 When I started this channel, my goal wasn't to do straight game reviews, but I also didn't want to do the whole Joseph Anderson Let me slowly explain every single thing about a game for two hours What I really wanted to do was talk about the things that interested me in the games that I liked or disliked Whether it's books, philosophy, movies, politics, or games I find myself most interested in how small little details can have a huge impact on something I've always been fascinated by the very subtle differences that make one film a masterpiece and one film action schlock And one of the reasons I love games is because it might be the media that's most affected by these very small differences As I played more and more games, I started trying to understand why one shooter would feel so much better to play than another Like, what's the difference between Borderlands and Borderlands 3? Both games look alike, they're structured the same Both have a gun on screen and you click to make things die So why does Borderlands 3 feel so much smoother than Borderlands 1? There are a ton of small differences across games that separate bad from good and good from great From softwares, Soulsborne games are easily my favorite ever precisely because they are amazing at nailing all of these small details They're not perfect and they can be frustrating and bullshit and sometimes they run like garbage I mean, seriously, Bloodborne makes my eyes bleed, man But it's obvious that they are meticulously thought out and carefully designed Some of their designs work better than others, but it's never hard to understand why things are the way they are And this attention to detail has become one of the defining traits of the entire genre We're deep into the summer drought for games, but luckily the last couple of months brought two new Souls-like games Hellpoint and Mortal Shell Both of these have things they do well and both have things they do not so well And as I played them through a second time, it occurred to me that the interesting thing is how they both succeed And fail by trying to recreate something about Dark Souls And how the subtle decisions the developers made have huge impacts on the way the games work These two games combined would be like a perfect game Unfortunately, they're not combined Instead, you've got two very different games that both try to capture the magic of Dark Souls In different ways As I was playing and thinking about these games, I got to thinking about what precisely it is that makes a good Souls-like game What are the subtle things that separate a game like Devil May Cry 5 from a Souls game? So let's really quick talk about these games and how they succeed and fail And what the most important parts of the genre really are And as usual, if you like what I have to say or how I sound saying it Do me and you a favor and click like and the bell, I guess Subscribe, comment, yada yada yada I'm also thinking of putting up a Discord server I don't know if anyone really wants to get in there, except for one guy in the comments And I've been thinking actually of streaming once in a while In the comments section, let me know if you'd be interested in seeing that Alright, what makes a good Souls-like and Mortal Shell after the logo? What makes a Souls-like? When I started writing this, I remembered an article that appeared in PC Gamer a few years ago It's a really poor piece of writing that argued we shouldn't use the term Souls-like Because it doesn't tell someone what kind of game they're actually gonna get The writer used several examples of games that he insisted were called Souls-like But actually weren't Games like Neo, The Surge, Salt and Sanctuary, Ashen, Code Vein and Lords of the Fallen were all on his list Now, if you're anything like me, you'll notice something about that list Every one of those games is indeed very much a Souls-like game Each of those games can be best described by saying it's like Dark Souls but It's like Dark Souls but with Samurai, slightly more complex combat and a Diablo-style loot system It's like Dark Souls but sci-fi and you cut off arms and shit to get armor It's like Souls but 2D, like Souls but indie, like Souls but anime, like Souls but bad He also threw a bunch of straw men on the list, games that nobody has ever called a Souls-like Games like Dragon's Dogma which some might have noted a few similarities in the boss fights but never called a Souls-like Or games like Hollow Knight that have always been called a Metroidvania with some light Souls influence in its tone and story Very few people call Monster Hunter a Souls-like so it's pointless to present that as some kind of example that the genre tag is useless In the same way, nobody ever calls Fallout New Vegas an FPS game even though they'd mention that it has first-person shooting combat Well, kinda The entire point of the article was that the term is meaningless because there's no set definition of what makes a game Souls-y This is demonstrably false In the same way, there's a wide variety of different mechanics and first-person shooters from Borderlands to Call of Duty to Doom Eternal But it's still accurate to call them all FPS games There's a nice wide variety of systems and Souls-likes while still