Pretty early you’re going to stumble into a boss battle. This is their version of glimpsing the playspace you’ll explore to get you excited.īut that initial learning curve drags on, and on. The shells are all in the starting area, but each of the four weapons will lead you to the game’s key pathways, a clever way of encouraging early players to explore. Your goal is to find the four shells and the four weapons. It’s cool, and helps give you a sense of purpose early in the game. The empty slots for weapons and Shells have this weird glowing aura, and if you interact with them you can use instinct to gain a vision of where you might acquire them. The game also does some neat foreshadowing here. The somewhere seemingly safe where your Shells will be stored, upgraded, and where you learn how to parry. Here you’ll find your base of operations in the midst of Fallgrim. So you get through the first area, and a torch by an open door entices you in. This teaches you basic crowd control, a skill you’ll need often as Mortal Shell groups enemies in threes often. Like any regular enemies in small numbers they are manageable, but large groups are an issue. They all have straight forward attacks that rarely chain more than two hits, and after they cream you a few times, you start to dispatch them handily. Once you get the hang of Harden, you’ll go through a marshland, Fallgrim, populated by spooky looking dudes right out of Yharnam. I’m a Souls veteran but even by the obtuse standards of Demon Souls, Mortal Shell begs you to stop playing. Like its inspiration, Mortal Shell’s first few hours are a slog. One Shell is geared around parrying and so on.
The Shell you begin with focuses on Harden, extending and modifying the damage boosts. Where Dark Souls sees you increase stats, your shell upgrades are gameplay modifiers, rarely straight boosts (there are five straight buffs in the whole game by my count). The real unique hook of Mortal Shell is the upgrades of the shells. Equally, the super heavy King Shell has basically no stamina but seemingly endless health, and heavy attacks get a damage buff. Rather, it dissolves into mist and reappears. For example, the rogue-type shell doesn’t dodge roll. The key to the game is still dodging, and parrying, and boosting through damage with Harden, but the Shells add this other layer. There’s also four core weapons and some more peripheral customisation as the game goes on, but that’s your core. You upgrade Shells’ individual skills rather than upgrading your base character.
Each of the four Shells has a unique set of properties and skills. Shells are the corpses of previous inhabitants of the world that you can inhabit (basically different classes). Instead, you acquire four Shells in the starting area. Because of this, you’ll always have the sense you’re missing out on a slightly better weapon or armour set.Ĭonversely, Mortal Shell does not have character levels. The first two Dark Souls games are so gear and level focused that it’s possible to completely break a weapon if you use an upgrade that isn’t compatible with your stats. The game’s challenge is in bringing to bear this character you’ve built to defeat enemies. Gear augments defences, your movement speed and stamina required to swing your weapons. You’ll spend the majority of your time spending experience points from defeated enemies to level up your character. Gear and stats then dictate the damage sliders on these animations. Dark Souls is a game about timing animations to hit enemies and avoid damage. Mortal Shell is built on the same 3D action game framework as FromSoftware. Get an upgrade to make killing things easier. Your goal is to fight through areas to reach the next check-point where you can spend the experience you’ve gained. You return to the last check-point you visited, the enemies in the world respawn. Harden begins the game’s foray into new territory, so despite any superficial and tonal similarity to Dark Souls, Mortal Shell treads new ground where so many others fail.īut the structure is Dark Souls adjacent: you’re playing a third-person action game where you have a limited quantity of healing, and when you die, your experience is dropped at the location of your death. Harden allows you to freeze your character during any animation and makes them invulnerable to damage until you release the Harden button or are hit by an enemy. You learn the mechanics of the game which are superficially similar to Dark Souls, except for Harden. You’re this white skinned, no-faced wax person. You wake up in a strange land without explanation. The descent into ‘well this one isn’t as good as Dark Souls’ is inevitable, but Mortal Shell invites this comparison, demands it, in fact. Writing anything about a game with corpse runs and mysterious NPC’s who cackle at the end of their dialogue is a tricky area.
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