Mortal Shell
MORTAL SHELL is the debut game of young indie developer Cold Symmetry. Released in 2020 and built by a team of only fifteen people, MORTAL SHELL is an impressive game: it’s very lovingly made, has a ton of visual polish, and is generally regarded as a strong new Soulslike (a genre of challenging action-RPGs spawned by and named after the runaway success of DARK SOULS).
I have some thoughts on MORTAL SHELL.
Which is a little unfair, because I haven’t finished the game. And I probably won’t finish it. Ever.
I love Soulslikes, and was excited when MORTAL SHELL came out. It looked sick. I started writing this review after a few hours of gameplay, with every intent to give the game a fair shake. Although the game very loudly wants you to compare it to DARK SOULS, I wanted to judge it on its own merits. But as I started to struggle with it, the main thing keeping me going was that other games I’d played were kinda “vouching for” MORTAL SHELL. For instance, I struggled hard early on with SEKIRO in 2019, and now it’s one of my favorite games. A voice was whispering in my ear: “Sure, you’re hitting a wall now - but you’ve hit a wall before, and you made it through then, and you ended up really loving those games, right? It’ll just take some more practice, but the reward will be worth it, just like before. Right?”
The original DARK SOULS (2011)
MORTAL SHELL (2020)
Another couple hours later, I gave up and just downloaded HELLPOINT - another stylish Soulslike from a different indie studio that came out in the same month (must’ve been something in the air). HELLPOINT didn’t end up being anything to write home about, and after beating it 1.5 times I’m not picking that one back up either. But at least I finished it. And I even had fun doing it.
(By comparison, I’ve beaten all three Dark Souls games, BLOODBORNE, and SEKIRO multiple times each, and happily play them again from time to time. I even picked up the remastered edition of the original DARK SOULS when it came out for the Nintendo Switch in 2018.)
So, what gives?
Tons of reviewers and popular Soulslike streamers loved MORTAL SHELL, with some even calling it the new gold standard for indie Soulslikes. Is it just that I’m bad? How can I review a game I didn’t beat?
It’s often tempting to overlook the beginning of a game, and to consider it almost a footnote in the “full” experience, but that’s not really a sensible way to look at media that takes double-digit hours to fully experience. Someone who sat through it all will have to round things up or down to be able to decide if the good parts were worth the bad parts. But some important info is lost by emphasizing that sort of summation. When someone says “Stick it out, it’s worth it in the end!” about a long piece of media, what they often mean is closer to “Hey, would you like an 80-hour experience where you enjoy 35 of them?” (to borrow a phrasing from badass media critic and video essayist Jenny Nicholson, talking about how the task of recommending long-running TV shows is tough). And video games have another layer here, because you have to consistently put in an additional type of effort to fully experience it: you gotta git gud at the game. Given the time commitment and effort involved, it’s not only fair, but important to evaluate how a game tries to bring you over the threshold to the good parts of it.
And hoooooo boy, I have definitely played enough MORTAL SHELL to be able to talk about that.
Soulslikes have always struggled with having a high barrier to entry, but MORTAL SHELL is a whole-ass case study on letting your barrier to entry get way too high - to the extent where it relies almost entirely on other games vouching for it to provide most of the incentive to actually keep playing.
There’s lots of little design decisions that add up to bigger problems here. Like movies, games are composite media - so issues with one facet of the game will impact the ability of other elements to do their job well. But I’m going to explain this game through the lens of one major symptom:
At the beginning of the game, MORTAL SHELL makes it really suck to explore.
That's really bad, because the beginning of the game is one of the times when players will be most actively trying to explore, and because exploration is particularly important in these sorts of games.
There’s three major dimensions to this issue, so let’s jump in.
Healing is bad
Soulslikes are about perilous exploration, in a way that relies heavily on your ability to heal.
Your health is a resource that you expend getting to the next checkpoint. However, the path forward is full of decisions to make. Every branching path you take, every additional fight you pick will likely cost you some health and therefore increase the risk that some enemy will be able to finish you off before you reach the next checkpoint. Once you do reach it, you’ve made permanent progress, your health gets restored, and you have a sec to catch your breath before setting out again. Most enemies in a Soulslike can kill you in just a handful of hits (especially at the beginning of the game), so your ability to heal (i.e. to recoup lost health) is major factor in setting the pace of the whole game: How many hits can you take before your attempt to reach the next checkpoint is doomed? How much leeway do you have to recover from a combat encounter that went badly? How often do you have to retreat back to a previous checkpoint to avoid death?
There’s a balance to be struck here. Too much healing, and the player can feel unstoppable - so long as they survive any individual enemy encounter, they can recover all the health they’ve lost and keep going forever. Too little healing, and the player won’t have the resources to progress at a comfortable pace because they’ll die too often, which can lead them to more conservative playstyles that make progression even slower or less fun, but are safer. Or they’ll just give up and stop playing.
