Family and Corruption: A Children of Morta Review
Clearing the world of evil forces, one family member at a time.
Basic Info
Genres: Hack & Slash, Roguelite, Action-RPG
Developer: Dead Mage
Publisher: 11 bit Studios
Release: 3 Sep. 2019
Platforms: PC, MacOS
Available from: Steam, GOG, Humble
Price point: 22 USD / 22 EUR / 47.49 BRL
Saving the world is a family affair. That’s the main premise behind Children of Morta’s hacking and slashing dungeon crawling. And right at the start, this got me intrigued. As Sin Vega pointed out in her review, stories in games are hardly ever about family. Sure, some stories might weave around families, but they are not, usually, the protagonists of the narrative.
Visual & Sound Design
This game is absolutely beautiful. Let me just get this out of the way. Children of Morta’s artstyle is gorgeous to look at, especially when you start paying attention to all the little animations happening while you delve deeper and deeper into a cave. Clearly, a lot of time and care were put into the visuals, and they surely paid off.
Everything is pretty. Characters move and fight in fun and different ways ─ looking at your Naruto run, Kevin ─, cutscenes have interesting animations, enemies look cool. The art is definitely one of the best aspects here.
The sound design is simple but effective. Combat sounds feel satisfying, enemies are easily identifiable by sounds effects alone, and the various abilities have appropriately powerful sounds. My only complaint here is that goddamn Obelisk of Force blasting my ears off. Who signed off on that thing?
The game does away with voiced characters ─ and basically all written dialog ─ in favor of a single, well-voiced narrator that accompanies the Bergsons in their journey. The experience was akin to listening to a fantasy audiobook. But was it a good one?
Narrative
As previously mentioned, story is a big focus point of the game. Through narrated little cutscenes, we get to know the Bergson family, their world and the dangers of corruption. The tone here is somber and heroic, with a big emphasis on family relations. It’s just a shame everything seems so… heartwarming all the time. It’s a straightforward story, where everyone gets along. From father John to grandma Margaret, to pregnant mother Marta, to wonderchild firestarter Lucy, everyone is always brave. And good. And lawful. And determined. And… Uh!
The focus on family is an interesting approach to narrative, but the monotony of tone ends up degrading the emotional effectiveness over time. A few hours into the game, I started begging for a comedic break at the dinner table, exploring the absurdness of parents letting their five-ish year old travel to the City of Thieves to burn baddies alive while cackling like a deranged lunatic. Or for someone to break my expectations and behave in a less heroic way. Hell, show some sign of weakness for more than three seconds.
As for the overall plot, it’s the tried-and-true “there are evil forces threatening the land and there’s only one group equipped to stop them” sort of deal. Dark creatures are emerging from the shadows and terrorizing the denizens of Rea. With little to no amount of twists, the promising storytelling from Children of Morta, hours in, feels fresh and uninspired at the same time, which are words I don’t think I’ve ever used together in a sentence before. The narrative falls victim to the games’ overarching sin: the lack of variety.
Gameplay
I can babble about art and story all day long, but this is a game, after all. So how well does it play?
Children of Morta presents itself as a typical Diablo-like dungeon crawler. There are six Bergsons available as playable characters: John, Linda, Kevin, Mark, Lucy and Joey. John and Linda are ready from the get-go, while the others are unlocked as the story progresses. Each of them plays similarly enough to be easy to pick up, but adds their own spin to the loop to feel fresh and give players a little variety in their playstyle.
John is a safe, tanky warrior that fights with sword-and-board tactics, while Joey is a more brute option, swinging his sledgehammer around to deal with crowds of enemies. Linda and Lucy are both ranged characters, but the first uses bow-and-arrow to approach combat in a hit-and-run manner, and the latter uses magic to shield herself, distract enemies and conjure powerful AOE spells. Mark and Kevin are agile melee fighters, with one being a monk that thrives in balance and control over the battlefield, and the other using dual daggers to dish out heavy single-target damage.
Here, the game discourages playing the same hero from start to finish in two ways. First, playing the same character over and over might lead them to acquire corruption fatigue, represented by a purple effect that reduces your maximum health by a certain percentage. So, the more runs you play, the more easily you’ll end up losing the subsequent one. Corruption fatigue can be healed by simply playing runs as another Bergson.
Second are the shared skills. There are two elements in Children of Morta’s characters that persist between runs: their level, represented by the skill points you’ve distributed, and the passive upgrades that are bought at their home, with coins earned while dungeon crawling. These upgrades, such as more base health points, better critical damage or higher experience gain affect all playable heroes. Every four levels, a character will also unlock a shared skill, a passive, character-specific bonus that will affect all other ones, and reflects that hero’s personality. So, while Linda’s footwork will increase the family’s movement speed, Kevin’s assassination expertise means everyone deals improved critical damage.
As for the roguelite elements, CoM features procedurally generated levels of varying depth and incorporates death and replayability into its narrative by having the Bergsons be saved from death by the powers of the Goddess of land, Rea Dana. It also does away with the looting aspect of Diablo-esque games, having items be run-exclusive and a more rare commodity, akin to the experience one might find playing The Binding of Isaac or Enter the Gungeon.
Going down the levels in a run, there are traps, breakable pots, floor hazards, item rooms, side stories, temporary buffs and, of course, enemies. Here, as with the story, the variety does start to grind your gears. There’s a very limited number of enemy types per floor, and it does not help that some of them feel practically identical to one another. After beating the last boss of the first act, I had only seen 3 types of ferocious enemies ─ the game’s nomenclature for champion foes ─ and the saminess of the experience was a bit disappointing.
Don’t get me wrong, combat in Children of Morta is fun. It’s fast paced, the controls are simple and easy to pick up and slashing waves upon waves as you grow in power is very satisfying. But getting to the second act and realizing that a bunch of aspects from the previous biome carried over, I was somewhat let down. The sand area features a sand worm, for example, that comes up from the sand and bites the player if they linger around it for too long. It’s the exact same behaviour as the iron spikes from the caves, and those are also present in the desert! The skeletons from the Caeldippo Caves are replaced by mummies, which is thematically fitting, but they behave exactly like their meatless counterparts. The list goes on.
The game does feature local co-op for an additional player, with support for Xbox 360/Xbox One controllers, and Dead Mage has announced they’re working on an online multiplayer component, but I have yet to find out if playing with a friend alleviates the repetitiveness that sometimes sets in during a session.
Conclusion
Upon beating the game, I asked myself this: would I come back to this game for more? Games like Diablo, or like Isaac, get their replay value out of managing to balance out the repetition from multiple runs/dungeon dives with enough variety in gameplay to keep the player from being bored. At the end of the day, I believe the main obstacle between CoM and an amazing experience is lack of variability.
That’s why I believe your enjoyment of Morta will be highly related to your proficiency with the game. If you can manage to defeat bosses in few attempts, the repetition might not get to you in a major way. But if you keep hitting walls and feel the need to grind out more levels, it could just be the thing that makes you drop the game altogether.
So: would I come back to this game? As it is, unless I had a friend willing to delve into it with me, I would say no. But if Dead Mage can manage to bring us more content, and perhaps iron out the wrinkles that keep Children of Morta on the verge of greatness, you can be sure I’ll be there to see Kevin slice new shit up like crazy.
A solid 7.5/10 game with an honest price tag. It has amazing visuals, satisfying combat and an interesting story perspective, that is unfortunately held back by the lack of diversity in its gameplay and the always too safe direction chosen for the narrative.
