Mortal Shell feels to me as if the entire Dark Souls franchise were thrown into an AI to auto-generate a new game. It's lifeless, boring, and is not worth playing at all when there are so many other dozens of other Souls-likes far more worth your time.
Nothing in Mortal Shell really made sense to me. Whatever story existed was extremely unclear and unengaging. The dialogue and much of the lore means nothing at all on the surface level, and I could not have cared less to try and delve into what it was trying to say. That's not to say that all of it was poorly written, it just seemed to be vague, Souls-like lore that was, again, spit out by some bot that was fed every line in the Dark Souls franchise.
The game in general just feels like it takes the concept of Dark Souls and either completely removes or fails to achieve everything that makes that franchise so great. The bosses of the game...exist. Each one is unremarkable, and with a few minor exceptions, has a boring, uninspired moveset that ends up mostly consisting of some strung together slashes and swings. To top it all, a couple of the bosses don't have any music at all, which just took me fully out of the experience of fighting it if I wasn't already. There four 'main' bosses of the game and three 'mini' bosses, and all of the 'mini' bosses are just reskins of the same enemy. One of the 'minibosses' is literally just a REGULAR ENEMY with NO changes except for having a massive health bar, which just flabbergasted me.
There are also a lot of very questionable, amateur design decisions throughout the game, some of which I could not even attempt to explain off. There's really weird small things—like how coming out of a crawlspace fades the screen to black two separate times, wasting a completely unnecessary amount of time, or how at certain points in the game a bell will not stop obnoxiously ringing no matter where you are until you give a certain item to someone—but there are a lot of more significant ones that made playing a pain. For example, you cannot know what an item does until you use it, and so you could end up wasting something good if you don't want to look it up (I don't tend to like to use guides for anything in games in that way unless absolutely necessary, you generally should not have to). By the end of the game I was full of a bunch of random items, many of which I might have only had one of, that I didn't want to use for risk of killing myself or wasting something extremely valuable. After killing a boss, the main hub region of the game gets overlayed in fog, and EVERY ENEMY is replaced with these gremlin demon things that are an absolute pain. One of their primary attacks is latching onto you and biting your neck for a couple seconds, which puts you into a zoomed-in animation that you have no control over. These enemies will often fall from the sky or ceiling with very little indication, making it extremely difficult to avoid them and forcing you to watch the obnoxious animation over and over again.
Mortal Shell is not really hard because of how poorly balanced it is, and when it is, it doesn't feel like the good kind of 'git gud' difficulty that it should be. There are five different 'shells' in the game, each having a different value of health/defense, stamina, and resolve (which lets you do special actions), and also a different set of upgrades. This is a pretty interesting concept, but it is executed very poorly and I ended up just using one shell, the one with the highest health and defense, throughout pretty much the entire game, as the others will end up killing you pretty quickly if you're not an expert at the game. There is very little incentive to switch shells, apart from wanting to try a different playstyle, but I just found sticking to that one the whole time was the most efficient way to be able to tank through bosses. The healing system is pretty weird, especially for boss fights. There are a couple items that will heal you over time, but they aren't reliable because of how little it is, and how inconsistently you will get them. Instead, I just found it convenient to abuse the death 'penalty' system for bosses. You essentially can die twice in this game, first knocking you out of your shell and putting you in a very vulnerable state, but picking it back up will give you another chance and fully heal you. If you die after this, you will actually die, but the shell will remain in the same spot. Picking it up on your next life where its frozen in space will fully heal you, so I would just keep it around until I was low on health during a fight to act as basically a THIRD life. If you died in your vulnerable state, however, you cannot pick up your shell and thus cannot use that healing. This whole system just seems poorly crafted. I cannot tell at all if they intended it to be used like that, and I generally think not because it is quite inconsistent and often unreliable.
Enemy placement and level design I also found to be very weird. It's not always terrible but, in one area in particular, specifically the entire Seat of Infinity area, it honestly just felt like the Souls equivalent of a child's Mario Maker level. This area consisted a lot of uneven, vast, open spaces, and enemies were placed completely haphazardly throughout the area, along with a lot of environmental features that didn't really make much sense. Visually the area is one of the better ones but it was otherwise either an empty wasteland or a clusterfuck with no in between to indicate any kind of well-thought out pattern for the area's pacing.
Mortal Shell is a DEEPLY flawed game that really just feels like a soulless version of any respectable souls-like. It's not quite the worst game I've ever played, and it's not wholly unredeemable; the game is very nice visually and the standard combat does generally do a good job of emulating the satisfaction of Dark Souls combat enough to where It was enjoyable a decent chunk of the time. There are simply so many flaws in every other aspect of the game that it was impossible for me to play for too long without noticing something new. Near the very end of the game I was having a bit of fun with some of the cool upgrades that you get, and then went to fight the final boss, which as I found out is not something you can go back on at all once you begin; you cannot even change your weapons, buy more items, or anything, after starting it. This was really off-putting and not a great way at all to end an already pretty negative experience, as the ability to try out new strategies after dying once or twice to a fight is an extremely important part of the Souls-like experience, and that is just completely stripped away here. I ended up beating it without too much issue and without using the game-given help as well, but I was still quite disappointed that I could not have gone back at all to just change my weapon, or even get a second to adjust my inventory, considering the game can't be paused and after dying you spawn immediately back at the start of the fight. From beginning to end Mortal Shell left a bad taste in my mouth and is not something that I would ever want to return to.