Amazingly, MORTAL SHELL manages to have both these problems.
The main source of healing in the game is mushrooms called weltcaps. You find them on the ground throughout the game, and pick up one or two at a time. Each one restores about 30% of your starting health, but it does so gradually over a period of 30 seconds (this gets faster after you’ve used them enough times). You begin the game next to a couple of weltcaps and that’s it - that’s all the healing you get to start. For reference, the first enemies in the game deal 30% of your starting health in a single hit. And you always find them in groups.
Weltcaps are so slow that you virtually can’t use them to help you turn a combat back around, and they heal so little that they barely affect your ability to overcome damage and keep progressing. A single weltcap won’t let a new player get back to their baseline health after just one normal encounter. There are other healing items in the game that are better - they heal more, they work faster - but they’re all single-use. Weltcaps are the main, recurring source of healing.
That’s because weltcaps regrow. After you harvest one, it will grow back in five minutes, and there’s no limit to how many weltcaps you can carry at a time. If you really want, you can sit at a weltcap node for hours, picking one up with a single button press every five minutes like you’re playing the world’s worst version of COOKIE CLICKER, until you have enough healing items to just plow ahead forever.
This is an astoundingly terrible set of incentives.
Waiting around for minutes at a time to harvest weltcaps is such an obviously unpleasant gaming experience that we have to understand it isn’t the intended way to play the game - they want us to find other ways to recoup health or avoid damage. But none of those ways are as obvious or common as a healing item that is offered to you right after you leave the tutorial, so players will almost always start the game focusing on healing items - only to find that there aren’t enough to get them far at all. This will naturally incentivize a struggling player to spend 15-20 minutes after each death farming mushrooms just to feel like they have a shot at progressing.
The real villain of MORTAL SHELL
For all the vaunted “difficulty” of DARK SOULS and its sequels, they’re much more generous than this. In those games, you start with a healing item that has multiple uses, each of which heals about 45-55% of your starting health. That may not sound like a big step up from the 30% that weltcaps give you, but in DARK SOULS that much health is worth several hits from a starting enemy, not just one. Not only is this healing item faster to use (only a couple of seconds), it also gets refilled each time you die or rest at a checkpoint - no farming needed. For a closer comparison to MORTAL SHELL, BLOODBORNE also relies on non-refilling items for its healing - but they always heal at least 40% of your health, which is still worth at least two hits from starting enemies, and you can readily obtain more of them from killing enemies. BLOODBORNE also has an entire mechanic that lets you recover health immediately after losing it by hitting the enemy back, so you always have the ability to regain your momentum.
It wouldn’t be accurate to say that MORTAL SHELL is harder than these games, though - in fact, most reviewers say it’s easier, and that’s exactly because you can technically farm infinite healing items just by waiting around, thus removing that aspect of the challenge of the game almost entirely. It’s only harder for new players who want to have fun, and don’t feel like looking up a video guide on how to optimize mushroom farming in order to just be able to play the game.
And this is only worsened by other design decisions.
THE FIRST AREA OF THE GAME IS FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE TO NAVIGATE
The first zone in MORTAL SHELL is a swamp called Fallgrim. I spent a lot of time in Fallgrim.
This is because Fallgrim isn’t just the first zone - it’s also the main zone of the game; every other zone you need to clear is accessed from Fallgrim. But rather than being a simple hub that you can quickly pass through, Fallgrim is a sprawling dungeon unto itself - one that you are expected to spend significant effort exploring and traversing, all of it fully available as soon as you finish the tutorial.
This is a risky choice, because the needs of a “first zone” and the needs of a “sprawling dungeon” are in conflict with each other. The first zone is where players build their foundation for how they understand the game, so you want to make sure it consistently teaches them how to play it well (or at least sets them up to enjoy it). This generally means linear level design and/or clear guidance to the next objective. By contrast, a sprawling dungeon is an area where you want the player to have the freedom to choose their own objectives, and to reward the player for exploring.
Sprawling dungeons aren’t bad, but you generally want them to show up a little later in the game. DARK SOULS has plenty of sprawling dungeons - like I said, Soulslikes are about exploration - but it doesn’t really present the player with them until several hours into the game. Even a game that is entirely about open-world exploration like THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: BREATH OF THE WILD starts off by giving you an unambiguous set of objectives to pursue in a particular order that ensures you encounter all of the basic mechanics and concepts in the game, before turning you loose. The most MORTAL SHELL gives you is optional 10-second cutscenes that consist only of a still image of some other part of Fallgrim that you don’t know how to find. By having a sprawling dungeon with virtually no guidance be the first zone, MORTAL SHELL entirely cedes its ability to teach the player how to actually play the game.