being best described using that term So what makes a game a Souls-like then? I don't think this is even hard to be honest First, the vast majority of Souls games use a lock-on mechanic for combat that focuses heavily on only a few enemies at a time The camera is always over the shoulder and usually pretty close Now that's not true always, of course Sultan sanctuary is 2D and doesn't need a lock-on And remnant is a shooter and having a lock-on and a shooter is fucking terrible As demonstrated by the really, really bad Immortal Unchained But most Souls-likes have that Almost every Souls-like features enemies that can kill you in two or three hits Almost every Souls-like has a bonfire-like checkpoints Almost all of them have combat that use eye frames to dodge through enemy attacks And of course, most of them have very similar control schemes A light and heavy attack, dodging on B or A, lock-on on the right stick, flicking the right stick to switch targets They all have animations that mean attacking locks you into an action And combat that's heavily focused on pattern recognition All of them have a focus on being challenging games that require you to learn their systems to finish them In most Souls-like games, every single enemy is like a boss that was shrunk down and turned into a regular mob These games are almost all meant to test the player rather than shepherd them through There's generally no story mode in Souls-like games So yeah, despite what IGN and PC gamers says, Souls-like is a thing But what makes a Souls-like good? The best of the Souls-likes all have maps that are fun to explore and make the game feel like a journey They have combat that rides a fine line between hard and fucking stupid And they have a dark tone in a way that few games really do They should add progression that feels like it matters without making the game feel like you're just grinding numbers up And they need to make succeeding feel like it was earned Those are the core things that a good Souls-like needs In my opinion, Souls-likes all come down to the map, stamina management in combat, pattern recognition in bosses and mobs Limited checkpoints, lost XP on death, iframes in combat that revolves around rolling or dodging through attacks Or parrying and blocking if you're a newcomer They're also, with the exception of Neo and Code Vein, generally very very light on cinematic cutscenes A far more restrained narrative often with a lot of ambiguity is the general rule These are gameplay-first experiences, not story-based games And frankly, even Neo is still a gameplay-first game It has a story, but I mean that's not what you paid your money for I guess Code Vein leaned into its story pretty hard, but it was terrible So I mean, there you go With that out of the way, we had the rare treat of two obvious Souls-likes Releasing in short order this summer that both focus on different aspects of the genre Let's see where they worked and where they didn't These games have wildly different production values and play very differently And by the end, I couldn't say that one was better than the other They're just different Today, let's start with... Mortal Shell Mortal Shell is not a poorly made game, and it is not a Dark Souls clone It's a Souls-like that wanted to really focus on the feeling you got in your first FromSoft game It takes the basic atmosphere of a Dark Souls game, complete with the mystery and ambiguity And tries to add some completely new ideas to the combat and progression This effort at pushing the genre in a new direction deserves praise simply for the effort at making something different But while we can praise the effort and direction, I found myself asking a few questions Like, do the changes make the combat more fun? Is this progression system an improvement on the tried and true systems the genre generally uses? Is the big interconnected map a better system than the more traditional linear maps with shortcuts that loop back on each other? Much of the positive press of Mortal Shell has focused on the game's efforts at bringing new ideas to the genre But, I mean, lots of games do this Mortal Shell isn't an outlier Neo adds entirely new mechanics to the formula and completely changes how combat works while adding in a heavy looter grinding element The Surge's amputation mechanic, implant-based progression, and its rechargeable energy system are totally fresh And make playing those games feel different from playing any other Souls-like Hell, Salt & Sanctuary makes it 2D, and Remnant makes Dark Souls a shooter Adding new twists and mechanics isn't something all that exceptional In fact, very few games play it totally straight Ashen, Lords of the Fallen, and Hellpoint keep things basically unchanged But for the most part, games in the genre do all bring their own twists to the formula The question isn't whether changing the formula is good It's asking whether the changes that are made make the game more enjoyable to play And whether those changes themselves are fully realized and coherent for the design And it's here that Mortal Shell falls a bit short in my opinion Mortal Shell is not more fun to play than Dark Souls Or The Surge, or Neo, or Salt & Sanctuary It's not really more fun to play than Hellpoint It's