Morbid: The Seven Acolytes review

Reviewed on: PC

Did you like Bloodborne? Great, you can buy Morbid: The Seven Acolytes with your eyes closed, no need to read the rest of the review. You can keep reading to support your colleague here, but the truth is that Morbid is, pure and simple, Bloodborne in 2D with a top-down camera, in the good isometric style that was so common in the past but is no longer seen as much today. Not that the game doesn’t have its peculiarities, and it is far from an imitation, since Morbid has a lot of cool and original things, but the inspiration from the best game of the last generation (tied with Persona 5…) is very clear and very positive.

Morbid: The Seven Acolytes is a 2D pixel-graphics game based on From Software’s games, from Dark Souls to Bloodborne, from which the game draws its biggest inspirations. Morbid’s story is, on the surface, quite simple: you play as a warrior whose mission is to defeat the seven acolytes and save the world. The cool part is that the whole story is told through the items and characters and, above all, the look of the world, which is based on the Cthulhu mythos. The starting map is a fishing village overrun by bizarre creatures and signs that something very sinister happened there, and every following area and enemy only raises the level of madness.

Like any game inspired by Dark Souls and Bloodborne, Morbid cares a lot about its combat system, and in this regard I am very happy to say that the game delivers an experience nothing short of phenomenal. I confess that in the first half hour of play I was treating Morbid as a hack’n’slash, and obviously it wasn’t working. When I realized that the combat was more measured, everything made more sense. From the start of the game you have light attacks (faster) and heavy attacks (slower), a dedicated parry button to counterattack at the right moment, a firearm to attack from afar but with extremely limited ammo, and a dodge that makes the character roll away from danger. All of this, of course, controlled by the famous little green stamina bar, which must always be on the player’s mind, since running out of stamina to dodge a more powerful attack means death.

Besides the excellent combat gameplay, Morbid has a peculiar experience and leveling system. You find statues around the world that give you blessings, and from that moment you can use the skill points earned with each level up to improve one of those blessings. They are powerful passive abilities, such as faster stamina recovery and increased potency of the game’s “Estus flasks”, potions you always carry with you and that are refilled at each checkpoint, among others. The similarities with Dark Souls and Bloodborne really are many, and they don’t stop there. Enemies in Morbid can drop, when defeated, runes that can be placed on your weapons so they have more attack speed or secondary effects such as HP recovery with each attack. Character customization is limited to that (the blessings and the weapon runes), but although it is not much, it is enough for what the game sets out to do. I won’t say that the lack of different armors, so each player could create their own playstyle, isn’t missed, but Morbid works well this simpler way, and the overall quality of the combat makes the difference.

Despite having a phenomenal combat system and a super interesting world to explore with a rich story, in one specific area Morbid drops the ball a little. The biggest negative is the confusion of the game’s navigation. The areas the player must explore are often quite complex mazes, and visually it is quite hard to know where you should go next. Morbid also makes the same mistake as many other souls-likes (a mistake I myself harshly criticized in my review of Mortal Shell, for example), which is the absence of a map. Morbid’s level design is not at the level of a Dark Souls or Bloodborne where a map is unnecessary. Morbid would certainly be a lot more fun if I hadn’t spent a good while trying to remember where I saw a certain character to hand in a certain side quest, or where I saw an alternate path that I decided, at the time, not to follow, but which I now need to find in order to advance.

Even so, exploring this world is a super positive and very cool experience. The design of the enemies, especially some bosses, is super bizarre and, at times, Morbid manages to be quite disturbing and bloody. A love letter to Bloodborne, Morbid will certainly please any fan of From’s games and, even more, fans of H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythology. An excellent battle system is what really matters in games of this type, and Morbid has that in spades. It lacked attention to certain details to be an unmissable game, but the target audience (me, for example) will be quite satisfied.