Children of Morta

Buyers beware! The game itself is great. Unfortunately, update #3 is still not there in the offline installers, six days after the announcement. I suppose it is only available in the (optional???) Galaxy client. GOG refuses to answer questions...

Children of Morta trully surprised me. First and foremost, I wish to clarify a common misconception about this game. This is NOT a rougelite. This is a straightforward top-down action RPG. There is consant progression and your characters never lose this. Only divine items are lost in each run, but these are minor buffs when compared to the actual levelling system. Now first the +: -For the first 12 hours, I thought I am playing the true successor of Diablo 2. -Character progression common among all characters. -Using each character is encouraged. -Almost no grind to get new character on same level as the rest. -Fun quests with good amount of randomness. -Divine relics are fun to use and are vert helpful during first 3-4 hours. -Animation of characters is beautiful. -Atmosphere of house and family are great and believable. Attention to detail such as each character has a room... -Pixel art look great especially in aformentioned house (main hub). Some of the dungeons are less good looking. -Each character in the family plays different, and it is fun to master them each. -New game +. The -: -The second 12 hours (completed all side quests and got 85% of achievements) when it becomes repetitive. -Progression regarding characters is too clear: Get gold, then XP, then DPS, then health and dodge. Rest of the progession seemed quite useless. -Characters are each somewhat unique and special but there is little room to customize. There is one way to play each. This means once you master the character, they only get stronger (so game is becoming even less interesting) and there is nothing else to do. -More unique characters would have been welcome with trully different mechanics. (e.g. shapeshifter, summoner, teleporter, etc.) -Side quests run out very fast. -Paws and Claws DLC overpriced (I understand that it is for a good cause - so I am not bitter about, but still for price sensitive people) -Either more dungeons or longer dungeons would be nice.

The dungeons feel very repetitive with the same hordes of slighty different enemies. I was playing with a ranged character and the gameplay basically consisted in luring the enemy mobs, and killing them one by one. Rinse and repeat. The graphics is pretty good but the game seems to have a noticeable lag. Story is mediocre and it's something like, the forest is corrupted, and our family must defeat the big evil to save it. And on top of that, the game is not even that long with no post game content like secret levels or bosses.

The title might seem a bit off, but Children of Morta only has a single noticable flaw IMO, but it's one that easily drops it to 3/5 for me, and I was tempted to go lower. What is Children of Morta? At its core it's a hack&slay game where you explore dungeons and slowly advance a story, with the typical roguelite element of repeated runs and slow permanent upgrades thrown in. What sets it apart is that there's in fact a host of player characters you slowly unlock, each with only a couple of abilities, but as a result there is a ton of variety. Oh and it looks gorgeous. The artwork is something to behold. But speaking of looks, the one crucial flaw: The game doesn't scale its pixels, and for some reason the *text* isn't scaled properly. This has the effect that *everything* is blurry, and quite significantly so. There are resolutions where it's better, but it never goes away, there doesn't seem to be a "match", pixel-perfect, resolution. And while that might be okay for the artwork which is still pretty, having the text not scale cleanly sadly makes it induce a headache in me whenever I need to read a bit. It's... weird to describe. It's like your eyes are over-strained and keep going out of focus. Super weird thing, especially because the game had a lot of patches, so there's no hope this'll get fixed. Without that flaw it'd be a really really great game though so I'm still hoping it'll eventually be resolved.

I was waiting for this game for a long, long time. I tend to stay away from early access so the wait was even more painful but finally here it is! And what a marvelous gem people from Dead Mage gave us. From the moment you start a game and hear a top notch voice over (Bastion-style) which is with you through the whole story it feels like opening a long lost and loved book. Every thing here is top notch: tight and responsive controls, feeding of story bits to the player smartly tied to death mechanic (it's a rogulike so expect to die... a lot), music and, oh my god, pixel art. What Dead Mages have done is nothing short of masterpiece. The amount of detail is astonishing - everything from design to animation - hence the lont wait. This is truly one of the best games this year and not even because of above reasons. It's the story of a Bergson family, their relations, hardships and the world around told through main hub area (tip - conversations family members have are on a loop so dont worry you miss something between missions, make sure you take a look around the house, all conversations compliment each other in some way), very well written books, journals and gameplay itself for example: you dont feel like you are a lone hero in the family, game adapts to which one of delightfully different characters you pick and you meet other family members doing their quests in the dungeons with short stories of their own. And I haven't even talked about sidequests, minigames (with nods to modern popculture) and easter eggs. This game is perfect for a cold evening where you cover yourself with warm blanket with munchies and a cup of coccoa and play. Cause thats what this game ultimately is - one the best modern fairy tales of old! :) Awesome stuff Dead Mage, just awesome!