different, but it's not necessarily better I'd say it's more fun than Lords of the Fallen, but that is a very very low bar to clear Now, the reasons for Mortal Shell being less fun are varied Some of them are odd design choices There's issues of a technical nature that I have to do with the lock on and the camera And there are some performance issues on PC But for the most part, the main issue is that the changes made to the formula don't really improve the game Because they're not carefully thought out in many instances At its best, Mortal Shell will give you that tense feeling you get during a Souls game But at its worst, you will find yourself kind of bored And in a weird way, Mortal Shell starts very hard, but gets ridiculously easy after a while In fact, my second playthrough, which was not New Game Plus, but just starting over progression from scratch, took about four and a half hours When I first played this game, I started writing a review about it being the worst piece of shit in the world But after my second playthrough, I have changed my mind quite a bit And to explain why that is, I've got to tell you how that first playthrough went And how Mortal Shell handles its map, its combat, and especially its healing system Whoops, I didn't discover healing Mortal Shell starts by giving you the typical Souls tutorial on how the controls work And then throws you straight into a boss fight that you will probably lose I'm sure a couple of people beat it, but it takes quite a bit of time to fully get a handle on the game's central mechanic, which is hardening If you're like me, and don't use shields in Souls games, you're going to find this as difficult to adjust to as Sekiro was Though obviously Mortal Shell is far less brutally punishing than that game After you are killed, you're dropped into the game's map, which is one large confusing forest with a few dungeons and caves branching off Where you find upgrade materials, new classes, new weapons, and the game's main boss fights It's an interesting idea for map design, and in many ways, it does perfectly capture that Dark Souls 1 feeling of being lost And not knowing where to go next But Dark Souls succeeds with that because you are lost as a result of the difficulty and the complexity of how the map loops back on itself Not because you're like literally lost wandering around in circles Dark Souls is masterful, and making each area look totally unique You are constantly presented with memorable landmarks to where you've been Mortal Shell looks almost exactly the same no matter where you are It is incredibly common to find yourself accidentally walking around in circles This is a really beautiful game, but it either needed a Metroidvania style map Or better, it needed to make sure the game was full of obvious landmarks so that you could keep track of where you are in your head The map is actually quite small, but it is so difficult to orient yourself in it that it can be frustrating for the first few hours Now, when you first come into this map, you can go like 5 different directions The only hint the game gives you is this stone right here that gives you this vision How did you interpret this vision? It seems many, if not most people, assumed this meant you were supposed to go up the hill like the vision shows you But am I crazy that I assumed this meant a boss was up there? The vision itself is spooky and dangerous-seeming, so I didn't walk up that hill I thought maybe the final boss was up there, and the game was telling me this was an important place to return later Instead, I turned left, and this decision completely doomed the enjoyment I was going to get from this game in my first playthrough If you haven't played Mortal Shell, this vision is actually showing you that this game's equivalent of Firelink Shrine is up that hill Meaning the main quest is there, the level up NPC is there, the game's only vendor is hidden up there, it is an important hill This structure would be like Dark Souls dropping you in the center of Undead Burg and hoping you choose to go towards Firelink Actually, it's even worse than that, because you only have like 2 choices in Undead Burg as opposed to the 5 you have here But it's even more disastrous than that You see, Mortal Shell has no Estus type refillable healing system There are very rare mushrooms on the ground that respawn every few minutes, and there is the ability to heal by parrying But if you turn left and don't go up that hill, you don't have the parry to heal ability, you can't parry at all It also turns out that the game's most effective healing item, Cooked Rats, is sold by a hidden vendor tucked away up that hill Again, if you turn left or right, or even if you go up that hill but don't circle around the back of the building You will be playing this game with no healing ability at all I beat two thirds of the game with absolutely no healing but the occasional mushroom I found And I beat everything but the final boss without finding the vendor who sells the rats I assume everyone can understand how fucking frustrating this was And frankly, I can't think of this as anything other than a design failure When I play Souls types games, I play them blind I don't look anything up, even if I'm lost or