I spent my first hour with it Mortal Shell crashing like a wave against his brutal combat and Souls-like obstacle for basic signs. Then I found the first save point of the game, I was able to start slipping for new capabilities, and everything started to click into place. Here’s how to avoid a similarly painful onboarding experience and get to where the game really begins.
Mortal Shell is a punishing but gratifying game where you steal warriors’ bodies and use them to fight through one of Ingmar Bergman’s medieval nightmares again in Unreal Engine 4. Immediately after the game’s tutorial you come to a narrow path flanked by two short offramps on opposite sides. On the left is your first fighting shell – the body of a knight – and on the right is an abandoned campsite with some loot. After both detours, the path opens up a large fork in the road with half a dozen different directions for you to explore. The key is to ignore them all and just keep going.
If you do, you will encounter some bandits sitting on the ground, who can quickly kill you.. Next, you walk under a large fallen tree and then up into a smaller fork in the path around a giant tree.
Directly to the left is an open door. Go inside, talk to the mysterious woman on the right, and boom – you’ve reached your first storage point, Mortal Shellthe version of the Dark Souls fireworks.
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Mortal ShellThe coin is tar, which you get by killing enemies. Talking to the mysterious woman – Sister Genessa – saves the game, completes your health, and shuts down the amount of tar you have. You can then spend the tar through Genessa, unlocking the ability to upgrade your Knight shell (and the others you eventually earn) to add new abilities and bonuses that make it survive Mortal Shell‘s harash world and defeat their harder enemies more easily.
The fact that Mortal Shell is so bad to get you to this very early checkpoint, even going to lure you multiple wrong paths is not great, but it is also no surprise. It’s basically the cemetery problem from the original Dark Souls, an optional location that started early that many novice players got up on because it was easily accessible, but the skeletons inside them were constantly tearing to shreds. And what would in Souls-like to be without a same blunt starting area (probably a Souls-lite)?
If you’ve already been to Genessa and still have the feeling when you finish the game, YouTuber FightinCowboy has a very useful video for finding some of the early shells, a process that is relatively quick, painless, and does not require much as a single fight. Once you have these shells, you can start switching between them and customize builds based on your playstyle. That’s true Mortal ShellThe fun really begins.
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