I eventually bounced off the first Mortal Shell because it was too fucking hard, but I ended up screwing around with the Open Beta for the sequel and it got its hooks in. That's one of the best demos I've ever played for a game, and it did a mean trick where there are invisible forcefields at certain points to halt your progress. I mean, I guess they can't give the whole game away, but God Damn if that didn't inspire a purchase. Now I know exactly what's behind that shimmering curtain of force: death, death, and more death. Which I should have guessed from the jump.
I generally regret buying "soulslike" games because they mostly just beat the shit out of me. I think we have about five hundred comics on the topic. But they have a couple things going in Mortal Shell II that give it a little more to draw the eye.
1. Collectible "Shells." The idea is kind of cool: by yourself, you're a tall, super-moist fella who ain't got much of a face t' speak of. Like a hermit crab, you can wear the bodies of fallen warriors you find around the map. They're fun to collect, they all have some trick to them, they look neat, and it essentially acts as your first health bar. When it's reduced to zero, the wet crab comes out and you can earn the shell back by dealing melee damage. Tracking them down gives me an alternate loop - a "perimeter oscillation" as it were.
2. Your Choice Of Parry Styles. Parrying is most of the game the way I play it, which is maybe why I get my ass kicked all the time, but when you get savvy with it the amount of satisfaction received is nearly immolating. The parry behavior itself is customizable in one of four ways (at least, far as I know) by equipping various Seals that substantially change the flow of combat. I just picked one up off a strange chair I found, and it's so different from the rest that it's considered a different mode altogether.
3. Weird Setting Is Weird. It looks awesome, runs crazy, and they got you fighting the weirdest crap. I had to beat up a bunch of surprisingly fast babushkas, some of whom had accordions(?). There's a dude in the hub world who is always trying to wash my feet with milk. That's not really what I need from a videogame, but there's somebody out there that's been waiting forty years for this shit and it's his time to shine.
We'll see how far I get, I guess. It's definitely terraformed my headspace. "There's a huge, sick frog who needs medicine and I know just where to get some." That's the type of shit this game makes you say.
(CW)TB out.