struggling I can do this, because I can usually trust that the game will make it clear if I'm doing something wrong New Lando Ruins is available right from the start of Dark Souls But the unkillable ghosts will make it pretty obvious you have taken a wrong turn The same with the skeletons who will wreck you if you're a new player and you decide to head to Tune with the Giants You will try those two and think, holy shit, let me try this way And boom, you'll fight a bunch of undead who are much more manageable Mortal Shell is not laid out like this It's not hard enough to actually make clear you're fucking up I went left, I died a bunch of times but I slowly got the hang of the hardening mechanic And ended up in the first nearby dungeon, where I finally found the game's first checkpoint Here in the dungeon, I died a bunch more, but eventually I made it to the final boss and killed him All without having any healing items at all Was it fun? No It was an infuriating exercise with slowly kiting enemies one at a time And hitting, hardening, and backing up until the hardening was off of cooldown But it was just manageable enough that I didn't think it was obvious I'd missed something I just thought the game was supposed to be fairly tough From there I made it to the next dungeon and beat that too, without healing Only after beating both of those dungeons did I stumble onto the shrine and get the first parry ability And the second one too, actually, because I had both of the glands So it's important for anyone to know that I really hated this shit as I was playing for the first time One could argue that that's my fault, I guess, but I'd say this is a failure of the developers How would the game have been hurt by simply starting me in the shrine? I also didn't find out about the vendor who sold the rats until my third try in the final boss Finally made me Google how to parry him I didn't actually find out how to parry him, but I did find out that guy up above the shrine sells unlimited healing items for 100 souls So, again, like, what's the point of hiding this guy? Now, after finding this shit out, I knew in order to be fair I was going to need to play the game again And sure enough, playing the game with this knowledge makes it enormously less frustrating I mean, my first run was like playing Dark Souls only healing 10 times or so throughout the entire game Still, even though my second playthrough was less rage inducing and far more enjoyable I still have a few beasts with the game I still recommend it and I think it's worth playing But I disagree with the universally glowing praise it's gotten in the mainstream gaming press for a few reasons The main differences Mortal Shell brings to the formula are the different healing mechanics Using the hardened ability instead of blocking The lack of RPG progression in place of purchased abilities and classes you find as shells And the Sekiro second chance mechanic you get when you die These aren't small changes and the developers deserve a lot of credit for taking such a big chance in an effort to switch up the formula But at the end of the day, I don't think any of these changes are actually positively implemented Some are kind of neutral and some end up negatives And the reason none are total positives is because while they're all interesting ideas on their own All of them have subtle little issues that make them feel like they're slightly off I've already explained how the healing system, combined with the map Meant I played almost the entire game without healing and turned every run into a war of attrition But we really need to think about how well the normal healing system works in these games Estus is bestis Most souls like games use one of two healing systems You've got the blood vials, grass, life gems or surge like healing injection way of doing things Where healing is plentiful, easy to get and is usually farmed in the game Or you have the estus type system where you have a fixed amount that is only refilled when you die Or when you rest at a checkpoint which respawns all of the enemies Neo is actually the one game that has a really good hybrid of this system Where healing is farmed in the game but you're always guaranteed to start with four The Bloodborne style plentiful healing system is almost always balanced by a game design that's focused around you dying Because the game throws really difficult things at you They are generally much faster paced So in games like Dark Souls 2, Bloodborne, the surge, you end up needing to consistently heal during fights The game will throw multiple fast and hard hitting enemies at you The healing isn't a finite resource you manage as you explore the level It's a combat mechanic you manage during fights These games are full of seemingly unfair encounters that are balanced by the fact that you have access to more healing as you go The games that use the estus system like Sekiro, Dark Souls 1 and 3, Salt and Sanctuary Make healing very slow and finite You're not really supposed to be healing during a fight unless it's a boss And even then, you need to get far away and be very careful about choosing when you heal This system is more of a resource management system You need to learn each enemy and level so that you can