Mortal Shell: This game is not for me

I knew this was a "souls-like" game before I even started playing it so my reaction was not terribly surprising and I quit after just a few hours. However, even though I am not a fan of "souls" games and realize that this term is thrown around too frequently, I believe that Mortal Shell is flawed in many ways that extends well beyond just that of being too difficult for casual players like me.

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The concept behind how the story is told is actually pretty cool because they don't give you any backstory. You just awaken in a watery cave with a weird corpse-like body and move forward towards eventually fighting your first enemy that it won't allow you to lose to. This is where they teach you a few of the moves that will be essential to the game such as dodge.

A bit later they introduce you to the "harden" function which is the one unique aspect of the game that I actually thought was really cool

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When you "harden" the next enemy strike will cause no damage and in some instances will stun said enemy. However, this has a recharge on it that isn't very easy to determine when the cooldown is over. I don't know how many times I hit the harden button in vain because it hadn't recharged yet

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The recharge indicator is this TINY little thing in the bottom left corner that during a battle is going to be almost impossible for you to determine whether it has actually happened or not yet. The game also doesn't even tell you about this and the only reason why I know about this is because I looked online out of frustration. Since hardening is a major part of all battles, they really should have done this differently IMO.

When you face your first boss, which happens very early on, you are meant to lose and you will. This is a tactic used in many other games and after having this guy strike me once and seeing 3/4 of my health disappear I could already tell that this was a fight you were not meant to win.

And then we get to the truly frustrating part of the game, which is the first zone of sorts that you will spend a great deal of time in called "Fallgrim."

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Fallgrim isn't terribly huge, but the major problem with it is that the game, I guess in an attempt to be open world in a way, doesn't give you any real indication of where TF you are supposed to be going. As it turns out there is a tower of sorts in the middle that is meant to be your first destination in order to obtain your future destinations, but this is not nearly as evident as it should be. I must have spent at least an hour just wandering around and encountering foes - and getting killed.... a LOT - before I stumbled upon it.

Once you get there you are given at least some indication as to where you are meant to go but even then it's anyone's guess where you should be heading. There is no map in game that I discovered, and because all off Fallgrim basically looks the same, you don't really have any geographic indication as to where you are in relation to where you should be going.

And then we get to the damn bear traps.

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I never once saw a single bear in the game or any sort of creature that these traps might be meant for but they are scattered all over the place and yes, you are going to step into them a lot. They don't do much damage but they leave you open to attacks such as this grizzly fucker that is heading towards me right above. If he uses his super attack he's gonna one-hit kill me, which he did..... many times.

The bear traps can be used as an asset because the AI on the enemies is really stupid. They will walk in a straight line towards you so if you shuffle a bit, you can get basically any enemy in the game to walk into their own bear traps every time.

Also, when you die.. .and you will, a lot, all of the enemies that you already killed respawn exactly where they were before. Since there isn't any sort of xp oriented system of leveling up, this just annoyed me more than anything else.

Another really odd flaw with the AI is that every single enemy I encountered just walks slower than you can and this includes the bosses. You can walk and even use healing items without any fear of them actually catching you. Perhaps this was intentional because the game is already extremely tough (by design) and they were trying to be a bit forgiving to new players.

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Overall I don't like to hate on games that are made by really small studios and according to the wiki this game was made by just a handful of people so I guess I commend their efforts. For "Souls" fans this might be an enjoyable experience but for me it was entirely too much of a mystery as to what the hell you are supposed to do and the difficulty was too damn high and this simply could have been resolved by simply easing you into the game a bit more.

If you are a super-difficult-game lover than maybe this would be for you but for me, I am extremely happy that I got this game for free because I would be pretty pissed off if I had paid for it.

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Grisha wants to kill you, just not enough to break a sweat by running towards you.

When I look online I see a lot of people that are saying that this game "is too easy" and I can't tell if they are trolling or if I am just that bad at it. I don't have a lot of patience for games that don't tell you how to play the damn game or give you any real indication of what your objectives are. This mystery may appeal to some but it doesn't to me. I don't mind a game being difficult, but I would like to have the game actually tell me what the mechanics of the game are and Mortal Shell does a terrible job of this.

I feel that when you play a game and feel within an hour that you have to go look online to see what you are doing wrong the designers haven't done their job properly in doing at least some level of a tutorial.