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ranger-report · 4 years

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Thoughts On: Mortal Shell Open Beta

I want to start this off by stating up front that I am not a fan of Dark Souls in any way, shape, or form. Don't get me wrong, I don't think Dark Souls is bad per se. I actually really like the world the games have built up. I watch videos on the lore, the environments, the bosses, and I find it all thoroughly fascinating, it's just that when I play video games I like to enjoy playing them, and playing Dark Souls is like bashing my head against a wall repeatedly because I'm using my forehead in lieu of a hammer and these goddamn nails just won't go in the wall. Oh, I've tried to get into it; I've put in two separate six-hour runs, along with diving into Bloodborne because I'd heard that game rewards players who are more aggressive vs the measured style of Souls, but no matter what, I just don't have the patience to be punished over and over again by a game that actively hates me. So imagine my surprise when I not only got into Mortal Shell, but actually persisted to play through the entire demo.

Mortal Shell, developed by Cold Symmetry, is a Souls clone and proud of it. Currently, the open beta is available to download via the Epic Game Store. Pre-purchase is up and running for $29.99. The first trailer was released on April 1st of this year, but make no mistake, the game is no joke. Far from it. For those coming in late to the party, Dark Souls's gameplay revolves around slow, methodical combat in which the player has to read enemy patterns in order to know when to strike, parry, dodge, etc. Any enemy in the game can potentially be a bad time, meaning that if the player gets a little too cocky and impatient, a solid run can so south pretty fucking quickly if they're not paying attention to timing. That's literally what the game is: a massive, calculated game of timing, fueled by trial and error. If you die – and you will, frequently – you're sent back to the last checkpoint you camped at or visited or lit up. You'll have one chance to forge your way back to the point where you died, and reclaim all the currency you worked so hard to accumulate, but if you die again before you do, all of it is lost. So essentially we're working with a complex risk and reward system, in which any fight could be your last, any moment could turn ugly, and your character is having the worst fucking day they could imagine.

Mortal Shell takes this formula and puts a bit of a spin on it. Sure, you've got the health bar, the stamina bar – which depletes any time you attack, dodge, or run – the quick items, and the ability to parry and commit heavy attacks if your timing is right. But what it does differently is the character system itself. Most Souls games involve the player creating a character and slowly leveling up as time goes by. You could become a super beast depending on what you choose to invest in. Shell puts you in charge of a Foundling, basically a nameless/faceless lost spirit, who can inhabit the bodies of fallen warriors it comes across. Each warrior – called a Shell – has different attributes which can be leveled up. Some Shells are faster, some are tougher, and each one has their pros and cons to fit your play style. In the beta, we get two, named Harros and Tiel. Harros is a well-rounded fighter, your basic bitch knight class, while Tiel is more of a rogue, which a much higher stamina bar but can be hurt a lot quicker. Regardless of which Shell you choose to inhabit, you're carrying around what has to be one of the most badass swords I've seen in a video game in quite some time. Called the Hallowed Sword, it's two handed and looks like it could ruin pretty much anything if you put your mind to it. It has a secondary attack where it turns into a goddamn spear for massive damage. There's another weapon in the beta, a hammer and chisel, but I somehow missed that in my playthrough. I'm eager to dive back in and find it, but for now we'll focus on the sword. Sweet Jesus, that sword. If a fantasy game had the equivalent of a double-barreled shotgun, it would be the Hallowed Sword.

There's also a catch to hitching a ride in the Shells: if you take too much damage, the Foundling will be knocked out of the Shell, vulnerable and weak. You'll have an opportunity to get back into the Shell, and if you do, it's an instant HP refill and you're back in the fight. Your Shell can die twice, but if you're knocked out of the Shell a second time, it's game over and back to the checkpoint. This is inventive because dying isn't immediately a punishment, and it's also neat because the Foundling can still carry the Hallowed Sword while trying to get back to the Shell. I have a feeling YouTube is going to be full of No Shell Runs in which players go hard as only the Foundling, chopping, parrying, dodging, somehow escaping damage. And make no mistake, the naked Foundling will die in one hit without a Shell. Having a safety net like this automatically makes gameplay more forgiving and also more intense. Say you fuck up and get knocked out of your Shell early on, leaving you with just one more chance to get through to the next checkpoint knowing if you get knocked down again, you're done. That's a rush unlike many I've played in video games. Also the frantic panic of running and dodging as the Foundling, surrounded by enemies, trying to get back to your Shell, desperate to stay alive, is shockingly effective.

However, there's another weapon in the Foundling's arsenal: the ability to Harden. Pressing the left trigger instantly turns the Foundling into a rock solid statue, unable to move, but also unable to take damage for one single hit. Once the hit lands, the Harden goes away and the Foundling starts moving again. What is absolutely wild about this are the potential combat tactics that can arise. Because if the Foundling is moving or attacking when the Harden goes into effect, they will immediately resume what they were doing when the Harden is gone. So say you're going in for a light strike, followed up by a heavy strike, and before you can land the heavy strike the enemy goes into attack animation. You hit the Harden, freezing mid-swing, and the enemy connects – and then your heavy strike animation resumes, smashing into the enemy, staggering them, freeing you up to either dodge away or get in another attack. Some enemies will be staggered just from hitting your Hardened form, so even if you're not mid-swing, you'll have a window of opportunity to get in and sucker punch. But Harden has a cooldown period, so if you use it at the wrong time, you'll have a wait a minute before you can use it again. And come out of it at the wrong time, you could be facing the business end of a bad day.

