The Souls-like genre is a pretty booming genre right now. So much so some people have even started calling some new Souls-like games Souls-Slop, something I feel is going a little too far but I won’t deny we are getting a lot of games in this once niche genre. What started the Souls-like genre is up for debate with some people saying it started with Demon’s Souls back on the PS3 and others pointing to games like King’s Field back on the PS1, both made by FromSoftware too. Even nowadays I’m still kind of surprised by how much this genre has taken off. It started out so niche being known for being crazy hard and not new comer friendly. For awhile it was just the Souls games from FromSoftware but slowly we started seeing others try their hand at the genre. I think it wasn’t until we got to the PS4 era that we really started to see a boom in the Souls-like genre with games like Nioh and so on. And one of those games in that era that always comes to mind for me is Mortal Shell.

Now, I am going to be super honest here, the original Mortal Shell is not good. I wouldn’t go so far to say that it is terrible or anything but I also wouldn’t recommend it either unless you were really desperate for another Souls-like game to play. The game tried to have an unique gimmick with the ‘Shells’. Unlike with most Souls-like games where you build up your character and play style by leveling up certain stats and what not, in Mortal Shell your build was based on which Shell you wanted to inhabit. Each Shell had their own abilities as well as their own strengths and weaknesses. Some where made to be more quick and light while others could be tanky. And you could switch between them back at the main area! A cool concept, and one that was done decently well, but everything else about the game simply was not good… From the boring bosses to the terrible level design, I was amazed the game got so many good scores when it released. I did managed to finish the game but it left quite the bad impression on me. So much so that when a sequel was announced I basically just rolled my eyes, expecting it to be very much the same as before. And then I played the demo and realized just how wrong I was…

Mortal Shell 2 is truly the best kind of sequel. It’s not the best game, or the best Souls-like, but it is such a massive improvement over the original in basically every single way. Enough that I felt the need to write this review after having finished it. This is truly the kind of sequel I love to see and I have to explain why.

Mortal Shell 2 marks such an improvement over the original game that I seriously had to double check and make sure it was developed by the same studio that made the original. And to my surprise, it was! The sequel was developed by Cold Symmetry, a developer I really could not find out all that much about. They have made Mortal Shell and Mortal Shell 2 and that’s it. They are certainly not an indie studio but they also don’t seem big enough to be consider AAA either. They appear to be one of the rare AA developers that you do not see in the game industry all too much anymore. I wish them only the best though as they have shown they are the kind of developers to actually learn and evolve.

This post will mostly be a review of Mortal Shell 2 but I mainly want to highlight just how well Cold Symmetry managed to improve the sequel over the original as it is something we desperately need more of in this industry. Like I said before, I did not like the original Mortal Shell. Once I finished it I had no drive to play it again and only remembered it when others brought it up. I am still baffled it managed to get so many high reviews. But thankfully, the developers didn’t just take that high praise they got from reviews, they clearly listened to the complaints from players like myself and learn from them.

Off the bat let me explain how Mortal Shell likes to do things when it comes to going through the games. Unlike a lot of Souls-like games that mainly focus on being linear with a few branching paths here and there, Mortal Shell lets you tackle the levels in the order you want. While they aren’t open world games or anything, there is an overworld to run around in with ‘gates’ that you can enter that take you to more traditional levels and clearing these gates by beating the bosses in them is how you progress in the game. This is how both games work! But it works so much better in the sequel.

The overworld in the original game is small and terrible and you will get bored of running around it in no time as fast travel is something you will only be unlocking toward the end of your adventure. While the overworld itself was small you would be spending so much time backtracking around it and not just when trying to figure out where to go next. Backtracking was built into the loop! Every time you cleared a gate you had to run back to the middle of the overworld which acted as your home base. And I truly mean you had to do this as even when fast travel was unlocked, you were locked out of using it if you were going back to the home base after beating a gate. Sure there was a lore reason for this but it was still awful.

Mortal Shell 2 has none of this.

