Dark Souls is extremely popular and there is no denying that and that it has an amazing commitment to game and narrative design, is a well-known fact.  It’s crushing but well-balanced difficulty is something that attracts tons of fans!

Borne of this uniquely challenging gameplay loop, is the moniker “souls-like”! Sure, a lot of the time, games are definitely trying to innovate on the Souls formula, but just as many games that are accurately called “Souls-Like”; there are those that are dressed with this moniker just because they are challenging to play.

Now the question I am sure everyone is longing to ask, is just “how much souls-like is Mortal Shell?” Well, Mortal Shell is not a Souls-like, but is in fact basically Dark Souls with a slightly worn-out skin.

It would be easy to call this a blatant copy of Dark Souls, seeing how everything from the atmosphere, to the bleak world-building and the brutal combat, is very reminiscent of Dark Souls. In fact, if I was to basically tell someone who had never heard of Mortal Shell that I was playing Dark Souls, they would eat it up without a hiccup.

However, being compared to Dark Souls on this level is absolutely no easy feat. I still can’t believe that a group of fewer than 20 people has managed to create such a similar world and setting without a similar budget afforded to them! They have undoubtedly managed to copy the best parts of Dark Souls, but have also forgotten to copy the greatest ones. What instead makes this a little more than a boring clone, are the unique mechanics that make it stand out.

On paper just like everything else, the gameplay is similar to a Souls-like, where you have a combination of light and heavy attacks that you can use in order to defeat enemies, whilst paying extra attention to your stamina as all actions have an important cost. This of course means that you have to really think before you act! It is absolutely the same here, and a lot of that template is present.

However, before I really go into detail of the mechanic that makes this game unique; let me set the scene a bit. In Mortal Shell, you basically play as a bag of bones, which on his own is very fragile and prone to die in a single hit. However, this bag of bones has a unique ability that lets it wear dead bodies like a shell! With each shell comes a varied sort of combat prowess.

But one thing Mr. Bones can do is he can harden his shell, like thick concrete, turning invincible to even the most powerful of blows. What really impressed me about this mechanic is the way it is delivered. Rather than giving you some sort of anticipation or build-up to the block like most combat-heavy games, hardening in Mortal Shell is instant.

It doesn’t matter where in the animation cycle your attack, dodge or movement might be, as soon as you press harden; you will lock in the pose that you were carrying. This level of immediacy is what makes the game’s combat a lot more interesting, giving you unique strategical opportunities on top of a block. For example, in a lot of the games, to really do a heavy attack, you have to time it well as if you do not; a quick counter-attack by the enemy can severely injure or interrupt you before you can even take a full swing. Here, however, you have that slight chance to quickly turn your timing mistake into an advantage by hardening, giving you openings to either continue your attack or escape when you let go.

It’s very satisfying, and is definitely in my opinion, the flagship mechanic of this game. The shells also sort of act as a barrier, that kick you out when you take too much damage. However, being kicked out on your bony visage leaves you open for life-ending attacks. As such, you have to quickly return to your shell to recompose your health bar.

You might be thinking that this means you can basically never die if you keep quickly repossessing your shell every time you are knocked out. However, the game puts a hard limit on that, and doing so multiple times will just kill you instead. Whilst I understand the need for this sort of balance, I do feel this particular method was borne more out of necessity than a meaningful addition that synergizes with the overall design. As such, it can feel cheap or baffling in also a narrative sense.

The game doesn’t have as many weapons either and you will find yourself quickly favouring one type of weapon over the others due to how much more of an advantage it gives, which isn’t exactly a great thing. In my opinion, the best games with limited weapons are designed in such a sense that makes you switch weapons based on situations and requirements.

Take Doom, for example, it is a brilliant game with only a handful of weapons like Mortal Shell, but rather than making a lack of weapons its weakness, it uses it as its strength, giving each weapon a unique edge against different enemies or by making it so that each weapon drops a different sort of pickup. This sort of clever balancing has you basically switching weapons based on needs and obstacles.

I would have loved to see something like that here, and in my opinion, if the devs had actually managed to make the weapons meaningful in this sense, it would have made Mortal Shell really stand out on its own, and then some! Sadly, as it stands, neither does it have the variety of Dark Souls or the clever dissimilarities of Doom.

Another big thing missing from this game is good original music. I won’t be lying if I said that the Dark Souls series including Bloodborne are also well-known for how brilliant their themes and boss battle tracks are. With a careful selection of its instrument palette, it manages to seep with the atmosphere visually present around the world, giving you a soundscape that is both gothic and alarming.

However, there is barely any music in this game, and for a while, I thought the game was buggy or maybe I had accidentally turned down the music in the menu, but sadly that wasn’t the case, and it did take away the excitement and urgency you’d expect from a Dark Souls game.

Whilst again, it is impressive what the developers have managed to do, and how close they have come to feel like a Dark Souls game, the lack of its own identity mixed with the absence of expected improvements often had me wondering, “If I wanted to play something so much like Dark Souls, I would just replay Dark Souls.”  That’s the unfortunate sort of trap it does seem to fall into quite a bit, and honestly, I had to really push myself to keep playing this game in order to review it, as I couldn’t really see myself investing a lot of time into this out of an intrinsic need to play the game.

Overall, the game nails the atmosphere of Dark Souls and has some really innovative mechanics thrown in here and there, with some solid enemy design, but rather than really embracing everything that makes Dark Souls so great, it has decided to be needlessly picky with what it borrows, leaving it neither here nor there, and ultimately those few unique mechanics aren’t enough to make this more than a fragment of its Dark Souls shell.

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