What initially drew me to Mortal Shell was definitely not the concept of a Souls game, but rather that Cold Symmetry cited old-school first person shooter Quake as one of their influences on the game. By and large this comes across in the aesthetics: browns, grays, armor textures, otherworldly pagan imagery, skulls and bones and dark caverns, it's all over the place, and it's lovely. Grimy industrial atmosphere permeates everything. Enemies range from brutish bandits with swords and pikes, to imp-like creatures that poison you when they strike. And the monster design is a visual chef's kiss, craggy and awful and menacing. My personal favorite is the Pincushion Warrior, which I've dubbed because it looks like a goddamn pincushion. Walking around with an eyeless helmet and multiple fucking swords sticking out of its torso like, well, a meaty pincushion, when it notices you from afar it will pull out one of the swords and throw it you. It'll keep doing so until you get into melee range, at which point it pulls out two swords, one for each hand, and come at you fast and hard. Do enough damage to it and it will attempt a kamikaze maneuver, in which it rips off its fucking head to throw at you and release a poison cloud which does massive damage over time. Seriously one of the most metal things I've seen, and I cursed the fuck out loud when I saw it the first time. But the showstopper, the truly most outstanding beast in the beta, is the Enslaved Grisha, a lumbering monstrosity that looks like a combination between Silent Hill's Pyramid Head and BioShock's Big Daddy. You fight it in an icy cave, and its attacks are so thunderous it will shake loose stalactites from the ceiling which can fall on top of you for damage. It's fast, brutal, mean, and intimidating, and beating it was such a terrific rush that it made me wonder why I've never gotten into this style of game before when it feels this rewarding to win against a tough enemy. Maybe it's because Soulsborne games are vicious and unrelenting in their assault on the player as they slowly attempt to crawl their way through the environment. Here, it seems like there's just enough stacked in the player's graces to save them that it's simultaneously more forgiving and more brutal. With the Harden ability and the different Shells as combat style options, the choices presented to the player are unique enough to offer a deep challenge, but one that players themselves can modify depending on how they want to play.

There's a couple other mechanics that I want to touch on briefly while I'm here: Resolve, and Familiarity. Resolve is essentially a limit break with multiple uses. When you're attacking enemies, you're building Resolve, and can keep track of how much you're gaining via the meter above your health. But while it builds through attacks, it slowly goes away unless you fill a whole bar, and each Shell will have a different number of bars to fill. For example, Harros has four bars, Tiel has only two. Once a bar is filled, you'll be able to use the Resolve in one of two ways. The first is parrying; you can attempt to parry if you don't have resolve, but in my experience it worked better when I had a bar built up. If you've got the Resolve when you parry, you'll do so with greater success, but it'll also open up a window for you to hit the attack button immediately after. Time it right, and you'll do a powerful strike which will regain a large portion of health, which is handy as fuck when you don't have healing items, but also uses up a lot of Resolve. This can hinder you a little bit if you want to use your special strike. Remember how I said the Hallowed Sword has a super strike where it turns into a spear and does a fuckload of damage? Yeah, you need to fill up at least one or two Resolve bars in order to use it. I'm not sure if you need one bar, two bars, or a full load, haven't done as much experimenting with that as I'd like. Some things in the game are still obtuse, relying on trial and error to discover, which brings us around to Familiarity: picking up items in the game world at first gives only a brief guess at what the items will actually do, so you have to use them to figure out what their effect is. This can be positive, or negative, but the more you use said items the more familiar the Foundling becomes with the effect. Each item has a different number of times you need to use it to become completely familiar with it, but once you do, it'll unlock bonus side effects. For example, the weltcap mushrooms restore 40 hit points over the course of 60 seconds (the regen shrooms I mentioned earlier). But use them often enough, and the Foundling will get a bonus effect of being able to dodge once without using any stamina to do so. Meanwhile, using the tarspore mushrooms – which infect poison damage – will eventually make the Foundling immune to poison damage for 120 seconds. For me this is one of the more revolutionary parts of the game, which requires the most amount of trial and error and experimentation. Of course you're not going to want to use the poison mushroom again after it killed you with poison, but if you take it enough, next thing you know you're immune to poison for two minutes? This is wild when confronted with Imps that deal poison damage with each strike they land, or the fucking Pincushion Warriors and their suicide poison bomb. But at the same time, this could be a bit frustrating when the player gets rare items that are hard to come by, which may have huge bonuses, or massively negative effects. I love it, but also kind of hate it, though where Harden and Resolve add complementary aspects to the combat, Familiarity throws in the gamble of figuring out whether a consumable will do you harm, or make your day.

Mortal Shell has already impressed the hell out of me simply by being a Soulsborne game that I can play and not feel vandalized by, but also through sheer innovation and attention to detail. The atmosphere is thick and luscious, the combat is deep and so are the RPG elements, and there's a genuinely terrifying obtuse story being played out. I did have a few issues with my playthrough, notably the two times the game crashed, one of which forced me to force restart my desktop. A few other ragdoll glitches notwithstanding, the beta is a resoundingly solid experience which is promising great things for the full game. Something which, to my unending surprise, I have already pre-purchased based on this demo. May wonders never cease.

#ck burch #rubyranger #thoughts on #mortal shell #cold symmetry #dark souls #bloodborne #quake #soulsborne #soulslike #review #open beta #epic games store #ranger report

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