izigame.me

"'Why, I feel all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread.'" -JRR Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings'
Mortal Shell do be like that. It's not that there's no good ideas, but they're spread too thinly, when its limited content should mean the opposite: a tightly polished, very focused experience. Mortal Shell does nail the slow and methodical playstyle of older Soulslikes, along with the 'figure it out as you go along' atmosphere, but nothing else.
Its chief problem is one that it shares in common with Lords of the Fallen 2014: very limited art assets stretched out over far too much level geography. Every space in a given area pretty much looks like every other space in a given area, and that's literally the whole game. Although the levels have reasonable shortcuts and side paths, there are almost no visual landmarks. Further exacerbating this, literally half the game is shrouded in mist - it's the game's single most consistent visual element! Dark Souls 1 players might recall the Tomb of Giants. Dark Souls 2 players might remember the Shaded Woods. Well, imagine a game that is made up of half Tomb of Giants and Half Shaded Woods. Nothing else. This slows navigation to an absolute crawl. Everything is gray stone and brown earth and white fog, endlessly.
Given the navigatory pains, one might expect exploration to be more rewarding, as fair compensation, but it's actually less so. Once you find the shells (essentially your more-limited class archetypes) and weapons, there's not much left of value. Weapon upgrades are much more limited but, confoundingly, less impactful than in an average Souls game, instead of more so. If you're lucky, an upgrade will let you kill a tanky enemy in seven strong attacks instead of eight, but it might not even do that much. This also applies to enemy drops; instead of a cool, rare weapon or armor piece, you get generic consumables that remain negligible even if you bother to engage with the admittedly conceptually interesting 'use this ten times to familiarize yourself with it' mechanic. Combined with the too-harshly limited healing that forces you into a parry playstyle, and the amateurish, Lost Izalith-esque enemy-spamming placement, this strongly incentivizes running past enemies. The combat is the bulk of the game that isn't wandering around being lost, but there's not much point in engaging in it.
When you do fight something, you'll find that the hardening ability is incredibly useful, but it and the various shells don't thematically tie into anything in the same way that hollowing does in Dark Souls or parrying does in Sekiro. They're just kind of cool ideas that don't link into anything else in the setting, instead of being smaller parts of a thematically-coherent whole. This also applies to the lore overall, which greatly values obscurity and using non-obvious words for vaguely-described actions. If the stories of most Soulslikes are jigsaw puzzles, Mortal Shell's is a transparent one that's even harder to put together but doesn't give you enough information to visualize a real picture. Why does this book page turn into a spider? What's with the flying fish thing in the boss arenas? Why do the enemies and bosses look the way they do? People make fun of Dark Souls 2's handwavey 'Um, Seath made the animal people!' justification, which is absolutely the Souls equivalent of 'a wizard did it,' but Mortal Shell lacks even that much of a fig leaf around its lore. Environmental storytelling, you say? Sorry, not in this foggy town.
The game's tedium and arbitrariness makes it harder to shake off its rough edges, which feel more disrespectful with the dearth of positive reinforcement. The visual indicators for item pickups are made much harder to see than in other Soulslikes, which just goes great with the rest of the pain-in-the-posterior visual design. There are places where you can get stuck on geometry with no recourse. Some enemies will walk off cliffs to their deaths for no reason. Archers and knockdown attacks are overtuned, and enemies overall are spongey, just like the levels are aimless and confusing, all just to slow you down. Your experience is divided into two currencies, which accomplishes nothing besides making progression even more fiddly and obtuse. Many of the few abilities you acquire are of questionable worth, but you're forced to max out a shell to gain an important utility feature anyway. The whole shell system is a downgrade in player agency from picking spells, armor, and attributes, with no positives to make up for it. The 'second chance life' system where you can regain your shell once before dying permanently feels poorly thought out, as you have to run back to your shell and put yourself in danger of getting oneshot - since the enemy who just killed you is STILL THERE RIGHT NEXT TO YOUR SHELL AND WILL UNFREEZE IN APPROXIMATELY THE TIME THAT IT TAKES YOU TO RUN BACK TO IT - to get that second chance! It feels like it could have been an engaging system with a little more effort and balancing consideration put into it, but that's just everything about Mortal Shell.
Mortal Shell is a handful of half-developed but genuinely cool ideas, with a vast amount of padding and filler around them. It's absolutely desperate to slow the player down, but doesn't give them anything to engage with or admire. The developers should have gone in the opposite direction, made the game smaller, focused on having it do the few things it does do really, really well, instead of trying to make it seem more complex and epic than it had the resources to be. In these days with an abundance of great Soulslikes, it's impossible to recommend.