But even if we judge Fallgrim just on its merits as a sprawling dungeon, it’s still a mess.
The different parts of Fallgrim all look extremely similar, with a uniformly muted color scheme that makes it even harder to notice details to differentiate one part of the landscape from another. There are technically a few landmarks, but the whole area is so full of trees and twists and tunnels breaking up your line of sight that they’re little help. Fallgrim is also full of dangerous enemy encounters that demand your full attention, and combat is inherently disorienting: fighting a group that is strafing and flanking you means getting turned around lots. The combats last long enough and are frequent enough that your attempts to build a mental map of the place are constantly thwarted. The only long stretches without enemies in them are literally in tunnels that block your vision entirely.
The, uh, other real villain of MORTAL SHELL
This is all a little abstract, so lemme illustrate. And since maps of video game levels are often dense and hard to read, I’m going to turn them into simple diagrams that focus just on showing you:
the number and relative placement of branching paths
which paths lead to dead ends (🛑)
which paths lead to a major new ability (🔧)
where the checkpoint is (🚩)
where the boss is (😈)
These diagrams are not to scale, and some paths might be moved around slightly to make the diagram easier to read. I’ve also simplified them so that things like closets don’t need to be shown (since they’re not really “paths”). But you should still get an accurate idea of how easy it is to navigate the zone.
Here’s the first zone most players encounter in DARK SOULS after exiting the tutorial:
Path diagram of Undead Burg from DARK SOULS (compare with actual map). Diagram by Mani Cavalieri
(This diagram reflects the area when players first encounter it; later on, more paths open up.)
Every branch splits off from the same main path, which keeps you oriented. Two of those branches loop around, but those loops are one-way and dump you back onto that main path - so they reinforce your internal map of the area. The checkpoint is about halfway through, and the boss blocks your main path, so they both reinforce your progression path through the zone - there’s always a clear “forward”.
(Also, this diagram shows you two paths out of this zone, but both those paths converge again in the same zone - so the overall progression continues to be linear.)
Now let’s look at the same diagram for Fallgrim - which, again, is where MORTAL SHELL dumps you right after the tutorial:
Path diagram of Fallgrim from MORTAL SHELL (compare with actual map). Diagram by Mani Cavalieri
There’s so many loops and forks that there’s no main path at all (it might look like there’s one in the middle, but that’s just a result of the way the diagram is drawn). Every path is bidirectional, which means that you can enter any loop from either direction, which really messes up your ability to understand the overall layout. Every path to a new zone is full of forks that will shunt you back into the labyrinth. The boss and checkpoint are just kinda in the middle of all this, so they don’t clarify where you should be going at all.
This level design exacerbates the healing problem when you’re starting out. Getting lost in Fallgrim means more combat which means a higher chance of dying without making progress. Being unable to make a mental map of the place means it’s harder to find “shortcuts” and thus avoid combats to explore farther. And when you finally push past a string of difficult enemies to get the “farthest” you’ve gotten, only to end up in a place you’ve already been with nothing to show for it, it’s both profoundly discouraging and lastingly confusing. It leaves you wondering if you’re on the right path at all, which is one of the last things a developer wants a player to experience at the beginning of a game.
Unfortunately, Fallgrim is the most important place in the game, and that’s because of how the game arranges and uses its checkpoints.
The checkpoints don’t help
Let’s talk about what you actually do at checkpoints.
Aside from restoring your health, checkpoints in Soulslikes also give you a way to improve your capabilities. This can either be direct changes to your character’s attributes (i.e. leveling up) or access to merchants that sell you gear or upgrade your armor/weapons. Additionally, Soulslikes will often allow you to warp from one checkpoint you’ve reached to another.
The punchline here is that checkpoints provide you the opportunity to iterate in order to improve your odds of success. This is vital, because a big part of the identity of Soulslikes is challenging the player, which means the player will eventually (and repeatedly) hit a wall and get stuck. To let them break through, you need to enable them to change their circumstances - whether it’s by letting them try a different weapon, or teleport somewhere else to try pushing forward in a different area, or just levelling up so that they have more health/do more damage/whatever.
In MORTAL SHELL, your character can inhabit one of four different bodies (called “shells”), and each one has its own stats and abilities. You can also wield up to five different weapons. You can only change your shell or your weapon at the checkpoint in Fallgrim. If you’re not there, then you need to use a relatively rare item that is consumed upon use in order to try out something new. (You can purchase that item, but there’s only one merchant that sells it, so it doesn’t address this issue that much.)
This wouldn’t matter at all, except for the fact that you can’t warp between checkpoints. Combine this with the fact that the checkpoints are not functionally identical, and you’ve greatly hamstrung the player’s ability to iterate.
