MORTAL SHELL
This body-hopping body horror impresses Oscar Taylor-Kent
We only review finished games, so in Viewpoint we go hands-on with near-final code of a game that just missed our review deadline. Oscar Taylor-Kent discovers how this indie soulsborne could teach the masters at FromSoftware a lesson in the dark art of gothic swordplay
Comparisons to
Dark Souls might be ubiquitous nowadays, but sometimes they have to be made. Mortal Shell draws on the entire FromSoftware portfolio – Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls, Bloodborne, even Sekiro. But that’s not to say Cold Symmetry is staying within From’s deep shadow. It means the studio’s done its homework.
Our character awakens, floating, in a strange land, the shallow water forcing us to splash our way through fog and ruins as we learn the controls. We’re a feeble revenant returned from the grave, our features flat and unclear, our body resembling flayed muscles. The boniness beneath is almost Gigerlike. Upon finding a sword, tutorial monsters teach us the familiar: we can dodge-roll with e, and u and i give us light and strong attacks with our sword respectively.
ROCK SOLID
But Mortal Shell immediately begins to hint at what awaits us by teaching us to hold down p: we have the ability to harden our body into a rock-solid statue at any point, whether that’s while awaiting an enemy attack, during our own sword strike, or on leaping into the air to perform a jump attack. Breaking after absorbing one attack, or when we release the trigger, it’s a tool that’s both defensive and offensive, allowing us to change the timings of our attacks whenever we want, enabling us to get creative.
You can even use it as a sort of Street-Fighter-inspired superarmour for combos. (The only limitation is a short cooldown, which you can reduce by buying skills.) This is furthered by the way you can string together light and heavy attacks into custom combos, and even offset a combo with a dodge to pick back up once the animation is finished. The combat has a depth you might not expect at first glance.
SHELL RAISER
You don’t have just one body to master, either. Right after a fish incident (it swallows us whole at the end of the tutorial), we stumble upon our first Shell, the corpse of someone who fell to the terrors of Mortal Shell’s twisted world of strange gods and dark worship. Each Shell has different stats, as well as skills to learn as you increase your affinity with the body. Our first, Harros, is an all-rounder knight who works well with the large sword we found at the beginning of the game. The robed and skeletal Tiel, on the other hand, has maximum stamina out of the gate at the cost of other stats, and is able to dissolve briefly into wispy smoke as he dodges enemy attacks.
You can learn the unique abilities for each Shell once you’ve paid to learn their name, spending Tar (this world’s currency) and Glimpses with the masked Sester Genessa, who gleefully asks you to sip from “the divine tar”. Each new skill gives you another revelation into what your Shell was like in life, and the abilities further enhance their discrete powers. Tiel can grow to resist poisons, for example, while Harros can reduce your hardening cooldown. You can only freely swap Shells in certain areas, but otherwise you can use totem items to switch instantly. When defeated, the Shells work as a Sekiro-like one-shot revival system, except here we have to scramble our way back into our body after we’re knocked out of it (with a delightful sense of impact), with only a sliver of health to keep us alive until we get there.
Tar can also be used to buy items, such as consumables or upgrades for your weapon that can be applied at anvils. Rather than frequent drops, each weapon stands on its own (and even has special ou + weapon skills). Some items’ effects will change depending on your familiarity ranking with them, which rises as you use them. For example, a dodgy mushroom in the poisonsoaked catacombs will strike you with a deadly toxin when consumed. Once you’ve nearly maxed it out, however, it will instead give you a useful resistance.
Unlike most soulsborne games, you can’t really grind to improve stats. Most of the tools you need are given to you, and it’s up to you to learn how best to use them, enhancements coming from tweaking powers rather than adding numbers to statistics. That can make defeating tough enemies frustrating, but ultimately that’s all part of the game design, as it forces you to learn. Inventive and challenging, Mortal Shell is a contender.
“COLD SYMMETRY’S SOULSBORNE MIGHT APPEAR TO BE WEARING THE SHELL OF FROMSOFTWARE BUT IT HAS THE NEW IDEAS TO MAKE US WANT TO INHABIT ITS BODY AGAIN.”
Mortal Shell is out now; you can read our extensive review next issue.