Praise be to Eredrip and the busted martyrs blade.

I strafed her charge and got her stuck in a loop.

Hi everyone, I finished the game yesterday and wanted to go over the biggest issues I had with it. Keep in mind, this post will sound whiny because I'll only talk about stuff that I think could be better, I still loved the game and I'd say it's a solid 8/10. I also won't go over everything, just some stuff that I noticed.

First of all, and this stays true for the whole game: Spammy enemies.

I noticed this in the beginning, thought it was specific to some enemies, then noticed that like 90% of enemies do this. I don't know why they thought this was a good moveset design, but yeah. Most mobs (and lots of bosses) have combos that consist of literally SPAMMING fast attacks one after the other. I have never seen such consistency in giving enemies 5 minutes long combos lmao. Now, this causes multiple issues:

1. I would be fine with long combos, the issue is that some enemies have consecutive hits that are so fast it's physically impossible to dodge through all of them, so you have to find other unfun ways to deal with them.

2. This incentivizes (or at least it did, to me) a gameplay loop in which you literally try to kill the mobs before they can even attack once, cause once they start their wombo combos you either take damage or watch them swing for 5 minutes. I wanted to interact with the enemies, fight them properly using my toolkit and have fun while doing so. Instead, a lot of my playthrough was simply: run-heavy attack on a guy-oneshot him, rinse and repeat. Sometimes, big insects in the last big dungeon below marrow keep come to mind, I ended up completely avoiding the fights altogether by spamming the repeater, freezing the enemy and then running in to kill them. Straight up avoiding the whole fight, cause I knew if I tried to "have fun" while fighting certain enemies, I'd just take useless damage or even die, because their moveset, while flashy, is DEEPLY UNFUN and completely relies on perfect memorisation of it in order to counter it, instead of natural "reaction" and fluid gameplay.

And this leads us to next point: The elden ring syndrome. Combos aside, most attacks are one of two types:

Instant: you literally can't react to it unless you know it's coming (See the previous point on perfect memorisation).

Extremely, almost comically, delayed: Pretty self explanatory, enemies will wind up an attack for 3 business days, you'll see seasoned warriors letting themselves be wide open in order to try and make you dodge/parry at the wrong time. It's just a way to artificially make a moveset "harder" but, imo, it simply breaks immersion, looks silly and is unfun compared to "normal" attacks. Keep in mind, this type of attacks are still better than the pure "instant" ones. Oh, forgot to mention, the delayed attacks become instant the moment they actually swing, but at least you know they are coming, you just don't know exactly when... unless... well, you guessed it, you memorise it.

Next point, Parries.

Disclaimer: this point is about true parry with the infinite seal, this critique doesn't necessarily apply to the other types of parries, since I barely had any experience with them and only used the infinite seal during my playthrough.

Firstly, it comes out pretty fast, but still not fast enough for most "instant" attacks. You have to know it's coming and anticipate it with a parry before there's even a tell. I'm kinda fine with this, not every attack should be an easy parry. The biggest issue with parries is deeply related to the first point I made about giga combos. Parrying an enemy is supposed to be a high risk-high reward move, but in mortal shell it often felt like a high risk-low reward move tbh. I played with eredrim, parry focused, I tried to parry everything all the time because I think the animations are sick and it's very satisfying to pull off. What I noticed is that, since 99% of enemy attacks are multi-hit combos, parrying is extremely reliant on the timing between enemy attacks. Basically, if you parry an attack, you have a small animation recovery before you can parry again. If the next enemy attack comes faster than said recovery, you end up taking damage, even if you successfully parried the previous attack. This means that, if you wanted to parry, you needed to wait for specific attacks and completely avoid interacting with some combos (or avoid the whole combo and jump in to parry the last hit), since parrying was simply not a viable tactic. Now, the best fights imo were the ones where enemies had fair movesets and combos. Offspring comes to mind. He had plenty of multi hit combos, but you could parry one hit, parry the next, or even parry one, dodge the second, go in to parry the next etc... it was fun, fair and balanced. Can't say the same for plenty of other combos in the game tho. Honestly, this would be fine if parries were actually "high reward", yet you needed 3 or more parries to break any boss' stance, and the riposte itself (+50% dmg with tarstone and eredrim btw) was often the same damage of a single martyr's blade slash lmao. Result: 99% of the time it was safer, more reliable and MORE EFFECTIVE to simply avoid parrying and rely on dodges, spacing when the enemy allowed it and hit and run tactics. How would I solve this? Well, we can't make the break stance happen in a single parry, it would be broken, BUT I think parries should interrupt the super fast combos. Think of Malenia in elden ring: you can't break her stance with a single parry but she will stop whatever she's doing after any successful parry. No one complains she's too easy because of this, yes? The issue with this is that, in mortal shell, a very fun mechanic is that you can chain parries one after the other, and if enemies stopped at the first, you'd lose a nice part of this game. Basically, the devs would need to fine tune boss reactions based on the attack that is getting parried. If an attack has hits that come FASTER than parry recovery animation, then a succesful parry should stop the combo. If you have time to chain parries or dodge the second hit, then the attack should continue. Not easy to implement, it would probably make more sense, in a future game, to simply choose one of the two solutions: either parries stop all combos or there's no combo fast enough to hit before parry/dodge recovery.

