Everything is a roguelike now. We’ve got poker roguelikes, slot machine roguelikes, even Breakout has been made into a roguelike, and it seems the possibilities for the framework are endless. Morsels, the debut game from Furcula, brings a bit more of a familiar take on the action roguelike, a la Binding of Isaac or Hades, but with a clever creature collecting twist.

The premise, which you’re reminded of every time you start a run, is a bit nonsensical and seems completely built around giving you pretense for the mechanics of the game, but it gets the job done in setting up the action. Mystical cards have fallen from the sky, imbuing those who wield them with the power to transform into strange creatures. Cats have hoarded these cards, becoming Card Barons that rule over the world. You play as a tiny mouse fighting its way up through the sewers after learning the secret to harnessing these cards to become various Morsels that you find the cards for. This is not a narrative-heavy roguelike, so none of this really comes up much or changes over the course of the runs, it’s just a simple backstory that allows for a setup with the ability to play through a rotating cast of characters.

While the backstory is simple, the world feels very fleshed out thanks to a strong visual identity. To me, it brings to mind the strange, grotesque wave of cartoons we saw in the 90s like “Ren & Stimpy” or “Aaahh!!! Real Monsters,” but with a pixel-art-and-CRT twist. The enemies and NPCs that you run into are all beautifully rendered, full of distinct personality that makes the setting of Morsels feel lived-in and gross, but in the cutest way possible. So much of the appeal of this game is the wonderfully strange world that you explore, even if you aren’t getting a particularly interesting narrative while doing it.

The big gameplay hook is the creature collecting system which allows you to swap between the different cards you collect, transforming you into various characters with distinct sets of abilities. You’ll start off with one Morsel at the beginning of your run, and others are added to your collection as you find them while exploring. They each have three hearts, and when you run out of Morsels, that’s the end of your run. Each has a very distinct way of attacking, making them feel very different from one another. For example, Gummsel, the sentient bubblegum, is a great starter because it just shoots a pretty standard projectile, but someone like Shromsel, the mushroom who attacks by making little clones of itself that mirror its movements, is a bit more complicated to work with. Swapping between your cards is easy and instantaneous, but you can only hold three, so as you go on there will be some tough choices that will end up defining your playstyle for that run.

This game feels like a twin-stick bullet hell type game, but there’s a stamina bar that regulates the frequency of your attacks, preventing you from becoming an overpowerful tornado of bullets. It took me a bit to get used to this at the beginning, as finding your rhythm of attack is really important when things get intense. You also have an extremely useful dodge roll that has a cooldown, and a special attack that varies from Morsel to Morsel. The gameplay provides just the right combination of familiar and unique that you’ll feel right at home when you start, even if getting down your timings takes some practice. While I didn’t really care for the stamina bar at first, by the end I came to enjoy the more deliberate feel it gave the gameplay.

An important element to your progression is collecting different currencies that fly out of the enemies as you kill them. Cheese is the main currency, used to buy things in stores that you’ll find along the way. Favor is a more rare currency that’s used for special items and boons. Finally, XP is also collected, which can level up your Morsel into a more powerful evolution. The unique catch to this system is that if you gain enough XP to level up your creature again, instead of becoming more powerful, that character is retired and removed from your collection. It’s a very clever design choice that forces you to mix it up with different Morsels throughout, preventing you from relying on a singular one throughout your entire run.

Like any good roguelike, there are plenty of pickups along the way that will allow you to modify your playstyle as you progress through your run. Aside from consumables, which can do things like temporarily give you infinite stamina, there are Morbs, which change the stats of your morsels, along with items that will modify your behavior in some way. For example, Cheese Shoes allowed me to get a small speed boost every time I picked up some cheese, which ended up being both a blessing and a curse. You definitely can stumble into some really overpowered builds, but oftentimes the items have just enough of a hidden drawback that it keeps you from getting to a point where you can just steamroll everything.

The nature of these pickups ended up being one of my favorite little world building things Morsels does. Sometimes I would pick up a consumable that would be called something like Ghost Sharks, and I would laugh to myself trying to figure out what that could possibly even be. Not every pickup explains what it does right away, and that element of mystery was something that I found so engrossing about Morsels. Too often it feels like games want to instantly explain everything in order to ensure that they don’t lose players, but the what-the-hell-will-this-do nature of items I ran into gave me a sense of wonder that immensely added to my experience.

