The game has a dark, depressing, and hollowed-out medieval Dark Fantasy setting and character design. You play as a being that can possess one of 4 "shells" that serve as your body, each one providing a different playstyle. Healing is rare, and instead you are expected to negate enemy damage entirely by "hardening" your body to stone or dodging through enemy attacks.
An expansion titled The Virtuous Cycle was unveiled on July 28, 2021 and released on August 18th of the same year, coinciding with the game's release on Steam.
Tropes present in Mortal Shell:
- Acquired Poison Immunity: Using certain items ranks up their familiarity statistic and sometimes changes their effect. The otherwise-useless "Tarcap" mushroom that poisons you instead grants temporary poison immunity once its familiarity is maxed out. And as a bit of Developer's Foresight, consuming one as Tiel, the shell that heals from poison damage, maxes out its familiarity instantly, to keep you from deliberately poisoning to heal yourself.
- Ambiguous Situation: Mortal Shell leaves it up to the player to piece together the plot from various flavor texts, item descriptions, and the world itself. At no point do you receive any kind of exposition cluing you in to what's going on. The creature you begin the game as doesn't speak and seems to be as clueless as you are about what the world is; Sester Genessa calls you a "foundling" because you're like a lost orphan.
- And Your Reward Is Clothes: After the "Rotten Autumn" update, feeding Gorf certain amounts of food (X amount of rats, frogs and/or rotten food) and then playing the lute in front of him will make him puke up a new Shade on a Shell, and each Shell has two different Shades.
- Annoying Arrows: Depending on the shell you inhabit, arrows can take off a lot or a little health, but they all bounce off your armor, because all four shells happen to be heavily armored. (Even more so if you're Hardened, the arrows don't even break your hardening stance). The one ranged weapon the Foundling gets, however, is anything but "annoying," as it's more like a siege weapon in portable form.
- Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: The Foundling at the end of the game, maybe.
- Attack! Attack! Attack!: The game pushes you towards this with the harden and health mechanics. Enemies hit hard and attack quickly but Hardening will deflect any attack and will interrupt enemy combos while briefly stunning them if timed correctly. So a reliable strategy most of time will be to pick an opening and go in swinging stun locking enemies till they are defeated or your stamina runs out while hardening if the they manage to get a swing in or other enemies interrupt your moves.
- This is more true for Harros and Tiel than Solomon and Eredrim. Harros focuses on hardening more than other shells, with abilities that reduce its cooldown or even let you refresh it by cutting down enemies quickly, and one key ability that radically increases his stamina recovery whenever he does, allowing him to charge in and blow all his stamina on attacks, harden to survive the enemy counterattack, and then unload on them again with a fresh bar. Tiel, on the other hand, just has far more stamina than any of the other classes, allowing him to wail away at enemies at will and still have enough left to dodge away. He also has an ability that passively increases his damage when his stamina does get low. His severely limited Resolve stocks also means he'll be less reliant on weapon skills and parrying than the others.
- Awesome, but Impractical: The players sole projectile weapon melts just about all non-boss monsters in one or two hits. Naturally you might assume you'll be able to go crazy with it and turn the game into a cake walk, however ammo is expensive to buy and very rarely dropped from enemies. It also does a relatively small amount of damage to bosses as well as being slow to both use and reload.
- BFG: The "Ballistazooka" you can repair for buying Tools for 8000 Tar at the top of the hub area is a heavier-than-heavy boxy crossbow affair that launches a huge bolt. The bolt fired by that thing tends to turn lesser enemies into Pink Mist and can kill all but the toughest elites, often pinning them to the wall.
- BFS: Your starting weapon is the Hallowed Sword, a long blade that requires two hands to swing effectively. The Martyr's Blade you can unlock at the beginning of the Abandoned Chamber is even bigger. The hilt of the sword is as long as your character's torso and the blade stands taller than you do. Needless to say, it hits like a truck, but it swings rather slowly and requires a lot of stamina.
- Boring, but Practical: The Smoldering Mace and to a lesser extent the Martyr's Blade. Both are heavy weapons that are slow to swing and use up a considerable amount of stamina, but are great for crowd control with the range of their move sets and powerful special attacks.
- Crapsack World: Mortal Shell seems to take place in a world that feels very much dead. The living inhabitants seem to mostly be brigands who attack you on sight, and cultists guarding more advanced ruins, but any semblance of civilization seems to have fled long, long ago.
- Elemental Shapeshifter: In lieu of a shield, you can Harden, briefly turning your body to stone in order to block damage. You can do it at any time, even in the middle of other animations such as attacking, though it has to recharge between uses.
- Fighter, Mage, Thief: The four shells you can possess have different playstyles that align roughly with the typical Fighter, Mage, Thief dynamic. They're all good with a weapon, but the "scholar" shell learns more about items upon use and has more "resolve," the secondary resource you use for special attacks. The Fragile Speedster of the group has lots of poison abilities and can learn to be immune to poison.
- Gratuitous Latin: Upon death, you get the message "Mors Finis Non Est" (Death Is Not The End).
- Guide Dang It!: If you thought Dark Souls was inscrutable, Mortal Shell makes it look practically hand-holdy by comparison. Apart from the introductory tutorial that teaches you the basics (and only the basics) of combat, the game is firmly committed to telling you practically nothing whatsoever about anything (even the controls for parrying and weapon skills, since you only unlock these after the tutorial). EVERYTHING has to be learned through trial and error experimentation- or more likely, getting fed up with it and looking things up on the internet.