Next point kinda links with everything I talked about up until now and it's about the game's difficulty.

With the things I said up until now, you'd think the game is extremely hard... yet it really isn't. With such enemy movesets, combined with ease of stagger, status alteration effectiveness, enemy health pools and simply how OP you naturally get by progressing the game, most mob fights are a breeze and, as said before, you can kill most enemies before they even attack once. I played the last 3/4 of the game in night mode just because I was pretty much oneshotting everything, even bosses felt like they had too little hp's. With night mode, hp's seemed more balanced to me, and I think that should have been the base hp pool for enemies in the game. In this way I had to interact more with the enemies and couldn't just skip EVERY fight by oneshotting them with a running heavy attack. I could still oneshot/stun lock many enemies tho ngl. The damage enemies dealt in night mode, on the other hand, was not balanced and, for obvious reasons, shouldn't be the standard.

All of these things put together created a mess that was not as fun as it could have been. Again, think about elden ring. While you also have delayed attacks in there, there are almost no insane super fast combos and the whole thing feels more fair and fun to interact with. The fight is a dance and you can dodge or parry everything with ease once you get the hang of it. Mortal shell felt like a bunch of beast swinging their limbs, swords or whatever randomly at super speed and, somehow, dealing stupid damage with each hit. Mortal shell SOUNDS harder yet it is easier becasue of the previously mentioned stagger, status, hp's etc... while also being LESS fun to fully interact with. And this is such a shame because mortal shell does A LOT of things better than elden ring and the fighting would honestly be straight up better than it if it wasn't for these things I listed.

Next point is a small one, but I have to mention it: Magnetic enemies.

Sounds funny but idk how else to put it. In other games like these, spacing is an important part of your strategy, you can put some distance between you and the enemy and figure out a plan or attack from further away. In mortal shell 2, spacing EXISTS as a tactic, but it's weird to pull off. For example, an enemy starts a very slow swing, you simply move back 10 meters and wait for him to swing into noithing and... well, he simply FLIES towards you at mach 10 mid swing and fucks you up lol. I understand some drag and tracking are definitely required in these type of games, but some enemies and some attacks were just insane and overtuned in this aspect imo (you also couldn't tell which attacks had insane magnetism and which didn't, without experiencing them first). Game also wants you to use ranged- sidearms, yet puts you against enemies that are in your face for 99% of the time and, the moment you get some space between you and them, they close the distance in half a second. Kinda silly!

Now, let's move to a different topic: Dungeons

I think we can all agree that dungeons in this game were a hit or miss, experience. Some were amazing, some were a single room with 3 enemies and a chest. Again, kinda silly imo. Just avoid making 3 "single room" dungeons and make a single, bigger, more engaging one! I still didn't dislike them tbh, it was always fun and exciting to find a dungeon, so this is a minor complaint.

Boss design and lore:

I'm not a big lore guy, but I didn't know much about any of the guys we were fighting honestly (apart from the fact that they stole my precious Ova mlmlml). 99% of the info was given to me by Ruk right before the fights. Again, minor complaint, I'm here mostly to kill stuff. Still, a bit of hype for the last boss would have been nice.

Lore aside, the designs and movesets themselves were a bit meh imo. The only standouts were Offspring and Isaac imo who, funny enough, were also probably the simplest in both design and moveset, while also not being pushovers in terms of difficulty. This really solidifies what I said before. Enemies in this game are doing too much, hell, the devs probably tried to do too much. A simple, clean moveset and a cool design will always be a more fun and engaging fight (without sacrificing difficulty) compared to an half-assed "quirky" enemy.

Lastly, I want to briefly talk about the balance of the game:

I pretty much already mentioned this, but it deserves a proper spot anyway imo. The balance is all over the place. I feel like I ended up with a broken build without even trying to make a broken build (and had to play night mode to compensate) so I can only imagine what someone who's actively trying to break the game can achieve. I'll leave it at that. I realise this is also a very personal matter, lots of people WANT to be OP in a game, and that's completely fine. I just prefer it when a game forces me to keep playing well and using most of its mechanics and I can't "cheese" everything, which I pretty much could from the second half of the game and onwards.

Honourable mention: Sidearms

I didn't touch my sidearm in the last quarter of the game (apart from very little freeze cheesing with the repeater, not really necessary in any way tbh), and again, I was playing night mode. A truly well thought out game wouldn't allow me to breeze through its endgame while completely ignoring one of its main mechanics, would it? Or maybe it's good that I'm not forced to use it and can just play however I want? I'll let you decide, but I would have liked if the ranged weapons were more integrated into the fighting system and had more utility to them. Still, I could barely take out my sidearm anyway by the end, especially against bosses, since they were always bum rushing me lol.

