At first glance I was split on my thoughts on Mortal Shell. It has the bugs you would expect from a smaller indie studio, and the story suffers from hiccups that the genre seems to enjoy crediting as being “creatively vague.” It portrays itself as a tightly wound dungeon crawler that focuses on its unnerving one-on-one combat, but the amount of information was too much at the start and not explained well at all throughout.

But once I put my head firmly against the wall and found a combination of weapon and shell I enjoyed, what the game wanted just clicked for me and turned into a fulfilling test of patience and skill that had me kicking myself for thinking otherwise. Mortal Shell is absolutely worth the time, and can comfortably stand as one of the better Souls-like games in the genre.