Oh Yahtzee, have we got a surprise for you!
A surprise, games industry? Is it... a PC
release of Infamous 2? Nope! Is it... Silent
Hill entering the public domain? Nope! Ooh,
did the entire management team at EA contract
cholera from giving each other rusty trombones?
N- I don't even know what that is. No, the
surprise is... a game that's an awful lot
like Dark Souls! Oh Jesus fucking Christ.
I thought you liked Dark Souls, Yahtzee. I
did! I also had a nice time at Disneyland
when I was ten but I never wanted to fucking
live there. I might just be over the whole
Soulslike thing. Lovely meditations on the
inevitability of entropy and death as they
are, I feel like I've meditated enough. I'm
confident if I'm ever in a sinking ship or
a crashing plane I could probably be philosophical
about my impending doom, now, and I'd like
to move on and meditate on some other things.
Like prawn cocktail flavour crisps. So the
game is Mortal Shell, and this is normally
the point where I'd summarise the plot and
the setting, but I think "it is a Dark Souls
clone" will do the job well enough. You're
a walking husk of a person in a dying dark
fantasy world and everything else in the world
has apparently been led to believe that if
they hit you hard enough then prizes will
come out.
I feel like Mortal Shell doesn't do enough
to set the scene. Hello, we're like Dark Souls,
is all it seems to say. Dying fantasy world,
inscrutable plot, you know the drill, bish
bash bosh. But Dark Souls at least gave you
something to go on. An intro movie that wouldn't
start making sense until around the second
playthrough and the instruction "go ring the
bells of awakening," which didn't do a whole
lot of justice to the several hours of ultra
violent directionless urban exploration between
you and that goal. But it was something. Mortal
Shell seems to be trying as hard as it can
to out-inscrutable Dark Souls. The game won't
even tell you what consumable items do until
you consume one, and that's the kind of learning
process that got me kicked out of medical
school. You're a white ghosty dude who looks
like Pepsiman contracted the ebola virus and
you're in a forest, and before long you discover
you have the ability to inhabit certain dead
bodies. Oh. Mortal Shell, I see. There was
me thinking the title was about the plight
of the oil industry.
So while the plot and setting do very little
to discourage comparison to Dark Souls like
a Chinese bootleg toy that somehow got through
the entire manufacturing process without anyone
noticing that "Batman" was misspelled, Mortal
Shell offers some unique twists on the gameplay
formula, most uniquely, the body inhabiting
thing. Instead of constructing a custom character
to cathartically carve a chasm through the
cartilage of countless craven creeps you have
to take a character off the peg, as it were.
No customisation, no levelling, every shell
you can wear has fixed stats and armour that
can't be changed, and which has probably gotten
very whiffy. Not that you can occupy ANY corpse,
mind, this isn't the Dark Souls clone in which
you can get revenge on those fucking poison
swamp zombies by possessing one Mario Odyssey
style and running around telling all its relatives
its embarrassing personal fetishes, amazing
an idea as that sounds. There are four highly
specific bodies scattered about the starting
forest and that's your lot. Really it's more
of a class switching mechanic. Because there's
the one dude with lots of stamina, the one
dude with lots of health, the one dude with
lots of that third kind of stuff what you
do special attacks with, and the default all-rounder
dude who wonders why he doesn't get invited
to parties.
To the usual Dark Souls style combat of long
windups, stamina management and rolling like
a cannabis dispensary just before the bank
holiday weekend, we add the unique ability
to press a button to very quickly think about
Jenny Agutter, make yourself go rock hard
and deflect the next attack. And importantly
you can do it at any moment, so if you've
mistimed your swing and the next enemy attack
is gonna hit you first you can say a quick
prayer to Jenny Agutter, let their attack
bounce off, unfreeze when you remember Jenny
Agutter's getting on a bit now, resume your
swing and biff the enemy while they're still
reeling from their failed attack on your invincible
stiffy. It's enough of a twist on the usual
Soulslike blow-trading to require a shift
in thinking, and it's probably just as well
we have the advantage, because there's something
faintly off about the general handling. There
were times I pressed the dodge button and
my dude just didn't dodge, overdoing the Jenny
Agutter fantasies perhaps. And there's this
one regular enemy early on that I swear can
go from sitting bored by the campfire to a
sprinting charge attack with no animation
in between like he just saw his dog go over
to the new shagpile carpet and start making
retching noises.
So what with Mortal Shell trying to out-inscrutable
Dark Souls you don't even start off in whatever
the local equivalent of Firelink Shrine is,
you get dumped in a swampy forest full of
paths that all look the same and receive a
vision of where to go next: a random part
of swampy forest that looks like all the other
parts. But I made it to not-Firelink Shrine
and received a whole bunch of more visions
showing me where I could go next, all of which
were also random parts of a swampy forest
that looked like all the other parts. So if
I were to summarise Mortal Shell in one word,
it would be "Jenny Agutter." Then, after jerking
off, I'd update the word to "demoralizing."
Not that one ever plays a Soulslike for a
positivity boost and a biscuit, but I find
very little about Mortal Shell drives me to
keep playing it. The fixed character stats
and lack of levelling or ability to change
equipment beyond four fixed weapon styles
makes it hard to give me any sense that I'm
progressing, or improving, or that one day
I might return to a starting area and take
revenge on all the level 1 assholes for making
me think I had a chance with Jenny Agutter.
Whoops, need to jerk off again.
The eternal paradox of copying Dark Souls
is that copying things is what a lazy person
does, but making a game like Dark Souls is
actually really hard, turns out. I'd say Mortal
Shell gets full marks for atmosphere, loses
a few for general gameplay feel and gets them
back for its interesting twists on the combat.
But at the end of the day, high difficulty,
inscrutable plot and a general sense that
this would be a bad game to recommend to anyone
on suicide watch do not a Dark Souls make.
The relevant point, I think, is that Dark
Souls is an incredibly majestic game as well.
Yes, you spend a lot of time in gloomy tunnels
playing sword pattycake with people in burlap
sack nighties, but every now and again something
will hit you like an unexpected pair of buttocks
in a ball pit and you'll go "Blimey, I'm in
a cathedral-sized room fighting a gigantic
inside out roast chicken and it feels like
the worst guilt-ridden anxiety nightmare Colonel
Sanders ever had." Whereas in Mortal Shell
when I took a moment to reflect I'd usually
go "Yep, still surrounded by confusing, dreary
environments and smelly dudes. All the poignant
majesty and introspection of walking home
from the pub in the north of England."
