Ever since Demon’s Souls became a surprise hit, game developers have been trying to imitate the games of FromSoftware. Many seem to put their focus squarely on mimicking the gameplay rhythms, which is an admirable goal, but misses what I consider to be the secret sauce – the vibes. Five years ago, developer Cold Symmetry released their attempt at the genre, Mortal Shell.
While I never got too deep into it, I will always remember it for a bit of writing in the beginning that hit the FromSoft tone in a way I rarely see. There was a moment where you go up to a vessel, and a prompt comes up that says “Sip the Divine Tar.” It’s a succinctly ominous phrase that immediately feels full of lore and meaning without actually saying much at all, just like the best parts of Dark Souls, Elden Ring, or Bloodborne.
Mortal Shell felt like a great start for a new team, even if it wasn’t quite the most robust experience. It had clever new twists and an interesting world, and now Mortal Shell II has come out and not only retained that great vibe they set in the first one, but also improved its mechanics and level design in ways that make this one of the best non-FromSoft soulslikes I’ve played.
Right from the beginning, there’s a lot of delicious proper nouns thrown your way. The Undermether falls from the sky, leaving her remains to be worshipped, with temples carved from her bones. You play the Harbinger, a being that has been prophesied to aid her by recovering her lost Ova, ensuring a future for her unborn offspring. Hearing the opening narration describe this setup is like an extended divine tar moment, with all the details making me smile with a sick pleasure.
After the narration, you’re dropped into a rural village that seems to be in the middle of a Midsommar-esque ceremony centered on you. There’s a creature named Ruk, who looks like a normal, but large, bird at first glance, until you realize that his open mouth contains a human skull at the back of it, which is his actual face. He will be your cryptic guide throughout the game, showing up to offer you ominous words of encouragement.
There’s a tutorial section that introduces you to your first Shell, before ripping it away from you after an epic first boss fight; then you’re dropped in the middle of an open world, with only vague directions to guide your way.
An Open World That Rewards Exploration
This structure quickly became the most compelling part of the game for me. From your home base at Marrow Keep, another perfect-sounding name, you can travel to a select number of beacons, Mortal Shell’s version of the classic bonfire, but the map isn’t filled out. Dotted across the blank canvas are bird icons, which denote places you’ll find Ruk to receive that area’s map section.
As you explore, more things will become marked on your map, including six massive gates where you’ll find the six main bosses of the game, which the denizens of Marrow Keep call the Ovum Thieves. The more Ova you collect, the more you progress the game’s story, with the final section being unlocked by defeating all six Ovum Thieves.
To start, you can only fast travel from Marrow Keep to a few different beacons, which has one of the coolest fast travel animations I’ve ever seen where you’re launched through the sky like a burning comet, giving you a good starting point to begin exploring. Finding the map pieces is a good first objective, and you slowly learn how to solve the game’s navigational puzzles of determining the route to a specific location.
It can be tricky because sometimes there are gates that will warp you across canyons, and those connections aren’t clearly marked on the map, but knowing that can give you theories to test out to get around. Certain zones of the map also have too much space between beacons, making it extra troubling when you’re running around for a long time between rests trying to find where you’re going. There’s a fine line between frustration and fun when getting around the map is so core to the challenge, but Mortal Shell II lands on fun more often than not.
In addition to the gates, the world feels dense with things to discover, without getting overwhelmingly large. Each of the beacons you run across can be cleansed of corruption, which involves going into a little dungeon and rewards you with more Ova. Other dungeons that you come across have different rewards, from upgrade materials to new weapons. You’ll also be able to add new weapons or shells to your map by talking to various people at Marrow Keep, giving you more breadcrumbs to chase after.
Much like Elden Ring, if you find yourself having trouble with one area, there’s plenty of other directions you can explore to continue to level up your character. Never once did I feel overwhelmed by the map, and I always felt like I had at least one path forward I could see to make progress.
The titular hook of the game that sets it apart from other soulslikes is its shell system, which acts sort of like swappable character classes. The Harbinger starts the game as sort of a blank human, which can fight, but doesn’t have any particular skills. To become stronger, he inhabits the bodies of various lost warriors, which need to be collected as you explore. Some of them were just waiting for me at specific locations across the map, while others had more side quests or interactions associated with their acquisition. Each of these warriors has a unique set of skills, and in some cases, unique mechanics for health recovery.
Shells Change the Way You Fight
For example, Tiel, my most used shell, had the ability to Shadow Step and become invisible to enemies, dealing a powerful sneak attack. He could also slip into the shadows any time he did a perfect dodge, rewarding you for focusing on dodging over parries. Another interesting one was Gragu, who replaced the traditional Dark Souls-style healing system (having a limited number of healing charges until you rest) with the ability to recharge a weaker heal resource through killing enemies.
This meant that he, in theory, could indefinitely collect healing charges and never have to rest, but would have to deal with those charges being less effective. It’s really compelling to experiment with each of these playstyles, and a lot of fun can be mined finding different shells for different purposes.