eventually consistently get to the boss with most or all of your healing items left Every time you take damage, that's one less healing item you have for the boss Both of these systems work great as long as the game is balanced around it And Bloodborne of the Surge, most things can kill you in two hits, but healing is so fast that you can dodge, heal and be attacking again in a second And Dark Souls, your deaths are often because you ran out of healing Or you didn't run far enough away to slowly heal in a fight Healing is something you generally do after an encounter, not during it And if you do heal during the encounter, it's because you backed way up and gave yourself time and space They are both great ways to design a game Mortal Shell is a kind of strange halfway system Its combat is much more like the Souls games in design There are very rarely more than a couple of enemies at a time, almost never more than three And they attack very slowly You're almost never killed from full health before you have a chance to back up and heal But the game has the healing system of the faster paced games And that you can carry more rats than you will ever need In my second playthrough, after I knew about the rat guy, I barely died at all And it was generally because I fell off a ledge Mortal Shell's combat is designed in such a way that it would have been improved by giving you four rats every time you died arrested And having that be all the healing you can carry Instead, it's clear the game wanted the risk reward of the parry system to be the primary healing method But they weren't confident enough with it to make the game truly revolve around it And I think that's because there is a problem with that system A huge one, in my opinion First, the game has a resource called Resolve It's basically energy or mana It refills as you attack enemies and this resource is used to fire off powerful attacks that can kill or nearly kill nearly every enemy in the game As well as stagger everything in the game including bosses When you are in the animation for this, you are completely untouchable and cannot be staggered out of it It's kind of a negate damage and erase enemy button It is tremendously powerful But parrying uses your resolve So choosing to heal means you're giving up the most interesting and powerful combat tools the game has to offer Now, this would actually be a really good trade off if the parry timings were consistent But for some very hard to understand reason, they decided to make the parry timing change based upon how much resolve you have If you have at least one full bar of resolve, the parry timing is tricky and wonky but generally acceptably forgiving It's still annoying but you will get the hang of it However, the main problem is that if you have no resolve, the parry timing is completely different It probably cuts the window in half The animation is incredibly long and many of the more dangerous enemies have attacks that come out too fast to pull off Like I think some enemies have attacks that are literally too fast to even get the parry animation off at all if you are out of resolve But worse, having two different parry timings depending on how much of a resource you have in the upper left hand corner of the screen is unintuitive and frustrating And what's worse is the game does not explain this to you It took me hours to realize what was going on with this Only after repeatedly testing it did I realize that the resolve not only decides whether or not you can repost But that it also greatly increases the parry window Man Parrying in games like this is all about muscle memory dude Having to deal with two entirely different parry windows depending on a resource is too much It hurts the game and it is really hard to understand how anyone thought this was a good idea Because the parry heal can be so wonky, you will probably realize that you can ignore it and just use rats against anything but the easiest to parry mobs But then there's the issue of the game simply not feeling balanced for that If you have 30 rats, nothing and I mean nothing in this game can kill you You will face roll everything in your path so totally that it becomes boring how stupidly easy it is You'll die like 10 times in the whole game, half from dodging off of ledges, which I hate A quarter from bosses and the other is because of bullshit like traps where enemies that you cannot see beforehand they are literally invisible will drop on your head from the sky The game needed one of these systems Either have parrying be the whole healing system but make it consistent, slightly more forgiving and tone down some of the faster attacks that look like the other attacks Or just go with the consumable healing system but make sure you can only have 4 or 5 at a time so you have a resource management system like other games The design here is confused because it's working at cross purposes Is healing supposed to be a difficult nail biting but always available chance you take? Or is it supposed to be a totally forgiving system that you can never run out of? Having both means that neither is as good as it should have been and the game simply does not feel balanced for both It feels designed for the parry mechanic If parrying to heal is