My favorite Shell, Solomon, focuses on using Resolve to use Empowered Ripostes and powerful weapon abilities to keep his health topped off. This is, visually, one of my favorite levels I’ve ever seen in a video game. Tar is used to fuel the abilities, but Glimpses are what actually lets any given Shell remember what they were once capable of. Glimpses, in fiction, are fragments of memory that people leave behind in death. Once you discover the name of a Shell by successfully taking it to Sister Ganesha, you can unlock a suite of abilities using Tar (the game’s primary currency) and a resource known as Glimpses. The basic interplay between each of these systems is incredible, and that’s before you account for how different Shells (the four bodies you can inhabit in the game) alter these relationships. But the game offers you so many ways of avoiding and mitigating said damage that it rarely feels unfair (and you’re offered two lives every time you journey out into the game’s harsh world). Yes, the enemies of Mortal Shell do a lot of damage. I drive the point of my chisel into his chest and he falls before me, my own health restored. A wave of magical energy knocks his hammer back, throwing him off balance. He starts a slow horizontal swing and I raise the Tempered Seal. I over-commit and run out of stamina again, only to see my first Resolve gauge is full. I dive in for another flurry of attacks, driving his health lower and lower. His massive windup gives me time to recover my stamina, and his hammer bounces off. I realize all too late that I don’t have time to avoid his next lengthy attack animation, so I Harden early. This fills 2/3rds of my first Resolve gauge and leaves my stamina on empty. When I engage a hammer-wielding giant, I dodge through his first heavy slam before unleashing a flurry of attacks. Hardening, your character’s ability to block damage by turning their body to stone, is on a cooldown. Parries (which restore health) and weapon abilities rely on Resolve. Health, Stamina, Resolve, and your ability to Harden. Mortal Shell ’s combat is based on the relationship among the game’s four primary resources. While the game initially lacks a distinguishing aesthetic (which it more than makes up for in one particularly gorgeous later area) it has an incredible grasp of how to make a Souls game feel good. The recently released Mortal Shell sticks close to the vision that started it all, a dark western fantasy with a complicated relationship to death and undeath at its center. The Souls-like (Soulsborne? Souls-adjacent? Third Person Action RPG With A Heavy Focus on Animation Based Combat and Pattern Recognition?) subgenre has exploded in recent years, taking on a wide variety of settings and aesthetics. Mortal Shell hasn’t answered that particular question for me, but it has answered many others. I awake in a body I still don’t understand and wonder if I sweat in all this heat. I lunge for it, only to meet a halberd’s blade mid-flight. I scramble up, desperate to return to the Shell I’d been inhabiting moments before. Later, I’m caught off guard by a man twice my size wielding a halberd, he throws me from my body and my newborn back slams into the dirt. A broken man’s wide swing leaves him open and in three strikes he’s gone, for now. I push through the wet heat of the forest, stillwater filling the boots on my unfamiliar feet, as I try to find somewhere to rest. More stamina, less health, middling Resolve. It begins nameless and forgetful, a collection of stats without any distinguishing traits. “A man is more than just a sleeve.” The game reminds me as I take a new body.
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