I already mentioned that traversing Fallgrim sucks because of how it’s designed, but there’s another reason. There’s not that wide a range in how dangerous enemies are throughout the game (because you can go pretty much anywhere in any order) - so the enemies in Fallgrim are very capable of killing you at any point in the game. This means that having to go back through Fallgrim to switch your shell or try your luck in a new zone isn’t just tedious, it’s dangerous. So if you’re a struggling player, your choices become “keep bashing your head wherever you’re currently stuck” or “bash your head against the worst level design in the game, to maybe get a chance to bash your head against some other wall”.
You know what game also didn’t let you warp between asymmetrical checkpoints? DARK SOULS…for the first half of the game, after which you unlock the ability. And in every single game made by that developer since then, you have the ability to warp between checkpoints right from the beginning. Almost like they learned some kinda lesson there.
So, I guess I was setting myself up to, like, post a picture of the developer’s logo here and caption it with “The real real villain of MORTAL SHELL” or something, but that’s just unnecessarily mean. So instead, enjoy the sounds of your character playing the lute.
Which is a thing you can do in this game. Before you know what it does. Or how to level up. But, y’know, it’s nice.
Failure to launch
Players love to complain about tutorials in video games. It’s true that there are some really excruciating tutorials that have all of the fun and interactivity of being forced to watch a decades-old anti-union propaganda video as part of your employee orientation at Wal-Mart. Even when tutorials are actually good, no-one plays a game for the tutorial.
But often we play a game because of the tutorial.
Or, more accurately: How the game teaches us to play it (beyond just teaching us the controls) is a crucial piece of whether or not we continue to play it, and what we think about it as we keep playing it. Like with anything else, some games are going to be harder to get into than others - but you can’t just go “Well, it’s a Soulslike made for Hardcore Fans, so I don’t need to teach them anything”. I mean, you can, but doing so means making your game carelessly (or, to put it differently, incomplete). Despite its success, the original DARK SOULS had a major problem with getting new players into it, and they still put a ton of consideration into the opening experience. In fact, I want to make one last comparison to DARK SOULS here, just to highlight how different these two developers approached things:
The tutorial area in DARK SOULS teaches you how to attack and defend, and gives you a replenishing source of healing. It shows you a checkpoint, then drops a big scary monster on you, then leads you to another checkpoint immediately after it - thus establishing the core progression loop of the game. After you kill the tutorial boss and now have a windfall of resources that you can use to improve your character, the game immediately takes you to the main hub, dropping you at another checkpoint, tells you that you can now level up, and tells you how. You know what “forward” looks like, you have a replenishing healing item, and you’ve leveled up at least once - all before you enter any proper zone.
The tutorial area in MORTAL SHELL teaches you how to attack and defend, and that’s it. It then dumps you into a sprawling dungeon with two hits’ worth of healing. It does (optionally) offer you minimal guidance to the next checkpoint, which is easily overwhelmed by the mess that is Fallgrim. Even if you’ve played hundreds of hours of Soulslikes like I have, you can spend several hours in Fallgrim before you learn what a checkpoint even looks like. Or you might get lucky and find the central checkpoint immediately. Or maybe you find one of the ancillary checkpoints that doesn’t let you switch shells/weapons first. Who knows!
After I’d encountered a couple of different bosses, shells, and weapons, I still felt totally lost, and it began to dawn on me that I wasn’t just experiencing some contained stumbling block. This was what the pieces of MORTAL SHELL added up to.
Both before and after uninstalling the game, I’ve spent a lot of time looking up other reviews to see what I was missing, and try to get a better take on the game.
While the overall consensus among fans of Soulslikes is pretty positive, I did notice that even the glowing reviews mentioned having major problems in the experience - and I even saw some commonality between what the stans were saying and my critiques here.
One review came from streamer and YouTuber DeModcracy, who is much better at these games than I am, and who generally has solid insights on what makes Soulslikes work. His review of MORTAL SHELL is pretty effusive - but it also echoes my complaints about healing and getting lost in Fallgrim. In fact, the only criticism I made that he didn’t match was the point about checkpoints not giving you sufficient freedom to iterate. And if you pay attention to the review, you can see why: He was good enough at Soulslikes that he didn’t need to iterate almost at all. In other words, he could get past barriers to progression not because of MORTAL SHELL’s qualities, but because of the qualities of other games that taught him how to play well.
And despite the vast canyon between my skill level and his, that’s an experience that we ultimately shared here: None of the reasons for me to keep playing this game have come from the game itself.
Clearly other people managed to get past the barrier to the fun zone - but I wouldn’t know; I’m still stuck in this fucking swamp.