going to be the system you need most enemies to be not all that dangerous If unlimited rats is the system you need enemies to be ridiculously powerful heal punishing monsters who can kill you faster than you can eat the rat Instead the enemies are in the middle They're a bit too hard and unpredictable to make parrying the only heal system But far too easy for a game that lets you carry 50 inexpensive and powerful heals at all times It's a perfect example of how a subtle little thing like this can have a huge impact on everything else in the design Not hardened enough As to that hardened mechanic It's a neat idea and it looks very cool but even this has some very subtle issues As we all know most souls likes revolve around either dodging, blocking or parrying Mortal Shell uses dodging and parrying but instead of blocking it has the hardened mechanic At any time you can pull the left trigger and turn to stone If an enemy hits you while you're rock they will be staggered even if they're a boss and you will be good No attack can hurt you in this state Often this system feels really good It's a neat layer to add on to the game that allows you to stay engaged with enemies and chain it together with your attack combos So you can continually chain attacks together and then turn to stone when the enemy swings You stagger him and then you continue right on in your combo You can do it while you're running, you can do it while you're jumping in the air It works, it's cool and it's different But it has just enough drawbacks that it's more of a neutral change It's not a total negative but it is not a positive that makes playing Mortal Shell feel like a totally different experience The issues with this mechanic is that it is so damn powerful that it absolutely needs to be on a cooldown and a relatively long one The reason it's too powerful is that you can hold this for a long time I'm not sure when it wears off because I never had that happen to me If this had been balanced so that you really needed to be very careful about when you hardened this would have worked much better Instead you can harden too early like 5 seconds too early and just sit there waiting for the enemy to attack you So there's no punishment for using it badly After about 45 minutes provided you have discovered that this game lets you heal You'll have mastered this mechanic and from then on almost every fight will play out the same You'll do a running jump attack, then you'll keep mashing attack until the enemy swings Then you'll harden, wait, and keep attacking until they die Or if they're one of the tougher enemies you'll do that whole thing but then you'll back up, wait 10 seconds for the cooldown and start it over The hardened mechanic has zero risk After you've played souls likes for a while you'll probably give up on blocking You might still carry a shield to parry or for the benefit it gives but you will rarely turtle behind a shield It's useful against weak enemies but the cost to blocking is that you lose stamina and risk being unable to attack or dodge Or in the worst case scenario you can get totally staggered There's a big risk to blocking and there is always a significant trade off You are trading the chance to attack and use your stamina for offense for the ability to play slowly and safely The hardened mechanic in Mortal Shell has no trade off at all It makes much of the combat feel trivial because you can never use this mechanic sub-optimally This also ends up meaning that the combat in Mortal Shell even though you have this new mechanic and the abilities Ends up playing out much more predictably than in other souls like games Because these skills and the hardened mechanic are so powerful you will rely on them so much that every fight will really be the same Yes, I know that you can say this about every game but this hardened mechanic is so strong it really does become the most important thing I think this system is cool. Again, it's just not quite right. It's too easy to use If there's a sequel, the game needs to seriously shorten how long you can hold this for If you harden too early, you will get killed. Otherwise, it's an unlimited easy to use win button Not an RPG like at all Alright, let's talk about the progression system Now, I generally vastly prefer traditional progression systems in these games because I like having consistent choices to make Even in a game like Bloodborne or the Surge 2 where your choices don't matter all that much It is still satisfying to consistently have those choices to make It paces the game and slowly increasing your stamina or health helps to make the game feel like an RPG With stats that have a big impact but even the simplified ones appeal to me more In fact, my biggest gripe with Sekiro is that I found the progression boring Almost all of it was just finding items that increased your health or damage and then unlocking skills that you don't really need But even there, the prosthetic upgrades were impactful and interesting even if there was very little room for variety or replaying with different builds Mortal Shell is basically the Sekiro model but this is a small indie team like a really small team Making a much, much smaller game so it's even more restrictive and allows for less