Another element of randomization that I really enjoyed was the addition of ailments. Morsels you pick up can be afflicted with various conditions, forcing you to deal with some pretty heinous negative effects until you find a way to cure them, which can be done with a specific consumable. This is generally on a per-Morsel basis, so it adds to the decision making about which ones to use when. Sometimes I would pick up a card of my favorite creature, but it would come afflicted with a condition that would cause it to be followed around by an unkillable little bug that would attack me over and over. When I decided to switch to the character, I knew that I had to be careful to keep on the move, or else that little bug would tear through it pretty quickly. The risk-reward calculation this added was a nice wrinkle, if not completely game-changing.

Each of the four parts of the game is broken up into a few discrete levels that are capped off with a boss fight. These areas are procedurally generated mazes, with enemies and environmental hazards scattered about that increase in complexity and density as you progress towards the ladder that acts as the level’s end. While the golden path through each level is marked with little arrows on the ground, exploring all the nooks and crannies of the map is essential to building yourself up enough to complete a run. Not only are you looking for items and powerups, but there are also little secret rooms in the walls that can lead to some unexpected challenge rooms.

You’ll often run into some specific items in the world that will need to be physically picked up by your character and carried to their destination. These can be things like bus tickets or bags of cheese, and importantly they prevent you from attacking while being carried. Moments like these make for wonderful mad dashes, as you’re sprinting through the level, dodging left and right to get through the waves of enemies and projectiles as you rush to your destination.

Between levels, you meet strange characters that will usually give you some sort of choice that can provide a powerful or opportunity. Oftentimes the better of the two options will cost a favor, so finding those becomes critical to your run. My favorite of these were often ones that transported me into weird arcade games that had unique modifications on the core gameplay, with unique art styles to go along with it. Some of these characters you meet are purely punishments, like taking all your cheese, and it felt bad in a way that didn’t add to the game for me. It wasn’t like I was given a hard choice between two bad options, it was just like I had gotten a bad dice roll and had to suffer for nothing that was related to anything I did. I was often more compelled just by seeing the new weirdos that I would run across than their actual mechanical function, so I wish this was a bit more robust of a system that tied into some grander narrative that the world feels like it’s capable of delivering.

The bosses I ran into were all great visual designs, but I don’t feel like any of them really shook up the gameplay in a meaningful way that provided me with a unique challenge. To be honest, in the seven hours it took me to get my first successful run, I don’t think a boss ever killed me, even when I went in with only one Morsel in my collection. Maybe this is a credit to how well-designed the patterns of the bosses were that I was able to pick them up right away, but they never felt like a skill check that I had to force myself to push past.

Between runs, you’ll fill up an XP bar based on how long you lasted, and leveling up will unlock new powerups that can be found on subsequent runs. Unfortunately, it never really felt like this was something that was making me do better each run, and it was rather my actual experience that was making me improve. This is one of the trickiest balances for a roguelike, as too much metaprogression can make it feel like early runs are worthless, but too little doesn’t really give you enough hooks to keep playing. For me, Morsels leaned towards the latter, as after I finished my first run, I didn’t feel overly compelled to continue playing. If you’re an achievement hunter, there are plenty to hunt down, with many of them pointing to tantalizing sounding secrets to uncover, but I don’t feel like there was enough mechanical evolution for me to keep engaged for the long term. There was a higher difficulty that I was offered after completing my run, but that doesn’t feel as enticing to me as something like the discrete, customizable challenges of a game like Hades.

Morsels is a solid roguelike with tight mechanics and a lavishly rendered world full of mystery and strangeness. It feels good in the hands and provides you with enough secrets to hunt down, but it doesn’t feel like it’s the type of roguelike that evolves enough mechanically throughout the course of several runs to keep me coming back for more. I thoroughly enjoyed the time that it took me to complete a run, but it didn’t provide me with a clear enough reason to draw me back in for another attempt. This could definitely come down to personal taste, as I like more meta progression in my roguelikes. It’s entirely possible that you’ll find the weird world of Morsels enough to grab you with its secrets and challenges, but I found myself wanting just a little something more before I added it to my rotation of roguelikes I return to.

Review code provided by the publisher. Morsels is available now on Steam, the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, and the Xbox Series.