The overworld in the sequel is not only much larger but fast travel is unlocked from the very beginning and is highly encouraged to use. And when you beat a gate, the game simply takes you back to your home base! That is already such an improvement but I can’t just stop the praise there as this new overworld is better in just about every way compared to the original.

Mortal Shell 2‘s overworld isn’t on the level of something like Elden Ring but it is still a large and very explore able place. In the original, the overworld truly just felt like it was there just to be a way to get to the gates. There never really felt like much of a reason to explore around it. In the sequel, I charted out that map as much as I could! While you can still argue that the real meat of Mortal Shell 2 is in the gate levels, the overworld itself no longer feels like something that was thrown in just to have something to connect the levels together. There is also very much a point to exploring around the overworld too rather than just running straight to the gates. The overworld is where you will find the various different Shells and weapons, usually inside little mini dungeons. And while said dungeons can vary in quality, even the ones I wasn’t really a fan of rarely stuck around long enough for me to truly be annoyed.

Speaking of mini dungeons though, let’s talk about the game’s rest points, the Beacons! In Mortal Shell 2, you can rest, level up, fast travel, and a whole lot more from the beacons around the map. This is pretty common in all Souls-likes but Mortal Shell 2 manages to stand out by having these beacons often start out corrupted. While they still function like they should regardless, you are able to enter the beacon to cleanse said corruption! This can just be a little extra thing or a requirement as that corruption can spill out of the beacon and block your path. This is the case for every gate in the game. While you could argue that this system is annoying or even padding I actually found it charming! And especially unique. Similar to the other mini dungeons, these ones can vary in quality as well but they tended to be far more original than any of the overworld mini dungeons thankfully! The beacon dungeons often had a lot more unique assets put into them while the overworld dungeons tended to pull from the same pool of assets to make theirs. Something that isn’t really a bad thing! But it does make the overworld dungeons start to feel a bit bland after awhile.

Going back to comparing the original and the sequel, let’s talk some more about those gate levels themselves! Despite the fact that they are the real meat of both games, in the original game they were only slightly better than the overworld somehow.

Level design was not the original Mortal Shell‘s strong suit. While the levels could look cool, we’ll talk more about that later, they never felt good to play. It’s hard to describe exactly what made the levels feel so bad to go through but it mostly came down to their actual structure for me. A lot of the time it just never made sense or felt natural. Now that might sound weird, expecting a fantasy world to have a structure that makes sense, but let me explain. You can have a fantastical setting and world but if it feels like the world was made to be a video game level I am not going to have a good time. I shouldn’t ever be thinking about how a place in a game is designed to be a level, like how this platform was clearly made for enemies to shoot down from or how this corner was made just so an enemy could jump out at me. That’s how the levels of the original Mortal Shell felt! They didn’t feel organic in the slightest which made them a chore to get through. But the real terrible thing about the gate levels in the original had to be the fact that once you beat the boss at the end of each you had to backtrack through the entire level again. Even when you have fast travel unlocked the game still forces you to backtrack through the level all the way back to your home base before you can fast travel again. And while sometimes they spiced up the walk back through these levels with something new to surprise you, it always felt like padding.

Thankfully, Mortal Shell 2 has none of that! Now when you finish one of the gates, you cleanse a beacon after beating a boss and are taken right back to your home base! No backtracking or anything. And even better than that, the levels are actually fun to play through in the sequel! The gate levels in Mortal Shell 2 feel so much more organic. Like, yeah, they are obviously still levels that someone designed but it doesn’t feel that way most of the time which is the important part. The flow of the levels works so well for each, even if some have some missteps here and there. But even then, the worst feeling levels in Mortal Shell 2 feel better than any level from the original game. And that is all on top of the super great art design from the first game!

