Elden Ring is a wonderful game, but I place it high B/low A tier in the broader FromSoft pantheon. My biggest issue is the size of the world: I think it is simply too big. I’ve touched on this in earlier notes. Mortal Shell 2 asks, what if we condensed the best bits of an open-world FromSoft-style game into a compressed but still large map; what if we took that 100+ hour game of Elden Ring and just gave you 30 hours of its greatest hits? Mortal Shell 2’s map design is open like Elden Ring, but sized closer to Dark Souls.
This is an exciting proposition. And I like Mortal Shell 2 a lot. I think it sits with some of the best From-likes, such as Lies of P. The issue is that Mortal Shell 2’s “greatest hits” are usually the equivalent of fun-but-forgettable moments from Elden Ring. Of course, it is unfair to think Cold Symmetry and From Software could compete in scope and quality, but it is an inevitable, maybe necessary, comparison.
Let’s start with some of Mortal Shell 2’s clever solutions to ongoing issues in the FromSoft formula.
The Ateria Leaf problem
In later FromSoft games, especially Elden Ring, when we start from a design pillar of “this world will be big,” we quickly run into a problem with discovering consumables. Players are greedy, and so a fun, visually interesting level to explore is not enough: we also want compensation, a reward, for attentively picking through the map. How do we create consumables that are exciting? Elden Ring doesn’t really have an answer to this. You’re going to pick up a lot of disappointing junk.
In Mortal Shell 2, consumables’ power increases with each additional consumable you find. If you find one Tarspore, you’ll have 10% poison resistance. But as you continue to explore and you find more and more Tarspores, your poison resistance stacks. I think this pretty elegantly solves two problems at once: as a player, I was pretty much always happy to find these stacking consumables. And as a designer, you only have to build out a comparatively small number of pickups (compared to having to make assets for item 1: gives poison res, item 2: heals poison buildup, item 3: heals buildup and gives res, etc.). There are other design tradeoffs this system introduces. For example, I remember running around the lightning zone, and it felt like every five feet there was a lightning res pickup, which got a little transparent. But I think that’s more of an item distribution issue.
The “wizard finds a dope hammer they can’t use” problem
It’s a tale as old as the RPG genre: you’ve cleared a difficult challenge, maybe one you’ve plucked away at for hours. You can’t wait to see what cool weapon you’re going to get, annnnnd you don’t have the stats to even hold it right. How can you make finding weapons rewarding when players are using radically different builds? And again, this is a question Elden Ring doesn’t have an answer for. The deliberate player will simply haul a massive, mostly useless inventory.
Mortal Shell 2 solves this in two ways: 1. A straightforward, in-game way to know what weapons are where, and 2. Spinning the character-building away from the level-up system and putting it in a skilltree that’s more about bonuses than trade offs.
For 1., there is a merchant at the start of the game who sells you maps. When deciding which map to buy, the game only tells you the weapon’s name. And the weapons are well-named: who doesn’t want the Clockwork Scythe, or the Axetana, or the Ballistizooka? Buy the map, and it marks the dungeon that holds the weapon. I would have been okay with a touch more vagueness in terms of the location, but I think it’s fine.
As simple as it is, to me this is an underrated feature. I actually have this problem with all Souls games: the combat is the focus, and the only way to see variations in the combat is by finding new weapons. Your verbs in these games are so limited. It’s really just “punch.” So finding and experimenting with different types of punches ends up doing more load-bearing than I think players realize. At least for me, in most of these games I end up saving a lot of upgrade materials and doing outside research into weapons because I want to find the coolest or most exciting one. And relatedly, a bummer to me in Souls and Soulslikes is finding an awesome weapon in the back quarter of the game. Like great, now I can play with this sick ass sword for the last 10 hours, and I would have loved to wield it 30 hours ago. Obviously we can’t just give all the weapons away upfront, but I think we can find a better balance. (Sidenote: I like how the new Tarnished edition of Elden Ring handles this. It seeds basic, less interesting/powerful versions of the new weapon classes from the DLC into the early game (the DLC is only accessible mid-late game for most players), so you have the ability to play through that initial content with eg the backhand blades.) Mortal Shell 2’s map solution is simple, but I think it’s worth emphasizing.
Again, of course there are tradeoffs. If you buy the maps you no longer have the opportunity for that organic discovery. If you really value that, you could forgo the maps. Personally, since I didn’t always want to spend the currency on maps, I still had that organic discovery. And since in these games I am usually googling for the coolest weapon’s location at a certain point, I’m not getting that sense of discovery anyway. I really appreciated having an in-game way to mark these locations. And I think it expands the sense of player agency. I could prioritize hunting down a new weapon whenever I wanted, and I knew it wouldn’t be fruitless.
