PLATFORM: PC, PS4, SWITCH, XBOX ONE (REVIEWED) | RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
Morbid: The Seven Acolytes promises a Lovecraft-inspired isometric world with deep lore and Souls-like combat. For the most part, it does deliver all of these things… only not quite with as much finesse as one might hope for.
Morbid‘s world is made up of separate areas connected by mirrors which act like a fast travel system. Each area sprawls in all directions and you’re rarely told where you’re supposed to be going – the quests you’re given are summed up in just one or two sentences, usually mentioning which area to investigate but you’re never explicitly pointed towards the relevant location. A relaxed attitude towards signposting is always to be encouraged (after all, there’s no fun in just walking towards a big marker, pressing a button, then moving on), but the world is littered with terrain that you can’t cross (even though it looks like you should be able to) which makes navigation quite frustrating, especially when you’re not even sure if you’re heading in the right direction in the first place. You’re likely to find yourself wandering around a lot and feeling confused until you eventually stumble across your goal.
There are plenty of tentacled monsters and bony skeletal mutants to fight during your journey, and a fair amount of weapons (which can be improved by attaching runes to) which help to deal with the bad guys. Combat is heavily focused on melee attacks, taking a Dark Souls approach of emphasising quick strikes and dodges rather than charging in with all swords blazing. Unfortunately, Morbid‘s controls don’t quite allow the precision necessary to pull off this sort of combat – movement in general is stiff and slow and not always as responsive as you’d like, and the game often ignores your inputs during combat in favour of pointing your character in whichever random direction it chooses. Its Souls-inspired stamina bar also causes more disruption than intended, draining far too quickly even after pouring countless upgrade points into it. On a related note, you earn experience at a fairly swift rate, but the game takes so long to actually let you do anything with these points that you’ll be questioning whether you missed something. And when you finally get there, the upgrades available are… let’s say “underwhelming”…
Morbid: The Seven Acolytes certainly looks suitably murky and gloomy, and there are plenty of decent ideas floating around – give it time to get accustomed to the slower pace of the gameplay and you may well find there are moments where it feels like things might be coming together… but it doesn’t quite get there.
