Mortal Shell Review | (PS4, Xbox One, PC)

It's without a doubt that developer Cold Symmetry looked toward From Software's classic Dark Souls and Bloodborne IP when crafting together Mortal Shell. It wears its inspiration on its sleeve while innovating on the formula with new features and mechanics that truly flesh out the established genre.

Much like the souls series, Mortal Shell has an absurd amount of lore to it that is incrementally given to you in the most obscure ways. You play as this bare husk of a man named The Foundling who leaves their limbo-like void to travel through Fallgrim.

Fallgrim looks like a withering fantasy land, filled to the brim with large mystic temples and deadly foes, some with medieval weaponry and others just trying to jam on the lute. Taking on these enemies, reading the descriptions of items and so on, is how you'll get entranced in the story.

It isn't easiest story material to get a grasp on but for fans of the Souls series, it's familiar and nostalgic. Mortal Shell begins with an inviting tutorial that teaches you the basics of combat and just how Mortal Shell is both similar and different from the inspiration.

While yes I was still playing as this sword-wielding warrior, making my way through fantasy worlds and destroying any monsters that come my way, the mechanics for this series made sure the journey had a learning curve to it that also felt challenging.

Upon starting the game, I spawned as this husk spirit, having a lot of stamina but very low health. I could swing my sword to my heart's content, but one swing would be enough to knock me out. As the name suggests, to survive, you're going to need the help of mortal shells.

They're quite literally the bodies of fallen soldiers that you can possess to aid you in battle. These shells act as classes as each one offers different traits that aid some battle styles more than others. All of these shells at least give you some extra health acting as armor if you will.

There's a total of four shells that can be upgraded using the currency earned from defeating enemies. They also have unique abilities that are later unlocked once you learn the name of the shell you're encompassing. These shells help add some variety to the combat while also making the game a bit more approachable from a combat standpoint for the different fighting styles.

And there's a lot of fighting to do as its the core of its inspiration and this title too. In terms of basic moves, you can perform a light attack that quickly deals some light damage and a slow heavy attack with more damage and greater range. On top of that, you can sprint and perform a side step or full-on dodge roll.

These actions are all linked to the green stamina gauge that I constantly kept an eye on to make sure I timed my attacks and dodges during boss fights. Pretty early on, I was also able to unlock a parry move and ripost similar to Bloodborne's visceral attack though it works differently.

Parrying can only be used when you have enough resolve, these orange bars above your stamina. They're earned by defeating enemies and when you land a parry, you're able to do an increased amount of damage while also healing yourself. It's a vital tool as your ability to heal is a bit limited here.

Outside of finding some mushrooms growing around the environment, it's pretty hard to heal yourself without doing something in return that requires some work. In that sense, landing a parry is a risky but important move that pushed me to play a bit more confidently as I got a hang of Mortal Shell's combat.

One unique feature that stands out for Mortal Shell above its inspiration is the hardened ability. It also has a gauge of its own and it sort of acts as this game's block. When the gauge is full, you can harden your mortal shell to block an incoming attack, granting you some brief invisibility frames to land some damage on a staggered foe.

All these mechanics lend to a solid balance of defensive and offensive play though at the cost of being able to cheese some boss fights by relying on the hardenability a bit too much. Of course, some enemy placements make it a bit more challenging to finesse enemies, especially when there's more than two coming at you.

Outside of its combat, I found myself exploring these almost horror-like setting temples. There's three of them total each with their own boss you'll have to defeat in order to retrieve the sacred gland. These dungeons are meticulously designed with their own themes and enemy types that made diving into the next one an enjoyable and rewarding experience.

Finding items in these temples and not really knowing what they do was always equally exciting and nerve-wracking. You see, part of exploring this world is learning about it through its items. Mortal Shell isn't too forgiving in that sense where it makes you use items multiple times before telling you what it actually does.

For example, a poison mushroom won't tell you it's poisonous until you eat it. That led to an instance of me hoping it healed me like the other mushroom, only to have it kill me. To my surprise, once I took it enough times to become familiar with it, the mushroom granted me poison resistance.

Things like this motivated me to explore more of Fallgrim and its inhabitance, even getting me to learn how to play the lute. Fallgrim isn't without its annoyances though. Some of the enemy placement here would get me trapped in corners fighting the camera more than enemies.

I'd even have transitional scenes where enemies could attack me but not the other way around, making things feel a bit unfair. Luckily these moments were rarer than the norm. Fallgrim is a treacherous wasteland that looks like it belongs in a Souls game.

The environment is almost horror-like in its imagery of mutated animals, large warriors and death lingering in every corner. Likewise, this sense of despair entranced me, making me want to explore it and learn more about the world. Who am I, what are these statues and how did this world become like this.

The visual design in Mortal Shell doesn't always straight up tell you about its world, but the bread crumbs were enough to get me hooked on its trails. Playing the PC version for this review, I was able to maintain a solid 1080p 60 experience running on my GTX 1070 and an i7 4790k.

With the camera really only being my main visual hindrance while playing, I found myself lost in Mortal Shell's world, both figuratively and literally actually. Landmarks aren't always the most unique objects and so I'd occasionally find myself running in circles through a short cut I had not noticed earlier, thinking this was a whole new route.

There isn't an orchestra behind Mortal Shell, instead of its music if you will, are the ambient sounds of this slowly withering world. The murky fog-filled swamps with poisonous frogs. The quiet melodies of lute players playing around a campfire. The sounds of steel weapons classing and blood sprays on the land beneath.

All of this culminates in this dark and decaying realm that we're just a small speck on. It sets the atmosphere for the journey I embarked on and perfectly encapsulates the challenges to come. Mortal Shell does its part in forging this love letter to the Souls series while also standing its ground with its own unique features on the genre.

The hardenability is clever in creating a balance of offensive and defensive fighting tactics, though it can lead to elongated and cheesy boss fights. Its ability to grab bits of From Software titles and add in its own mechanics, helped it feel like a great introduction to the genre, even better than the name brand games that help start its popularity.