variety The progression boils down to finding the different shells, upgrading them with tar and finding and upgrading the different weapons Let's start with the weapons There are four in total including three that you can find in the world Each of those weapons can have their damage upgraded with acid and you can find the two items that unlock their special attacks It has everything the game needs but here again there are a couple of very subtle problems that make the weapon upgrade system work less well than it should Acid, the upgrade material is very rare so you can fully upgrade two weapons at most And in fact I was only able to upgrade one all the way and one to nearly all the way both times I played I assumed that I missed one acid which would mean that you can use two But the problem is, once you start upgrading one weapon it is so much more effective that switching out to another seems pointless And in fact the starting sword is probably the best or at least one of the very best weapons in the game The others are fine but the slow weapons don't seem to make up for their slow attack and heavy stamina costs with a big enough damage increase And the hammer and chisel is good but it's range is very limited which can be a bit annoying because a bunch of the enemies and mortal shell do the whole jump away from you thing With so few weapons and such a limited upgrade resource the game should have made damage increases attached to you, not the weapons Or they should have looked to other games in the genre to see how it's done In souls, Bloodborne and the Surge, weapon upgrade materials are so plentiful that you can take as many weapons as you want far enough to at least be usable Generally games make the final late game upgrades rare so you will need to choose eventually but they let you upgrade most weapons easily so that you can change your mind This is not the case here. All upgrades use the exact same resource, there's only one kind of acid This means that the final upgrade on your sword uses the exact same resource as the first upgrade on your hammer So you would be crazy to not upgrade one weapon all the way before you even start upgrading another And by the time you've done that you're almost done with the game and there's no way to catch the other weapons up This is exactly the reason that souls like games usually make each level of upgrade use a different resource Bloodborne for instance doesn't just use bloodstones for everything, it will bury you in bloodstone shards Then you'll get a bunch but less twin shards, then chunks and then you can find one rock or a second one in the DLC I believe You don't want making a weapon plus one to use the same resource that makes another one plus nine Because if you do you would be crazy to choose making something plus one It is just more valuable to fully upgrade one weapon than it is to make a different weapon plus one This is a poorly thought through design choice that only serves to limit variety, that is all it does And weapon variety is a crucial part of replayability in souls games The solution here is obvious, make every level use a different material and make the early ones so common You can freely experiment before choosing what you'll max Acid plus one, strong acid plus two, very strong acid plus three etc With each type more rare than the last, it should be easy to level each weapon to plus four But you only have one of the final upgrade material so you have to finally settle on one weapon Then you've got the actual shells and the upgrades to them Instead of choosing a class and mortal shell, you play as this weird gross zombie night thing And the classes are other characters dead bodies that you find out in the world It's pretty cool, I'm gonna give them that, it is really cool You will start with the basic knight, he has a medium amount of health, a medium amount of stamina, a medium amount of resolve Or mana, energy, whatever When I play souls type games, I hardly ever level health at all The only time I ever put XP into health is when I reach a point in the game where something one hit kills me When that happens, I dump points into health until that thing can no longer kill me with one hit Instead, I always dump all of my points into damage and stamina, alternating You do not have that choice in mortal shell, which isn't a deal breaker for me, but it isn't a change that feels like it adds much to the gameplay either As you move around the map, you will stumble onto other shells Teal has very low health, almost no mana, and like three times as much stamina Then there's a guy with a ton of health and low stamina, and a guy with a ton of energy but average health and stamina So, what you've got here is four classes that are pre-made for you, four stat builds that are pre-made for you It's like finding finished builds that you then spend time unlocking the abilities on The only problem is the abilities are kinda either pointless or ridiculously powerful Teal does poison damage The starting dude, you unlock the ability to recharge stamina while hardened Again, here you run into the exact same issue where by the time you first found another shell, you've almost certainly dumped so much progression into what you're using That it isn't