Mortal Shell embraces the Souls-like moniker with open arms. They welcomed comparisons, and, for the most part, delivered. What's more impressive is that a team of only 15 people created it. Mortal Shell will make you to rethink your ideas around patience and frustration. You will love this game for all the same reasons that you hate it.

Mortal Shell wants you to know that if you like Dark Souls, you don't always have to resort to From Software. A brutal ARPG with good ideas.

Mortal Shell doesn’t just replicate what other games in the genre have done before. Instead, it takes that formula, sharpens it and adds enough to make it a completely different feeling, but equally satisfying blade. Fallgrim is a world I’d be happy to struggle through again.

Without fundamentally upsetting the codes inherent in Souls Like, Mortal Shell knows how to adorn itself with a personality of its own, as much thanks to its system of discovery of objects as of combat, which manages to largely compensate for the absence of parry posture with mechanics of hardening, determination and counter-perfect perfectly interwoven.

I respect the Cold Symmetry team for their courage to put their own twist on the soulslike formula. In Mortal Shell almost nothing works how you would expect it to and even if the game doesn’t always benefit from that, it feels fresh and is definitely worth checking out. [11/2020, p.36]

Mortal Shell sticks to the fundamentals of the Souls-like genre while adding it's own ideas to come up with a fresh yet familiar experience that is fun for hardened veterans and appropriately challenging for newcomers.

There’s some good to be found in Mortal Shell; its world is interesting and generally well designed, it looks lovely, and some of its boss fights really are exhilarating. But there are just so many aspects of it that will leave you frustrated, underwhelmed or disappointed. It’s a shorter, more focused Souls-like experience that demands you go toe-to-toe with your aggressors, but its combat and surrounding systems just aren’t good enough for you to feel wholly fulfilled by it all. It’ll no doubt have its fans, but Mortal Shell could have been so much better with more polish and some tweaks here and there.