For 2., leveling up is strictly linear. You level up, all your stats go up, and there are no stat requirements. The character-building is offloaded to your shell and your tarstones, various equipable modifiers to your weapons and abilities. The shells themselves have expected archetypes like rogue or tank (and some fun, unexpected ones like berzerker or summoner) and a skilltree. It’s prescriptive character-building, of course, both in that you have to choose from one of the preset shells, and you can only gain skills present in the tree. But there’s a surprising amount of flexibility in that system. I mostly ran with Proxima. If you look at her innate skill and passive, it’s clear she’s supposed to be a bruiser/isolater: use her skill to drag an enemy close Scorpion-style and make positive trades with her Grafter Armor passive. But instead I ran her like a glass cannon, completely ignoring her tanky passive and investing fully into lightning damage.
There’s an easy critique of this system, that it reduces player connection by forcing you into a preset character. I’d argue it’s not that different from choosing between an Astrologer, Prisoner, or Prophet at the beginning of Elden Ring. Even when you’re character building in FromSoft style games, you’re never starting from scratch. You’re not coming up with characters wholecloth and able to mold your tarnished into that exact vision. You are always in conversation with the game and its limits. You are always starting with their prescribed action figures. And I think the limits of character building in FromSoft games are higher than its levelup system implies. Mostly because of the limited verb (punch). The shell system is like discovering a midgame Astrologer with some abilities already unlocked.
Player expression in FromSoft games
Now there is a third element here, which is the ease of respeccing. Enforcing limited respeccing feels like the designers holding back a toy players think they want, but the devs know it would worsen the overall experience. And broadly I am almost always in the dev’s camp on this. The design tradeoff with cheap respecs is that your character building choices don’t “matter” because they can always be undone.
I want to pose this question: in FromSoft-style action RPGs, which choices matter to the player? Your character in this style of game is an empty vessel, an avatar for your weapon choice. Personally I had zero connection to any of my tarnished, ashen ones, or undead. What I remember fondly, what I have a connection to, is the Dark Moon Greatsword, the Onyx Blade, the Kirkhammer, the Man Serpent Greatsword. (Side note: I think players develop connections to their avatar in these games primarily through fashion. Mortal Shell 2 mostly offers colorways.)
In the design space of FromSoft games and their siblings, I think the choices that matter are the choices you make in combat. I think this is really why players are such purists about difficulty in these games. I think this is why players are so defensive about not summoning or playing “honorably” by avoiding magic. Moreso than the marketing, reputation, or pride. I made the right choices. Did you?
To that extent, I think cheap respeccing is key in allowing players to find the build and weapon they want to express in combat.
Some quick criticisms and thoughts:
Major boss design is usually poor, which is unfortunate because there are so few of them. I think there are two-three bosses with exciting design and are fun to fight (Magdalena and Isaac, and the Hexapod is cool too). The rest are visually uninspired and boring to fight. I have to call out the final boss as especially disappointing.
I like the overall visual direction and aesthetic they achieve. It’s metal with the right amount of self-seriousness and goofiness. But in practice, the game looked very washed-out on my screen. I had a hard time finding the right balance of brightness/gamma to alleviate this. I feel like their aesthetic is achievable even without restricting the color palette to brown, green, or white.
The northern part of the map is the most fun to explore. I think this is largely because the land mass is mostly contiguous, which maintains a better connection between the player and their journey. The southern half is broken up with a lot of teleportation points over impassable canyons. It’s just less fun to constantly jump back and forth between contained segments.
Beacon distribution in this game is… wacky. I feel something is lost with modern FromSoft games putting a bonfire every ten feet. In Mortal Shell 2, at least in the version I played (I think they patched in some extra beacons recently?), you are hoofing it for ages without the security of a nearby bonfire. It’s often exciting! I love the push/pull of exploring a new area and fighting new mobs, while holding a big bag of souls and managing limited healing resources. I think it leads to a unique tension and a fun failure when you inevitably eat dirt. The downside is that the runback is actively disheartening, but not because it’s difficult or frustrating. Rather, the design encourages you to play as safe as possible. You’re incentivized to run past most mobs and not engage with the game, because you don’t want to lose those souls. It’s such an interesting back-to-back experience of this exhilarating hunt for a nearby beacon, death, and then this transparent runback that exposes the artifice of the tension. I spent 10 full minutes clearing out these rooms. I could have ran past these dudes in 15 seconds all along? The obvious solution, to introduce harder blockers between zones that require you to fight, must flop during playtesting, because I’m hard pressed thinking of a modern Souls/Soulslike game that doesn’t have either too many bonfires or mobs you can ignore.
The shell mechanic is interesting. The occupier of the shell, the skeletal harbinger, doesn’t receive the same benefits when levelling up. In late game, when you’re knocked out of your shell, your max stamina and health drop considerably. In practice, this leads to fights where you’re knocked out of your shell in the middle of a boss’s multihit attack, and immediately die for real. I feel like in the late game, I’d rather just have died instead of playing as the skeleton.
Small dungeons are weird and should have been Jaquaysed-up a little more (a simple ask, really, just make the dungeons better bro). Too many of these small dungeons just had dead-ends. I frequently had a lingering sense of surely I’m missing something and would run around smacking every wall to no avail. I do like the idea of a bite-sized dungeon where the main attraction is a quick combat encounter, a brief side-story, or a troll. As an answer to the catacombs of Elden Ring, which were far too samey, this is an option I’d like to see further developed.