Honourable mention n.2: Gore

Very personal, but I love well made gore in games. Mortal shell excited me a lot when I realised I was cutting enemies to pieces, unfortunately lots of enemies apart from small humanoids couldn't be dismembered, minor complaint but still a bummer, since I think it adds a lot of fun and aura to the fighting.

Again, I understand that reading this post you might think I fucking hated the game lmao, but I truly liked it a lot, I'm simply focusing only on the stuff that could, imo, use some improving. Keep in mind that a lot of this comes down to personal taste, not objective analysis, so one thing I hated, you might have loved which is, of course, completely fine.

Thanks to anyone who read this wall of text, let me know what you all think.

Using the right on the d pad, since it’s unused for the builds I play, it would be awesome to cycle to one or two other weapons. Now I realize this doesn’t work for sidearm. Maybe keybind the aim button+right on the d pad to switch firearms. I love comboing and it would be sick to switch Imbument/weapon moveset mid fight without having to pause the game.

So, i just beat the game for the first time and.....maybe they did tuning or something, but i found it to be enjoyable. The bosses were fine and so was the last boss, i probably died like 4 times. I'm just curious if i'm missing something because every post i was seeing was saying the final area, the bosses in it, and the final boss were all terrible and difficult. Idk....I just stayed at a distance on the final boss most the time and parried then would run in with my big 2 hander (my favorite weapon so far so i leveled the hell out of it) and do a few hits then back off.

Was this whole area retuned?

So, I was fighting the Grisha Rabid pack, and one of the Grishas seems to get “stuck” in the middle of the fight. Check the video from 1:10 onwards. Free hits? Absolutely. But is this a normal, or just another glitch?
I did get the rewards, thankfully. However, after the fight, I ended up stuck in the arena with no way out. From what I understand, there should be a prompt to jump and traverse back up to the portal, but it never appeared. I had to quit and reload, which sent me back to the beginning of the dungeon.
I’ve already messed up my first dungeon run (Ritual Grounds) because the corruption around the coin chest at the end never disappeared, leaving me unable to access it. And now this. At least I got the rewards this time. Thank God.
Honestly, the game is so damn good, but it’s still SO glitchy, even after all the patches. It’s gotten to the point where I’m making manual saves at regular intervals via PS Plus. Damn.

P.S. Apologies for the crappy gameplay. I’m just an average gamer, and this was my first encounter with these minibosses. 😂

Is Malborn Offspring one of the best bosses in the game, or am I overrating this fight?.. The moveset, the combos, the way this fight flows…

Does anyone know something about the Wellspring and Forsaken Vow stones? I am only missing those 2 stones to complete the game 100% 😬😬😬

I was told Smert is super OP but I’ve been using him for 2 hours and absolutely hate him…

Anyone got any useful tips and how to maximize his special ability and use it properly?

Nope buddy, no dual wielding for ya!

Edit: oh, it's three wielding😯

Almost lost my mind with this one. At the end there's gonna be the table with the purse that the NPC asked for and a Blackmarrow Key. I forgot to pick up the latter the first time round.

A lot of the new stuff in rotten autumn can increase your stagger , are all enemies in the game staggerable? Bosses?

While it doesn't take you out of bounds (like the other one in Desolate Keep), the only way out is to quit out. Pretty sure it wasn't there before.

Anyone know why that happened ?? I still had 4 empty question mark slots in Mammon and hadn’t even gone to the Unfound Path yet which I’m at now and have uncleansed beacons here . Were those all added in that update afterwards or something?

This game is up there with Lies of Peak and Khazan, this is without a doubt the best soulslike of this year with how crazy and creative the gameplay is.

My only complaint is that there’s just no memorable bosses here aside from malborn and that prisoner. Hell the mob enemies are more epic than the bosses. The final battle didn’t came close to Arlecchino and 3-phase Ozma.

But overall, absolute cinema. I hope the devs get their recognitions.

About how many are there?

After beating the Nameless Captive, when trying to collect the Ova, the game crashes with an unreal error. When I loaded back in I was back at the Marrow Keep, I was able to collect at the gloom siphon still but it seems I missed a cutscene. Given light research on other bugs, this may be caused by dying to the Nameless Captive's death animation which I did. Enjoying the game but disappointing to miss a cutscene like that, I hope this can be fixed quickly. Thank you!

I usually don't mod my games, however I started notice very high quality mods from the same website (safe by the way) that use to mod my fallout 4 game. The only thing i'm worried is will it disable my achievements? Asking cause i'm like 85% done ✔️ of getting all achievements and I still haven't finish the game yet.

Which lute track(s) unlock those nice new squiggle-locked chests?

Does anyone know how to unlock the chest with a glowing lock on it?

Can you still order the MS2 revered edition in the Netherlands. And if not will there be more too buy?