Mortal Shell is an action-RPG Soulslike produced by Cold Symmetry, a team consisting of a mere 15 people. Luckily, these 15 people seem to know their way around game design and bring us, Mortal Shell. The version I shall be reviewing today is Mortal Shell: Enhanced Edition and I played through the game on PlayStation 5. So, is Mortal Shell: Enhanced Edition worth picking up? And what’s new for this revision?
First, it’s worth quickly going over what a Soulslike actually is to help the uninitiated. A Soulslike is a relatively new genre to describe a game that borrows elements from the Demons Soul’s and Dark Souls series (Hence the Soul in the Soulslike). To sum this up, a Soulslike style game has an emphasis on Non-linear exploration, a firm but fair difficulty level that punishes greed and rewards patience along with an RPG style permanent stat-based character progression. Mortal Shell: Enhanced Edition has all these qualities and many more. I will go into more depth about the mechanics of the game in the Gameplay section of this review.
Story
The story of Mortal Shell is intentionally vague and quite hands-off, a lot of It is told through small clusters of NPC dialogue or through the many item descriptions that you’ll come across on your journey. This will allow you to dive into the lore as much or as little as you like. Personally, I think this is a very natural method of storytelling rather than having lengthy, scripted cut-scenes to baby feed you information. In Mortal Shell: Enhanced Edition you have to dig through your items and pay close attention to NPC dialogue to piece together what is going.
From my playthrough, the impression of the story I got is as follows: We play as the foundling, a blank, humanoid type creature with the ability to inhabit shells, the remnants of fallen warriors. This allows the foundling to take on their appearance, use their abilities etc.
The foundling wakes up in a realm full of water and fog, we find a sword and meet Hadern, the tutorial boss who reminds me a lot of the Hero’s Spirit who teaches Link abilities in Twilight Princess. While fighting Hadern we learn out basic abilities along with a unique mechanic ‘Harden’. This allows the foundling to basically turn to a statue instantly and negate most damage.
Now, apparently, you can best Hadern here, but I was quickly defeated and swallowed by the Wormfish, a giant fish about 15ft long, after a quick transition we awake In Fallgrim, a dark and dank swamp inhabited by some quite hostile enemies. In Fallgrim we an imprisoned character who instructs us to go out and seek three items to help set him free. The rest of the game is spent searching for these items as our primary goal.
Enhancements
Mortal Shell: Enhanced Edition looks great on PS5, the base resolution is 3200×1800, upscaled to 4K and runs at a solid 60fps. As with all ‘Soulslike’ style games, framerate is imperative and thankfully I didn’t notice any framerate dips even when I was trying to make them happen.
With the PS5 version, the DualSense features added to Mortal Shell Enhanced edition are great, they really add a lot to the overall feel of the game. I found myself moving my character around, panning the camera to feel the distinct crackling of burning torches etc.
Gameplay
As you journey across the lands looking for items to required to free the old prisoner, you come across numerous different enemies, each one that is killed will net you some ‘Tar’. Tar acts both as a currency and to a certain extent as experience points. Nominal amounts of tar are gain upon slaying a foe as well as through the use of consumable objects. Much like souls in Dark Souls, upon death, the foundling will drop all Tar carried and will have to fight their way back to where they met their demise to collect it back.
At various points throughout the Mortal Shell, you’ll run into Sester Genessa. This NPC will allow you to spend your collected tar and she acts as a spawn point if you die.
Brining your tar to Sester Genessa allows you to learn abilities for each of the four ‘Shells’ you’ll come across on your adventure but first, you’ll need to spend 500 tar to learn their names.
Shells are a unique mechanic indeed and a very welcome one. The foundling has the ability to inhabit four separate Shells or sleeves as they are called at one point in the game. These four unique characters take care of the traditional class system you may expect to find in this type of game.
The first character you will come across is Harros, the Vassal and archetypal Knight who is a very good all-rounder with a balanced amount of Health, Stamina and Resolve. Next up, we have Solomon, The Scholar who has the most amount of Resolve in the game allowing for frequent special attacks which really help with taking down some of the game’s harder bosses. We then have Tiel, The Acolyte who acts as your rogue type character mixing super-fast evasion with the ability to deal poison damage to enemies. Finally, we have Eredrim, The Venerable aka your Tank class. Eredrim has a massive health pool and can really take a beating but the trade-off is a very low amount of resolve and stamina.
These Shells can be switched up at Fallgrim Tower or by use of an effigy, this is handy if you are stuck in a certain area and could use Tiel’s speed for example to get yourself out of trouble.
Items found while playing Mortal Shell have quite a unique system of familiarity, each item starts off unknown to the foundling and you gain more knowledge of the item the more times you use it. For example, early in the game, I used a consumable to see what would happen, unfortunately for me, this poisoned me causing 40 points of damage for 16 seconds. I found out later that becoming familiar with this item gives you immunity to poison. This system is great, and I found myself often using consumables just to see what they did.
Maybe I just suck at this, but parrying! I could never reliably get the timing right in Mortal Shell. Other games with parrying mechanics like the Souls games give me no problem with getting the timings committed to memory, but with Mortal Shell the chances of my successfully parrying an enemy were around 20%.
The individual areas themselves across the game are quite vast, however, there is some sameness about a lot of the areas, especially your starting area and it’s very easy to get disorientated at first. This feeling soon goes away as you learn the lay of the land and you’ll soon be traversing about like an expert.
Some of the enemy animations feel a little off, for example, early on there are these larger halberd-wielding enemies known as Sturdymen which seem to go from sitting to attacking you with very few frames of animation in between. To be fair to Mortal Shell, this only happened with very few enemies, in fact, I did wish that your standard ‘brigand’ enemy type was a little faster as they seemed to take ages to lure them away from an enemy camp to thin out their numbers.
One last thing I must mention is the bosses. Each boss is varied and resides at the ‘end’ of each area with a mini-boss usually waiting at the half waypoint. Each of the boss areas is visually distinct and brutally difficult, well at least on your first attempt. Once you have their patterns committed to memory, everything becomes a lot easier.
Conclusion
Mortal Shell: Enhanced Edition takes the traditional Souls formula and puts its own unique twist on it. While a lot of other Souls imitators fail miserably Mortal Shell totally delivers on what it sets out to do and is definitely its own thing. The game can be a little rough around the edges at times but overall, I found Mortal Shell to be an engrossing experience for the 13 hours it took me to complete it. The enhancements made, especially to the PS5 version made sure I had a great time with the game. I sincerely hope Cold Symmetry bless us with a sequel in the near future.
8
PS5 review code kindly provided by Playstack