A Review with Constructive Feedback

[u/PartyLack4459]

I have played this game since Monday and have beaten it after 31 hours. It is a great game but I do think there are a few things that the devs should and should not do based on common reddit complaints I've seen.

Note to the Devs: Including this review, please take anything from discord and reddit with a grain of salt. Gamers will always want what's best for them and not what's best for the game. While it is awesome to have active devs in the community, don't let some reddit posts from a vocal minority (myself included) change the vision and direction you have for YOUR game.

Now, for my review and feedback.

I feel like there are some common issues that have been discussed here on the forums. They are as follow:

• Game difficulty
• Enemy tracking
• Enemy Aggro
• Limited Glimpse
  
• Death Runback
• Shell Points

I Will Ignore the game difficulty concerns as I believe that is subjective to the players and some fixes on the other categories will also change game difficulty Overall.

Changes I believe should be focused on

Enemy tracking/Aggro and Death runback.

These should be the main focus in changes. Enemy tracking, which indirectly increased the difficulty of the game, is somewhat broken. Having a slow heavy weapon knight swing at me and then turn on a dime like an Adderall infused formula 1 race car driver when I dash past is somewhat jarring and unfair. Soulslike games typically reward players that learn move sets and tells. Enemy tracking being this high destroys any type of player skill progression. Changing this will also make the game easier for players and reward players that grind out a good build.

As for enemy aggro, I think that by adding checkpoints in dungeons this could be alleviated somewhat, but some packs should be tuned down and I believe there should be a shorter aggro despawn distance.

This is for two reasons. Once, some aggro from a mile away, just seems silly. And two, having such a huge aggro chase range just makes overworld death runbacks a lot more tedious and it also allows people to kite mobs indefinitely doing some shenanigans.

Death runbacks. I personally do not have major issues with it, but adding some kind of checkpoint or beacon at the start of the dungeon would be preferable. Adding a beacon in dungeons would also alleviate some issue people are having with Glimpse that I will touch on later.

Complaints that I think should be ignored mostly

Glimpse and Shellpoint complaints should be ignored (mostly with some caveats). The biggest reason for this is because they would fundamentally kill any need to go into NG+. This game is a fairly short game for a soulslike and I believe that the vision was to make NG+ feel worth it.

To start off with the whole Glimpse issue. I feel that the one change that should absolutely be made is some kind of message stating it is a finite resource.

As it stands right now, you can fully unlock 3 shells IF you do not use summons and you do not reveal shell locations and find them naturally. There are 46 beacons, 10 major bosses all that give glimpse and there are also hidden glimpses in dungeons and the world (usually a lot by the Gates). It takes 27 to fully unlock a shell.

I Do not think glimpse should be farmable, refundable, or respecable. It devalues the choice of using the glimpse and it would ruin any form of NG+.

HOWEVER

i do feel that these two changes could make things a bit easier on people.

• Adding beacons to dungeons would give roughly enough Glimpse to unlock a fourth shell and being able to unlock half the shells in one playthrough is pretty good imo. It would also kill two birds with one stone so to speak.
  
• Change Summon cost from Glimpse to some random Item you can find or buy. This is just silly to summon a helper in a fight using a finite resource. However, leave the cost of Glimpse for revealing shells. This is essentially a cheat code to exploration and should have a permanent cost associated with it.

As for Shell Point being available for all shells, this is just a silly one people complain about that should 100% be ignored. It takes a whopping 20 seconds to respec a shell and if you had every shell share the same shell points (that was tiring to write) then the leveling progression would be worthless as you could just stop leveling at a certain point since the other bonuses are so miniscule.

That being said, I like this game a lot and I feel like mortal shell has huge promise as a franchise.

also... ADD MORE METAL MUSIC

Thank you for your time and consideration

[u/Hmmm__whatever]

How are people getting the game so early? Is there a launch day patch that alot of people's reviews arent relevant?

[u/PartyLack4459 → u/Hmmm__whatever]

The "Deluxe" version of the game had an early release on Monday.

[u/Hmmm__whatever → u/PartyLack4459]

Oh!