The shell system also has a neat second chance mechanic attached to it. When your shell runs out of hit points, you’re returned to Harbinger’s blank human form with a sick animation that feels impactful every time. If you run out of HP in this form, then you die and respawn at your last beacon, but if you do enough damage, you’re able to regain your shell form, returning all your abilities to you and allowing you to continue on. For a game that can get really challenging, it’s a nice little safety net for you to have that makes a fight feel really desperate and rewarding when you succeed.
While your abilities are defined by your shell, most of the combat rhythm will come down to the weapon you choose. Some weapons are quicker than others, but overall Mortal Shell II has a very chunky and deliberate pace to its combat, which is one of its greatest strengths. There’s no stamina management, so it all comes down to timing and spacing, making for compelling fights that you can rarely button mash your way through.
It was not uncommon to approach an encounter too casually and find myself kicked out of my shell within moments, and I loved it for that. Just like shells, it was fun to figure out which weapon fit my playstyle, equipping different ones for different types of fights.
Combat Hits With Brutal Precision
In addition to your melee weapon, you also have a sidearm that can be used for ranged combat. These are never your primary damage-dealing options, but it’s definitely worth exploring because they all feel very different and complement your arsenal in meaningful ways. My favorite was the lute, which seemed like a pretty silly inclusion when I saw it in the trailers, but was critical to my strategy, as it cast confusion on enemies and caused them to fight one another. I loved how tactically it made me think, figuring out which monsters I should confuse and which ones I should isolate and fight.
One of the other signature elements of the game is the harden mechanic, which can replace the standard parry depending on which seal you have equipped. You’ll start with two seals at the beginning, but more can be gathered as you go, and they change your defensive options. The parry seals do allow for a traditional soulslike experience, doing stagger damage to enemies when you successfully time a block, but the harden seal was way more fun for me. Instead of using a standard block, your character briefly turns to stone in the middle of whatever move they’re doing, making them immune to damage.
Time it right, and it will do stagger damage like a parry, but the exciting part is that when you un-harden, you continue with whatever action you were in the middle of. Hardening mid-combo makes you feel like a total badass, shrugging off an enemy attack during an ax swing and delivering a devastating blow as you finish the attack.
Going along with the very brutal feel to the combat are excellent execution animations. When you do enough stagger damage to enemies, they will become vulnerable, allowing you to perform a devastating move not unlike DOOM’s glory kills, though they are not guaranteed to be fatal. Combined with the game’s heavy use of blood splatter, it makes Mortal Shell II feel more savage and vicious in a satisfying way that sets it apart. Each creature has its own unique execution animation, which often involves using their own weapon against them or repeatedly stabbing them with your dagger. Unfortunately, there were several instances throughout where the animation of your character and the enemy wouldn’t sync up properly, but when it worked, these were always a fun treat.
Building Your Perfect Harbinger
Aside from your weapons and shells, there are other ways to modify your build. Through your exploration, you’ll find a plethora of Tarstones which can be used for various purposes. Many of them will give you the option to add elemental damage to your attacks, while others will give you completely different skills. They each have limitations on which weapons they can be equipped with, so your options will always depend on your loadout.
There are also consumable items you can find, which can be equipped for either active or passive effects. Usually they have a limited number of uses that will reset when you rest, and the more of them you collect, the more the items improve. While I did enjoy ones that acted as additional healing items, my favorite summoned a huge bear-like beast to my side to fight with me for a little bit, giving me a valuable tool for my arsenal.
All these can be leveled up as you go, either at beacons or in Marrow Keep. Gloom, which is acquired by killing enemies and needs to be picked up from where you died, is used to level up the Harbinger, which will provide some base level boosts no matter which shell is equipped. At certain Harbinger levels, you’ll be awarded shell points that can be spent on specific shells, allowing you to purchase extra modifiers that make the core abilities more useful.
There’s a blacksmith who operates an infernal machine that will upgrade your weapons and tarstones using specific materials. All these provide a nice power curve throughout, even if it feels like improvement comes more from your skill and pattern recognition than from the actual stats.
My favorite upgrades in Marrow Keep came from the mysterious woman who kept the shells. In exchange for a resource called Glimpse, she can strengthen the bond you have with your shell, which not only gives them a stat increase, but also provides access to the shell’s memories. This allows you to get a sense of who they were before they became your vessel, giving you both a focused character study and an extra glimpse at the world as a whole. Some of my favorite details about Mortal Shell II’s world were gleaned from these scenes, and I valued them more than any mechanical level up the game provided.
A World Overflowing With Weirdness
You’re going to need all the help you can get, because the game has a wide variety of enemies that are not only well-designed visually, but challenge you each in their own ways. While some of them are pretty standard medieval knights or brutish creatures, there are some deeply weird and creepy enemies mixed in. It was always a joy to get to a new location and find out what strange denizens lurked within, learning their patterns until you’re able to deal with them effectively.
