Mortal Shell

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.

So this is the start and here you "learn" the game. Just NOT where to go or how to procede. At best this is a "Souls like" rip off

The base game is something that I appreciated playing. Playing through the game once and beating it once was something that I appreciate as I go through my backlog. Mechanics are good and responsive are you get to fight mobs of enemies and unique bosses for a short and sweet game. As long as you don't encounter the jank of your parry or you basic attackes not working to the point where you might have to boot the game to the main menu as intended as these souls like tend to be. Story, whether you wish to decipher it entirely or not, is for what it is or not is good for what it is and gives justification what new game plus mode for those interested in doing multiple runs. Overall an enjoyable experience that make me sad that we may never get a sequel for the game anytime soon and flesh up the world more by the same developers that fathomed the idea of this Souls-like, dark fantasy setting. Would get the game if you don't have anything to better to do. Even better if you see a sale for it in the store.

This game depends way too much on random enemies. You can either kill them all without accomplishing anything, or run past them. No thought or finesse was put into the gameplay at all. The boss fights seem fun at first, but become monotonous far too quickly. Two stars are given for the style and soundtracks. They are really good. Still, I wouldn't recommend the game to anyone. Not even people who like Souls-like games.