- Hopeless Boss Fight: The tutorial ends with you facing down against Hadern for the first time. If you're playing the game for the first time, you will almost certainly lose, even if you're experienced at the Souls-like RPG genre, as he has a lot of HP as well as the same abilities as you plus the Mechanical Spike ability for the Hallowed Sword (although despite still being in Foundling form, you're at least not a One-Hit-Point Wonder during the tutorial). If you can defeat him there's an achievement and a valuable Glimpse of Reverie in it for you.
- Hyperspace Arsenal: Surprisingly averted for a "Souls-like" game. There are only 4 weapons in the entire game (5 with the DLC), and you can only carry one at a time, with the others being stored at the Tower along with your other Shells. However, you can find items that let you switch weapons on the fly, which are thankfully infinite use (unlike the items that switch your Shell on the fly, which are consumable and fairly expensive to buy).
- Last Chance Hit Point: Once per life, upon taking fatal damage, you will get launched out of your shell with a tiny amount of HP remaining and can climb back in for a full heal (provided you can avoid getting hit again first). You can purchase an upgrade that lets you regain your Last Chance Hit Point after spending it by killing enough enemies.
- Morph Weapon: The "Virtuous Cycle" DLC introduces the Axatana which can be a two-handed axe or split apart into twin katanas.
- Multiple Endings: In a manner of speaking. There is a friendly brigand named Baghead who asks if you'd like to join him and live the brigand life. If you accept, you get a cutscene of the two of you playing the lute and partying, then you get credits, technically making it an ending. However, it doesn't end your playthrough.
- New Game Plus: After you complete the game once by fighting The Old Prisoner/The Unchained, you start right back again at the Tower with all of your upgrades and shells. Sester Genessa will even comment that it's happening all over again. Enemies now have more health and do more damage, but weapons can now be upgraded to +10 to compensate. Enemies will now also deal chip damage through your Harden. Any weapon upgrades you picked up in your first playthrough will be replaced with extra Quenching Acids, and Sester Genessa will also add Quenching Acids to her store available to maxed-out Shells.
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Nintendo Hard: Well, it is a Souls-like game. Checkpoints are few and far between, enemies can kill you in a few hits and your healing options are limited to (rather risky) parries and (limited) healing items. - Possessing a Dead Body: Your Shells used to be living people. Lucky for you they're not living anymore, so you can hop in. Some people will even recognize particular Shells as people they know (most notably the Old Prisoner, who was Solomon's brother), but after getting a good look at you they realize you're just wearing their body.
- Punny Name: Hadern can also use the Harden ability.
- Reality Is Out to Lunch: Eternal Narthex is a zone made of obsidian obelisks that gets more and more bizarre and disconnected from reality the further you climb. Eventually the ground disappears entirely, the stone slabs float in the air in circular formations, and the last appearance of Sester Genessa before the boss fight has her inexplicably giant, staring down at you. She acknowledges that reality is just a bit weird here.
- Recurring Boss: You fight the knight-like enemy Hadern every time you acquire a new weapon, with him using said new weapon against you and you having to defeat him to acquire it, as well as at the end of the tutorial in a Hopeless Boss Fight. You also fight werewolf-like Grishas multiple times as boss fights. The game's only unique bosses are the 3 main objective bosses, the final boss, and a single Ven Noctivagu guarding Tiel's shell, which is literally just a non-respawning common Nocteserper enemy with a unique name and a life meter appropriate for a "boss".
- Sdrawkcab Name: Gorf, the giant frog, is "frog" backwards.
- Shout-Out: The achievement/trophy names have some of these.
- Is This a Sparta?
- Faded the Fire
- Fashion Shellsexplanation
- It's a me
- Lute Hero
- Too Awesome to Use: In many cases it's not even necessarily a matter of being particularly awesome; a lot of the game's consumables (such as bells and tokens) are strictly limited and cannot be farmed or bought. The Baguette, for example, is one of the best healing items in the game, restoring 40 HP immediately (or 60 once you're familiar with it)... but there are only two in the entire game, which is only just enough to master it, unless you have Solomon with the Accretion of Foresight (which increases familiarity gain) eat the first one. If you eat one during a tough fight and then die anyway, then tough luck, you wasted it and you can never replace it. The Mango is even more this, as it fully heals you, restores all Resolve, and gives you +3 Glimpses, but there's only one per playthrough.
- Treacherous Quest Giver: Zig-zagged with the Old Prisoner. He gives you the main quest and offers you no reward other than the satisfaction of doing the task, and your character accepts seemingly for no reason other than they've got nothing else to do. Once you finish the main quest and free him, he does turn against you and become the Final Boss, but only after he fails to ascend and realizes it's you who's destined to ascend, not him, attacking you out of jealousy.
- Was Once a Man: The fact that Solomon and the Old Prisoner were brothers would imply the Old Prisoner was once human, instead of the massive bird-like creature he is now. Sester Genessa tells a tale about an old acquaintance of hers who consumed a massive quantity of Nectar in search of transcendence, becoming something inhuman, which may possibly be referring to the Old Prisoner.
