I’m not sure what stage of Soulslike influence the current design sphere is in right now, what with Elden Ring’s entirely saturating the market with basically everything the genre’s playebase could want, be that the combat, storytelling, world design, player expressibility, or some combination therein. It’s possible that with FromSoft’s most recent outing that Soulslikes will go the way of Doom Clones and take what iteration the last decade of the type has gone through over the last decade and completely turn it on its head - what would the Deus Ex or Portal of Dark Souls even look like? However, that’s 2023; for a while, it seemed like the goal was less for games to take initial inspiration from FromSoft’s soft series and more to produce facsimiles of that style of game as quickly as possible with the serial numbers filed off. The obvious examples are the fast follows, Lords of the Fallen or The Surge, Nioh perhaps as a more successful variation or Salt and Sanctuary as one of the first “Darks but ____” games , but there were small enough changes made to many of this type that, while necessary to qualify their status as ‘clones’, they were worth relating back to Soulsborne games as something which was in a mutual conversation with Miyazaki’s ethos and not merely mimicking its expression.
Mortal Shell is certainly one of those games, and also certainly for the worse. It breaks off from the Souls conventions in many ways, but those ways are almost exclusively to the detriment of its systemic interactions and balance, leaving a mishmash of things which have the silhouette of Dark Souls (or really, more Demon’s Souls) without any of the refined features. If anything is unique in this game, it is a uniquity of extremity made from a childish lack of acknowledgment concerning blossomed restraint, utterly convinced that things are mature when they are simply more than they had been: Dark Souls was opaque, Mortal Shell is without form; Dark Souls was slow and methodical, Mortal Shell is leaden and finicky; Dark Souls was fantastical, Mortal Shell is maniacal. It is devoid of not simply new ideas, but of ideas at all, creating a mess of a game which promotes no excitement at progressing through any of its design axes - where Dark Souls had eureka moments of combat, building, exploration, storytelling, Mortal Shell is pages on pages of deluded beats admiring themselves for the semantic freedom, refusing to acknowledge that a sign which can mean anything means nothing, and if it is surrounded by shit, it is crowned the signatory of waste.
I realise that I was overly general in my summation, so here are just a few concrete examples of things which nip a player’s heels to bone over the course of a playthrough:
- Enemy attacks proc in regard to player proximity alone and calculate hits from that proximity, which I imagine was designed to increase use case for the hardening so that players might ostensibly have a longer period of reaction, but this proc does not consider terrain. What this means is if there is a slope between an enemy and the player, the enemy will begin an animation at the top of a slope, have the distant foreshortened because the decreased exponential distance between enemy and player, and warp to the player to compensate what the game thinks is the animation completing sooner due to proximity. Nearly every big enemy in the game has this behaviour. In every area, I would be about a 5 second run from a big bad type enemy who has begun an attack only to have them begin a sword swing that started at the maximal difference and ended .3 seconds later through my torso.
- The area design across every portion of the game world is 1) entirely a single primary colour with a minor highlight (and highlight here is roughly analogous to the way moles highlight skin), so differentiation and personality drawn from the disparate areas is nil, and 2) the architecture, both in terms of the plausibility of intelligent habitation in the world design and the traversable space afforded to the player in the level design, is laughable, literally worst in class, something that would be weakly made in Halo’s Forge mode. The game is without a map (because Dark Souls didn’t have a map, duh), and I cannot stress enough how frustrating navigating the game is when compared to, as it so desperately wants to be, Dark Souls’ masterclass in influencing navigation. The majority of the game will, even if you look at fan made maps, be spent running around in circles in a monotonously green forest fighting idiotically arranged enemy encampments, because bad level design begets bad encounter design, and the game will not reward that investment with either a systemic mastery of space nor a narrative understanding of the space’s purpose.