4/10
Nothing in Mortal Shell really made sense to me. Whatever story existed was extremely unclear and unengaging. The dialogue and much of the lore means nothing at all on the surface level, and I could not have cared less to try and delve into what it was trying to say. That's not to say that all of it was poorly written, it just seemed to be vague, Souls-like lore that was, again, spit out by some bot that was fed every line in the Dark Souls franchise.
The game in general just feels like it takes the concept of Dark Souls and either completely removes or fails to achieve everything that makes that franchise so great. The bosses of the game...exist. Each one is unremarkable, and with a few minor exceptions, has a boring, uninspired moveset that ends up mostly consisting of some strung together slashes and swings. To top it all, a couple of the bosses don't have any music at all, which just took me fully out of the experience of fighting it if I wasn't already. There four 'main' bosses of the game and three 'mini' bosses, and all of the 'mini' bosses are just reskins of the same enemy. One of the 'minibosses' is literally just a REGULAR ENEMY with NO changes except for having a massive health bar, which just flabbergasted me.
There are also a lot of very questionable, amateur design decisions throughout the game, some of which I could not even attempt to explain off. There's really weird small things—like how coming out of a crawlspace fades the screen to black two separate times, wasting a completely unnecessary amount of time, or how at certain points in the game a bell will not stop obnoxiously ringing no matter where you are until you give a certain item to someone—but there are a lot of more significant ones that made playing a pain. For example, you cannot know what an item does until you use it, and so you could end up wasting something good if you don't want to look it up (I don't tend to like to use guides for anything in games in that way unless absolutely necessary, you generally should not have to). By the end of the game I was full of a bunch of random items, many of which I might have only had one of, that I didn't want to use for risk of killing myself or wasting something extremely valuable. After killing a boss, the main hub region of the game gets overlayed in fog, and EVERY ENEMY is replaced with these gremlin demon things that are an absolute pain. One of their primary attacks is latching onto you and biting your neck for a couple seconds, which puts you into a zoomed-in animation that you have no control over. These enemies will often fall from the sky or ceiling with very little indication, making it extremely difficult to avoid them and forcing you to watch the obnoxious animation over and over again.
Mortal Shell is not really hard because of how poorly balanced it is, and when it is, it doesn't feel like the good kind of 'git gud' difficulty that it should be. There are five different 'shells' in the game, each having a different value of health/defense, stamina, and resolve (which lets you do special actions), and also a different set of upgrades. This is a pretty interesting concept, but it is executed very poorly and I ended up just using one shell, the one with the highest health and defense, throughout pretty much the entire game, as the others will end up killing you pretty quickly if you're not an expert at the game. There is very little incentive to switch shells, apart from wanting to try a different playstyle, but I just found sticking to that one the whole time was the most efficient way to be able to tank through bosses. The healing system is pretty weird, especially for boss fights. There are a couple items that will heal you over time, but they aren't reliable because of how little it is, and how inconsistently you will get them. Instead, I just found it convenient to abuse the death 'penalty' system for bosses. You essentially can die twice in this game, first knocking you out of your shell and putting you in a very vulnerable state, but picking it back up will give you another chance and fully heal you. If you die after this, you will actually die, but the shell will remain in the same spot. Picking it up on your next life where its frozen in space will fully heal you, so I would just keep it around until I was low on health during a fight to act as basically a THIRD life. If you died in your vulnerable state, however, you cannot pick up your shell and thus cannot use that healing. This whole system just seems poorly crafted. I cannot tell at all if they intended it to be used like that, and I generally think not because it is quite inconsistent and often unreliable.
Enemy placement and level design I also found to be very weird. It's not always terrible but, in one area in particular, specifically the entire Seat of Infinity area, it honestly just felt like the Souls equivalent of a child's Mario Maker level. This area consisted a lot of uneven, vast, open spaces, and enemies were placed completely haphazardly throughout the area, along with a lot of environmental features that didn't really make much sense. Visually the area is one of the better ones but it was otherwise either an empty wasteland or a clusterfuck with no in between to indicate any kind of well-thought out pattern for the area's pacing.
Mortal Shell is a DEEPLY flawed game that really just feels like a soulless version of any respectable souls-like. It's not quite the worst game I've ever played, and it's not wholly unredeemable; the game is very nice visually and the standard combat does generally do a good job of emulating the satisfaction of Dark Souls combat enough to where It was enjoyable a decent chunk of the time. There are simply so many flaws in every other aspect of the game that it was impossible for me to play for too long without noticing something new. Near the very end of the game I was having a bit of fun with some of the cool upgrades that you get, and then went to fight the final boss, which as I found out is not something you can go back on at all once you begin; you cannot even change your weapons, buy more items, or anything, after starting it. This was really off-putting and not a great way at all to end an already pretty negative experience, as the ability to try out new strategies after dying once or twice to a fight is an extremely important part of the Souls-like experience, and that is just completely stripped away here. I ended up beating it without too much issue and without using the game-given help as well, but I was still quite disappointed that I could not have gone back at all to just change my weapon, or even get a second to adjust my inventory, considering the game can't be paused and after dying you spawn immediately back at the start of the fight. From beginning to end Mortal Shell left a bad taste in my mouth and is not something that I would ever want to return to.
4/10