Mortal Shell Beta (PC-Epic Store) Preview

When I sit down and think about some of the games that have changed the way I play, I keep coming back to three big ones. The Metal Gear series, Dungeons & Dragons, and the Souls Series. Today isn’t about the first pair, but rather about the latter one.

The Souls series came onto the scene like a furious storm that takes players from a state of casual play into a challenge from the time you pick up your controller or keyboard. I got my first taste with Demon’s Souls (soon getting a remake from Bluepoint Games) after my group of friends really got into it. I was terrible then, but I’ve honed my skills over the years, now being able to play these games quick and dirty. With so long between Souls titles the fans crave more, and more is what we are getting from developer Cold Symmetry.

With the anticipation of Mortal Shell releasing on August 18th, we wanted to talk about how we felt during the beta, which was pretty great after we finagled a PS4 controller to work with it. 

I have beaten 3 souls-like games so far: Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls, and Dark Souls 2. I haven’t played Dark Souls 3 yet, I can’t seem to win in Titan Souls, and other indie souls-like games I have not played aside from Hollow Knight which takes on a lot of inspirations from those games. I’ve played Bloodborne but never finished it. With Mortal Shell releasing during a bit of a drought of fantasy games of this genre, that will be the next souls-like I play and finish at this rate. 

While I sat down with the beta, I found that the first hurdle was learning items. Going blind was weird but refreshing because as a player I had to keep dying to learn patterns again and figure out how items helped and/or hurt me.

Dang, Mortal Shell is hard...I love it.

Each enemy had something unique to bring to the fight against the player. The tension stayed high and I had to crack the patterns and nail the timing to get each one down. It almost gave off some old Nintendo Hard feelings for how precise players needed to be to get through so many combat sections and try not to burn through precious healing items. 

One point that interested me was that Healing items had a cooldown to use again, even when you had a bunch of them. This made battles that much more tense because I only had the chance to heal a little bit once or heal a little over time but only one time in a fight typically unless you ran away and dodged forever. Since it is such a long time or there is no way to actively shorten it like for example, successful parrying or something, you just have to be on your ace game. Honestly though, if you are on your ace game after a ton of practice you really shouldn’t even need the heals unless you use it preemptively to keep health topped off, just in case. 

Outside of the difficulty and unique fights that I personally expect to find in new games, indie and AAA alike, combat feels excellent in Mortal Shell. I tried to play on a keyboard and mouse but I suck at it because I do not have the muscle memory for it yet since I have played with a controller for most of my life. Now once we got the controller hooked up it was on! The controls felt really nice. I was expecting it to be a little wonkier but I was pleasantly surprised and really enjoyed the flow. On release, I can only imagine it will get better with final polishing. 

Players will undoubtedly find this as a game to play all the way through at least once. Speedrunners will likely get a whole lot of replay value out of it as they chip away at min-maxing runs, fights, and Any% glitches to get a leg up. I played the same areas many times over in my run through the Beta, so once I’m done with it I would likely need a break before I got back into it again for a full run of the game itself. 

I’m not sure where I sit with sound other than noticing that the voice work fits this dark and depraved world. Even as hollow as Sester Ganessa sounds, you can still feel traces of emotion from her. The voice of Harros the Vassal sounds rough as an enlisted soldier or knight should though this recording could use some more polish at full release. Tiel the Acolyte sounded smooth, deep, and like any fantasy character that broods should. I hope to hear more of the beautiful prose and dialogue upon release. 

Now the only things that I personally did not like but that I found many other people including Alex loved was the parry system. It took me some time in Dark Souls to be able to parry so I imagine it will feel better with practice in Mortal Shell. Again, the healing system was rough and took a considerable amount of time. I’m unsure if this was on purpose or something to be sorted during the Beta but I do hope the latter so I’m not stuck waiting 30 minutes to get six healing mushrooms that take one minute each to use during combat. It’s a little hard to enjoy that. 

I love this game already. Mortal Shell is going to absolutely slay the market and could be just what fans of souls-like games have been wanting. We’ll have to see how players take to it once it releases August 18th. We plan to be on this train early so keep an eye out as we talk all we can and get some live gameplay over on our Twitch Channel. 

If you are interested in some Mortal Shell gameplay videos with our take and perspective let us know in the comments below or over at our Discord Server.

As a final note, I want to say congratulations to Cold Symmetry for a great debut title for a veteran team to start with. We are looking forward to many, many more games to haunt us for the next several years.

Mortal Shell is a single-player Action Role Playing Game (RPG) developed by Cold Symmetry and published by Playstack. It will be available on August 18th on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC through the Epic Game Store.

Zachary SnyderAugust 17, 2020