Mortal Shell

Slow, steady and methodical combat along with charming landscapes. Lovely game although a bit short - I played it through over a few weekends.

Is it good? Yes. Is it great? Eh. Is it worth a play? If you're into the genre, I'd say so. Personally, I still maintain that the original Dark Souls is still the best of the trilogy because of its world design. The labyrinth that is Lordran really does start to feel like home after a while. You recognize landmarks, learn shortcuts, etc. Frankly I could probably give someone directions around the game over the phone with nothing to go off of but their description of where they are. Nothing in this game even approaches that. Just feels like mostly linear levels connected to a hub. No interconnectedness to any of it. What about combat? Well Sekiro was my favorite in that department (only played a bit of BB so I can't compare there, seriously though Sony give us a PC version please). Sekrio felt tight and responsive. If I died, it was because I did something wrong. Well, this game can't really compete with that either. The combat feels... serviceable. But it doesn't feel great. Parrying feels like it just doesn't work sometimes, the game does an awful job of communicating when proper parry timing should be, to the point where I often don't know if I messed up a parry, or the game did. Frankly I've started ignoring it entirely, it's not worth the damage you'll take if it doesn't register, especially when the game isn't doing a good job of telling me what I'm doing wrong. The harden mechanic is neat though. Overall, I don't think there's any aspect of the game that manages to be better than FromSoft's work. Generally speaking I'd say they make better complete packages too. But this isn't a bad game. It's fine. It's just in the unavoidable position of being compared to them. I don't regret buying it. I just don't feel compelled to keep playing it. Out of the other non-FromSoft souls-like games I've played, LotF, The Surge, etc. it's the one that's held my attention longest. And kudos for releasing it on GOG, that's something FromSoft hasn't done yet. Much appreciated.

-you cant cancel your auto attacks -no free healing at every bondfire reset

Without sounding too cliché, I played all the Dark Souls games. This game runs in the vein of those games; your character will move and feel like you're in a souls-like. The graphics are not spectacular, they look similar to Dark Soul 1, before the remaster; (excluding resolution). I personally did not like it because of the inability to customize your character like Dark Souls. For instance, instead of allowing you to up dexterity to move/roll quicker, your Pidgeon-holed into an un-upgradeable body, which is slow and irritating. You are this alien thing that invades corpses. When Dark Souls exists, why dumb down your game to ignore levels and focus on invading static corpses? After spending a couple hours in the dark rocky/wooded area, I decided that this game and its "shell" concept was not for me. I wanted to add that I never bought this game when it first came out, because it was a bastard Epic exclusive. Anyone that take cash upfront knows their game is a flaming pile of ****; Ignore the potential fans (n|m), just take the money and run. Anyways, I take this as a loss of 2 hours and $x.xx.

The souls recipe is here but with the size of a small studio. Meaning that enemies aren't that varied, as for the weapons. The 5 areas aren't that big. But it is decent enough to enjoy playing and dying. This game is interesting not only because of his inherent dark-souls heritage, but because of the shell mechanics. Those are bodies to found and possess, each one having her own skills to unlock, with a different playstyle. In addition to that when your shell die, you're expulsed of her, but don't die. and you can reposess her, giving you a second life. The healing system really peculiar. You have only two ways to regain health : by eating consumables, but it's slow and when you're in a fight it is very dangerous to do so, or to do a perfect counter. Doing a perfect parry will regenerate your hp. So a big side of the game is to learn when to parry and learn the pattern of each enemies. The other particularity is your "harden" skill. You turn your body into stone and the next attack, any attack, will do no damage. By combining this ability with the combo of your weapons you can deal a lot damage. Therefore in fight you will often either do a lot of damage of die missing your parry. The story is criptic as expected and the artistic direction nailed it. Some blackspot : some boss fight (including the final one) take place in a fog, so it's very difficult to see anything and dodge hits. If you liked souls, you may like this game, but don't expect the same depth in the exploration and customization.