really worth starting another These are pretty expensive upgrades, so upgrading another requires some grinding Yes, you can do another playthrough, but the classes aren't really different enough to be worth it You can't play as a magic user This system does work for a short game, but it's another example of being just subtly off The solution here is to have the upgrades carry across each shell So the shells have the different stats, but the ability nodes are unlocked on your gross little ghost dude That way when you find a new shell, you can immediately use it Remember, this is a very short game, maybe 12 hours the first time, 4 hours the second time So it's not worth grinding to upgrade another one when you're basically already done with 2 thirds of the game There are a bunch of little tiny things like this, like for instance the difficulty Different areas are harder than others Hilariously, I ended up by mistake doing them nearly in reverse order of difficulty, without healing, remember I started with the second hardest dungeon, then went to the hardest, and then what was supposed to be first, I guess So by the time I got to the last dungeon, I crushed and destroyed everything in there Surely there was a way to either scale the enemies by the player, or to more carefully signpost players So that they end up going through the game in the correct order As it stands, if you, like me, go to the snow place last, you will end with a dungeon that is so easy, it's silly This is probably one of the reasons that most games have gone away from the open world thing A more linear structure like the surge, or blood board, or Dark Souls 3 Means you can more carefully structure the difficulty so that the second half of the game isn't massively easier than the first half Again, none of these are huge, terrible flaws, or flat out bad ideas Instead, they're all very subtle issues that have bigger impacts than one would immediately think Wrapping up Okay, I know I sounded really negative here, but I want to be clear that if you like Soulslight games, you should absolutely pick this up It's only 35 bucks, and while it's really only worth one playthrough, there is enough cool stuff here to make the game worthwhile Boss fights are pretty good, the combat is fun enough, and the graphics and atmosphere are truly fantastic It is quite clear that setting the tone of a Soulslight was a heavy development focus, and on that front, developer Cold Symmetry absolutely nailed it There is very little to criticize there, outside of a lack of enemy and area variety It's a game world that feels like a real place, and that's something I'm always harping on, it is a hugely important thing for me in a Soulslight I'm always talking about how enemies should feel like they belong where they are, and when we get to Hellpoint, we'll notice that that's a bit of a problem But here, the issues with enemy and level variety, progression, the hardened mechanic, and especially the healing system, make the game flawed in many ways as well As a first ever game, it is very impressive, but it has a bunch of systems and mechanics that are good ideas, that aren't carefully enough balanced to make it a great game It's beautiful, but repetitive, it's difficult, you can either be stupidly insane, or absurdly easy depending on which way you walk I would actually recommend with this one, which I never do, that you google which order to play the game So you don't end up screaming in fury before steamrolling your way through the second half by mistake like I did I hope this sold well, and I hope they move on to make more Soulslikes, but I also hope they're a bit more careful about the way they implement core systems next time Every single mechanic and system here could have worked amazingly well, but instead, they all suffer from some tiny flaw on the design that makes them not click like they could have The things that separate good games from great games are often extremely subtle, and I think souls like games in particular are all about very carefully managing small differences In an ideal world, this game could have used another year to really, really nail down the mechanics and balancing, but a small studio almost certainly was up against the clock because of money A good game, but not a great game A game that changes it up, but not always successfully A small game that you can only really play once because by your second playthrough when you know what's going on, it will take you like 4 hours and you will destroy everything in your path It's a game that gets the really big things right, tone, atmosphere, animations which are great, art design, sound design, boss fights, but also one that gets a lot of the most crucially important subtle things slightly wrong Still, for a first game, it is pretty impressive, and it leaves me excited for the next effort It just really shows that if you're going to change the formula in a souls-like, you need to be very careful that those changes are really well designed Alright, that's part one Part two is going to be Hellpoint, and why if you're not going to change anything in the formula, you need to make damn sure that you get those basics rock fucking solid Okay, thanks for coming, I'll see you next time Alright, bye