While most of the overworld can feel a bit generic here and there, there are still some highlights! But the real showcase of great art style comes from the gate levels! It’s always kind of felt like the both games were going for something close to a ‘metal’ feel. Specifically heavy metal album covers. And that is really brought out in Mortal Shell 2! In the original, the art design was still great but mostly stuck to how things looked and less about the designs overall. For example, I can barely remember any of the bosses from the original game besides the final boss. That could be for a lot of reasons but bland designs are for sure one of them! This is not at all the case for the sequel.

Each of the gate bosses always felt so unique, and not just compared to one another but compared to other Souls-like games! The highlight for me has to be the Nameless Captive. He has a sword sticking out of his head that he still uses to fight you with. It is so good…

He’s far from the only memorable boss though! I won’t be going over each in detail, since I don’t want to spoil them, but very rarely did any of them feel the same to fight. None were overly difficult either even if some could be very annoying at times. Which would have to be my biggest complaint about the bosses overall! But even then, having beaten all of them now, I can’t say I outright hated any of them. Though I will say that the final boss was quite the let down but I’ll talk more on that later. Another thing I should clarify though is that this praise is mostly centered around the gate bosses in particular. Most of the bosses in other parts of the game are simply recycled and slightly tweaked versions of existing enemies given a little more power with something unique about them. Like the boss version of an enemy with a big axe now has that axe on fire meaning you can’t parry a lot of their attacks like you normally would! This sort of thing will happen a lot so you better get use to it. Though, to be fair, this isn’t something Mortal Shell 2 does exclusively, it’s pretty common for games like this to recycle enemies as bosses. But it happens so frequently that I noticed it way more in this game than say Elden Ring. That being said, I happily take having a good handful of fun and unique bosses with some bland recycled bosses than anything the original Mortal Shell had to offer.

I hope it makes more sense now why I was so shocked that this game was made by the developers of the original. While it still shares a lot with that original game, it manages to learn so much from the flaws of it too. That right there is why a game like Mortal Shell 2 truly is the best kind of sequel. It manages to keep a lot of the really cool original stuff from the first game too. The sequel obviously has more Shells as well and this time around they do feel a lot more different from one another by giving each their own set of unique abilities. They also have some differences with things like health and defense, like some of the Shells are more tanky than others like in the original. This time around though, the Shells also have much more personality to them. If you really want to unlock a Shell’s abilities, you need to bond with them and look into their memories. You do this back at the home base with Glimpse. This helps the Shells actually feel like characters instead of just suits for you to wear which I like! It’s a small thing overall but still a nice one.

However, after all that praise I do need to lay on some criticism. And this comes with a minor spoiler warning. I’m not going to be getting into too much detail but all of this criticism is centered around the final section of the game. I’ll keep it vague for the most part but you have been warned!

The final section of Mortal Shell 2 feels completely tacked on. The area itself reminds me way too much of the original game’s level design and the bosses in this area, while unique and not recycled, weren’t really my favorite either. Mainly because it felt like they didn’t need to be there. While I don’t want to say the game dragged on or over stayed its welcome, this final section really just made me want to be done with the game. And that is especially the case with the final boss! Again, going to avoid details, but it was such a damage sponge with so many unblockable attacks that it wasn’t even fun to learn the patterns of it. A slog is the best way I can describe the final boss and the final area in its entirety. Which is ironic since the final boss of the original Mortal Shell is probably the only boss I truly liked in that game! And that is sadly the note the game goes out on. But thankfully it wasn’t so bad that it ruined the experience overall!

Despite my gripes with the ending, I still highly recommend Mortal Shell 2 for any Souls-like fan! It’s not perfect but it’s an improvement. A massive one too! And the developers at Cold Symmetry need to be praised for that. I truly wish we saw more sequels like this. There are plenty of times when I play a game and can feel its potential and know that if a sequel happened it could be so great! The Callisto Protocol is always the first game that comes to mind when I think about games like that. So I genuinely hope we see more sequels like Mortal Shell 2 in the future!

But those are just my thoughts! What are some of yours? Is there a sequel you feel vastly improves on the original? Interested in Mortal Shell 2 now? I’d love to hear your thoughts so don’t be shy!

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