- Narratively speaking, of course, the game has mostly gaps which are meant to be filled; Souls never tells the story straight, so why would its imitators. The number I’ve seen thrown around for how much of the narrative is explicitly within the text of the Souls series, which here specifically does not include Bloodborne or Sekiro, is about 70%. That means that while the game can progress mostly with a majority understanding of the events imparted, major inferences must be made to complete the cycle in a player’s appraisal. Mortal Shell can’t really be described as 70% or 40% or any percent because the narrative is less a cohesive progression of events or thematic happenings and instead a boss rush with dialogue. The goals are insipid, the mummery of the PC is pointless when compared to Mortal Shell’s influences, and the flavour of the cast is unsalted and boiled. It promotes no discourse on the value of such a world with such inhabitants, and the goal of the game, when accomplished, has less textual or emotional bearing that “you played a great game”.
Mortal Shell is certainly one of those games, and also certainly for the worse. It breaks off from the Souls conventions in many ways, but those ways are almost exclusively to the detriment of its systemic interactions and balance, leaving a mishmash of things which have the silhouette of Dark Souls (or really, more Demon’s Souls) without any of the refined features. If anything is unique in this game, it is a uniquity of extremity made from a childish lack of acknowledgment concerning blossomed restraint, utterly convinced that things are mature when they are simply more than they had been: Dark Souls was opaque, Mortal Shell is without form; Dark Souls was slow and methodical, Mortal Shell is leaden and finicky; Dark Souls was fantastical, Mortal Shell is maniacal. It is devoid of not simply new ideas, but of ideas at all, creating a mess of a game which promotes no excitement at progressing through any of its design axes - where Dark Souls had eureka moments of combat, building, exploration, storytelling, Mortal Shell is pages on pages of deluded beats admiring themselves for the semantic freedom, refusing to acknowledge that a sign which can mean anything means nothing, and if it is surrounded by shit, it is crowned the signatory of waste.
I realise that I was overly general in my summation, so here are just a few concrete examples of things which nip a player’s heels to bone over the course of a playthrough:
- Enemy attacks proc in regard to player proximity alone and calculate hits from that proximity, which I imagine was designed to increase use case for the hardening so that players might ostensibly have a longer period of reaction, but this proc does not consider terrain. What this means is if there is a slope between an enemy and the player, the enemy will begin an animation at the top of a slope, have the distant foreshortened because the decreased exponential distance between enemy and player, and warp to the player to compensate what the game thinks is the animation completing sooner due to proximity. Nearly every big enemy in the game has this behaviour. In every area, I would be about a 5 second run from a big bad type enemy who has begun an attack only to have them begin a sword swing that started at the maximal difference and ended .3 seconds later through my torso.
- The area design across every portion of the game world is 1) entirely a single primary colour with a minor highlight (and highlight here is roughly analogous to the way moles highlight skin), so differentiation and personality drawn from the disparate areas is nil, and 2) the architecture, both in terms of the plausibility of intelligent habitation in the world design and the traversable space afforded to the player in the level design, is laughable, literally worst in class, something that would be weakly made in Halo’s Forge mode. The game is without a map (because Dark Souls didn’t have a map, duh), and I cannot stress enough how frustrating navigating the game is when compared to, as it so desperately wants to be, Dark Souls’ masterclass in influencing navigation. The majority of the game will, even if you look at fan made maps, be spent running around in circles in a monotonously green forest fighting idiotically arranged enemy encampments, because bad level design begets bad encounter design, and the game will not reward that investment with either a systemic mastery of space nor a narrative understanding of the space’s purpose.
- Narratively speaking, of course, the game has mostly gaps which are meant to be filled; Souls never tells the story straight, so why would its imitators. The number I’ve seen thrown around for how much of the narrative is explicitly within the text of the Souls series, which here specifically does not include Bloodborne or Sekiro, is about 70%. That means that while the game can progress mostly with a majority understanding of the events imparted, major inferences must be made to complete the cycle in a player’s appraisal. Mortal Shell can’t really be described as 70% or 40% or any percent because the narrative is less a cohesive progression of events or thematic happenings and instead a boss rush with dialogue. The goals are insipid, the mummery of the PC is pointless when compared to Mortal Shell’s influences, and the flavour of the cast is unsalted and boiled. It promotes no discourse on the value of such a world with such inhabitants, and the goal of the game, when accomplished, has less textual or emotional bearing that “you played a great game”.
LordDarias
1 year ago