// KOTAKU — GAMING
Mortal Shell 2: The Kotaku Review
Look, I’m going to give it to you straight here. This game starts with cult stuff. I love cult stuff; those dancing lunatics with their uniform robes and a deep, starry-eyed belief that doing the worst, most despicable evil is a Good Idea? Yes. Give it to me. You get a little fanaticism, a touch of murder, almost always some weird cosmic comeuppance, and then the nagging feeling that something even worse than these guys is at play here. Mortal Shell II starts like this, almost as if signposting to people that are hopelessly devoted to this kind of experience—you might say the cultlike Souls crowd—that they are in the right place.
And folks, not for nothing, but this isn’t even the only cult in the game.
Review writing can be funny. In general, building out an argument about why someone should or shouldn’t play a game has to have a thesis, or at least a unifying theory. I was not expecting to have one from the second I started playing Mortal Shell II. Try as I might, I cannot shake this one unifying thought: Mortal Shell II is the most metal video game I have ever played.
I don’t mean “ha ha dark fantasy is metal there are always skeletons someone’s getting impaled it’s like an album cover” metal. I mean, this is fucking metal metal. Proof? Look at this, for God’s sake:
Every frame of animation in this game was made with the painterly hands of a person that desperately wants it to be cloudy above their abandoned 19th-century mansion all the time. It is a game that demands to be played in a dark room, large candles lit, in stark silence while a thunderstorm raging with a biblical fury rattles the foundation of the dilapidated church you might be playing it within.
In a crowded field of Soulslikes, a genre often obsessively dour, Mortal Shell II dares to ask the question of “what if this, but way more” when it comes to an ever-present sense of creeping evil. The sequel to developer Cold Symmetry’s 2020 release Mortal Shell, this game shares with its predecessor the core hook of shells; essentially character classes with unique abilities that can be swapped out at each rest location. While the first Mortal Shell’s biggest strength was in how tight and compact it was, the sequel is a much more sprawling game, with plenty to see and uncover throughout an open environment littered with weapons, small dungeons, and Tarstones that augment your character, giving you options for different character builds.
Mortal Shell II, also like its predecessor, is a game in the proud tradition of such sunny affairs as the Blasphemous series, which takes itself so heart-attack serious that it borders on comedy. I mean this as a compliment. There’s plenty to love about, you know, playing Mortal Shell II, but the mood of this game? It drips, with all the viscosity of blood. And I am buying everything that it is selling, the drippy viscosity of it all. I cannot get this out of my head. There will be times that you’ll think, damn, Mortal Shell II. Pump the breaks a bit. Mortal Shell II will tell you to eat shit. There are no brakes. There are only double bass kick drums. Glance out at the vistas of this world and you’ll drink in a hellscape straight out of a Wayne Barlowe painting. I couldn’t get enough of just looking around. Killing monsters? Finding new weapons and shells? Stumbling into another minor boss fight in yet another bespoke mini-dungeon? Absolutely. These are the things that drive me, because I love exploring these places.
Hilariously eerie tone, great spacing and pace of combat, exploration is very satisfying
Scarcity of upgrade materials and currency made character builds restricting and grindy, occasionally getting stuck in the environment super sucks
40 hours. Completed the main campaign and several dozen dungeons, found all the shells but missed a couple of weapons. Dinked around in Night (Hard) mode, but played the campaign in normal conditions.