There might be a little more repetition in location theming than I’d like, especially for something so exploration-based, but the world looks fantastic. Plenty of cliffsides have little raised circles that you can sit on, providing you an opportunity to take a break from the brutal combat and just enjoy the beautiful vistas the game provides. A solid soundtrack accompanies your exploration, enhancing it without becoming distracting, while still kicking into high gear during big encounters with some heavy metal riffs that match the game’s vibe to a T.
The surprising part about the game is that despite its doom metal tone that it gives off, it’s actually pretty funny, both with its enemy design and level layouts. There are some dungeons that almost feel like they are trolling you in a playful way, with hidden traps that act as punchlines. To contrast with the usually horrific enemy design, you’ll also run into goofier ones, like an accordion-playing old lady who comes at you with a flying dropkick.
There’s even a fakeout non-standard ending that gave me quite the chuckle. It’s the kind of humor that adds to the world through its contrast rather than breaks the world by feeling out of place, making for a richer experience overall.
A plethora of minibosses will be encountered all over, and these have a pretty wide range of quality. Some of them are just bigger or more dangerous versions of standard enemies, which feels a bit uninspired, while others can be clever bosses that are either compelling challenges or contain a mechanical or thematic trick to them. The more memorable ones included a ghost in a library archive that requires you to destroy books to make them vulnerable and a shepherd who turns a flock of docile sheep into a horde of monsters.
The most visually impressive bosses are the ones that you hunt down beyond the gates, and while I loved these fights, they also provided the largest amount of frustration with the game. Each boss comes with an epic introduction that shows off their extremely menacing design, leading to an excellent fight that felt like a true test of skill. Many of them have multiple phases, keeping you on your toes as patterns change and escalate as you progress through the battle. They feel like narratively important beings, acting as satisfying chapter markers in the game as you close the books on a specific area.
Boss Bugs Mar an Otherwise Incredible Adventure
The only issue is that, in the review build of the game, many of these bosses were pretty massively affected by technical issues. I found out late in the game from the Discord that the devs set up to chat with reviewers that there was something specific about the lute weapon that I was using that would cause the enemy AI to break, making them stop in their tracks and just take hits unresponsively until they died. Even after switching out my build to prevent that, I found some of the bosses, particularly in the endgame section that follows the defeat of the six main bosses, to still have issues with their behavior in ways that made them attack nothing or stop altogether.
There was one particular boss where if you did the execution attack on them while they were staggered, the synced animation would throw you out of the arena if you were too close to the edge, killing you instantly by no fault of your own. It felt deeply disappointing that I didn’t get to experience these bosses as intended, both for my own enjoyment and for my ability to speak on their overall challenge level definitively.
Cold Symmetry said they had a day one patch that both fixes bugs and adjusts the balance of the bosses, and I’m extremely hopeful that fixes everything. Even with all the issues I had, I enjoyed this game so much that I would love to fire up New Game+, which unlocks after completion, and play again to unlock all the weapons and shells that I missed while also experiencing bosses in their finished form. Without playing that, I can’t speak to the difficulty balance of those encounters, but based on what I’ve played, I think they would end up being satisfyingly challenging.
Soulslike games often evolve post-launch; just look at how many times they massively tweaked boss fights in Elden Ring, so even if I had played with the day one patch, it might not be the game people are playing six months down the road.
Fortunately, if the game does skew too difficult for you, there’s a built-in “easy mode” with the Slayer Seal. In addition to adding some health regeneration, when equipped, it provides you with a charge-up punch that launches you at your enemy and does massive stagger damage, allowing you to get an advantage on even the most challenging foes of the game. It doesn’t completely diminish difficulty; you still have to time the attack well and survive during its cooldown, but it’s a great way to assist without making it an unsatisfying walk in the park.
It should be noted that equipping this will disable your achievements, which is a move I don’t love, but I do understand where they are coming from. If you’re on the opposite end and find the game too easy, there’s a night mode that can be activated in Marrow Keep that makes things more challenging while also providing you with extra rewards for your trouble.
It’s a shame that I ran into so many technical issues with the bosses, because Mortal Shell II is easily among my favorite games of the year. It nails my two favorite aspects of FromSoftware’s classics, the engrossing exploration and the ominous narrative vibes, while still having brutal, deliberate combat that made me pay attention to every encounter. Its dense world packs in so many secrets in a smaller map size that gives you the freedom to explore in any order you choose. I wrapped the main story in about 30 hours, but there’s so much hidden all over the map, including weapons and shells that will have a meaningful impact on your playstyles, that I’m definitely planning on coming back for more.
I acknowledge that it’s entirely possible that the bug fixes and balance tweaks may make the bosses too challenging, but based on the overall quality of the game, I’m confident they will be able to dial it in right.
Review code provided by publisher. Mortal Shell II launches August 20 for the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC via Steam.
