To the usual Dark Souls-style combat of long windups, stamina management, and rolling like a cannabis dispensary just before the bank holiday weekend, we add the unique ability to press a button to very quickly think about Jenny Agutter, make yourself go rock-hard, and deflect the next attack. There are four highly specific bodies scattered about the starting forest, and that's your lot really, it's more of a class-switching mechanic, because there's the one dude with lots of stamina, the one dude with lots of health, the one dude with lots of that third kind of stuff what you do special attacks with, and the default all-rounder dude who wonders why he doesn't get invited to parties. Not that you can occupy any corpse, mind this isn't the Dark Souls clone in which you can get revenge on those fucking poison swamp zombies by possessing one Mario Odyssey-style and running around telling all its relatives its embarrassing personal fetishes, amazing an idea as that sounds. No customization, no leveling every shell you can wear has fixed stats and armor that can't be changed and which has probably gotten very whiffy. Instead of constructing a custom character to cathartically carve a chasm through the cartilage of countless craven creeps, you have to take a character off the peg, as it were. So while the plot and setting do very little to discourage comparison to Dark Souls like a Chinese bootleg toy that somehow got through the entire manufacturing process without anyone noticing that "Batman" was misspelled, Mortal Shell offers some unique twists on the gameplay formula, most uniquely the body-inhabiting thing. There was me thinking the title was about the plight of the oil industry. You're a white ghosty dude who looks like Pepsiman contracted the Ebola virus, and you're in a forest, and before long, you discover you have the ability to inhabit certain dead bodies. Mortal Shell seems to be trying as hard as it can to out-inscrutable Dark Souls the game won't even tell you what consumable items do until you consume one, and that's the kind of learning process that got me kicked out of medical school. MORTAL SHELL LENGTH MOVIE"Dying fantasy world, inscrutable plot, you know the drill, bish bash bosh." But Dark Souls, at least, gave you something to go on an intro movie that wouldn't start making sense until around the second playthrough and the instruction "go ring the Bells of Awakening", which didn't do a whole lot of justice to the several hours of ultraviolent, directionless urban exploration between you and that goal, but it was something. "Hello! We're like Dark Souls!" is all it seems to say. I feel like Mortal Shell doesn't do enough to set the scene. You're a walking husk of a person in a dying dark fantasy world, and everything else in the world has apparently been led to believe that if they hit you hard enough, then prizes will come out. So the game is Mortal Shell, and this is normally the point where I'd summarize the plot and the setting, but I think "it is a Dark Souls clone" will do the job well enough. I'm confident if I'm ever in a sinking ship or a crashing plane, I could probably be philosophical about my impending doom, now, and I'd like to move on and meditate on some other things, like prawn cocktail-flavored crisps. a game that's an awful lot like Dark Souls!" Oh, Jesus Fucking Christ! "I thought you liked Dark Souls, Yahtzee." I did! I also had a nice time at Disneyland when I was ten, but I never wanted to fucking live there! I might just be over the whole " Souls-like" thing lovely meditations on the inevitability of entropy and death as they are, I feel like I've meditated enough. Silent Hill entering the public domain? "Nope!" Ooh! Did the entire management team at EA contract cholera from giving each other rusty trombones? "N- I. MORTAL SHELL LENGTH PCa PC release of inFamous 2? "Nope!" Is it. "Oh Yahtzee, have we got a surprise for you!" A surprise, Games Industry? Is it. This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Mortal Shell.
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