed, because Firelink Shrine speaks for itself. You FEEL that you’re going down a way too dangerous path if you happen to decide to dive into the Catacombs at the start of the game, since right at the entrance you’re surrounded by several skeletons that don’t stay dead. That’s the game telling you “hey, this isn’t the way” without actually having to say it. The game leads you in the right direction without saying a word or having to put a compass pointing the way. In Mortal Shell, on the other hand, the game has no map simply because Dark Souls doesn’t either, but I think Mortal Shell forgot that it needs to have competent level design for that.

Honestly, I’m already a little tired of writing about this game. That was also the feeling while I played; after a short time I was already tired. The combat is weak, and the new “hardening” mechanic, which replaces blocking, is completely overpowered once you learn to use it. It’s really hard to die to any boss after learning to play this game. Against the second-to-last boss of the game, my HP never dropped below half and I beat him on the first try. And it’s not because I play well, but because the game doesn’t put you in different and difficult situations. After mastering the hardening mechanic, around which the entire game revolves, you become truly immortal.

Customization in this game is practically nonexistent. You have at your disposal FOUR weapons and FOUR “armors”, the game’s “Shells”. The Shells are bodies you inhabit; in practice, they are four characters you can choose to play. Each has its skill trees, but they’re so dull… It’s not fun to level up the character, and the game encourages you, through the way progression is done, to focus completely on one character and abandon the others, so if you chose to start with one and, halfway through the game, want to try another, good luck, because you’ll be completely weak, from scratch.

The level design of the areas beyond the central one is laughable. Think Dark Souls 2, original version, only worse. They’re dull maps, with enemies waiting behind every wall to ambush you, and that happens SO many times that it’s irritating and loses the surprise. At least the enemies are dumb, because the artificial intelligence is terrible, and their aggro range is super low, so you can walk 5 meters in front of an enemy and he’ll just stand there waiting for you, which makes it extremely easy to “pull” the enemies one by one, making the game much less challenging and much more boring to play.

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 super well-crafted multiplayer. Except no. Mortal Shell is single player, and has no interaction at all between players.

The technical, visual and audio side is average. Visually, the game isn’t ugly but isn’t beautiful either. Technically, the game has no bugs that completely break the experience, but has little attention to detail. The sound effects are cool, probably the best part of the game, the sounds of sword on metal, of the enemies, it’s all well done, but the soundtrack is nonexistent. By the way, it was a dirty trick what they did, putting SATANNIC METUL in the launch trailer ; I expected to hear something in that style in the game, and ended up hearing… nothing. After a while I turned on Spotify and put on a Death Metal playlist, which improved my experience a bit, I must say.

Lastly, the story. What story? Dark Souls and Bloodborne put the story in item descriptions, in character dialogue, and, above all, in the game’s WORLD. You walk through Anor Londo in Dark Souls and see the game’s story right there, stamped on the architecture, the statues, the paintings. You walk through Byrgenwerth (even having played Bloodborne more times than I can remember, I’ll never be able to write that name without looking it up first) and see what happened in Bloodborne. In Mortal Shell… I honestly have no idea what happened, nor why I did what I did, went where I went, defeated the bosses I defeated. You know that feeling of “holy crap, Artorias!”, or “damn, Ludwig”, or the chill down your spine you felt when you heard Gwyn’s “plim plim plom” for the first time? You know that moment when you’re at the end of Dark Souls 3, enter a boss arena and find Gwyn’s lost son mounted on a dragon and, after having played the whole series, you understand the gravity of the situation? Nothing in Mortal Shell comes close.

Anyway, as I said at the start, this wasn’t going to be an impartial review. The game isn’t as bad as I may have made it sound. It isn’t technically broken, the combat works (despite being boring), and the game is so short that just when you’re starting to get irritated it ends out of nowhere (it lasts about 15 hours on the first playthrough). But it’s without a doubt a big disappointment. Better to play Dark Souls or Bloodborne for the seventeenth time.

Narrative: 5.0

Mechanics: 5.0

Audiovisual: 5.0

AVERAGE: 5.0