Children of Morta

I picked up Children of Morta, which I had sitting in my library for quite a while. I don't remember where I got it from, and I didn't think I'd enjoy a random game, but it turned out to be quite fun, and I'm not even entirely sure why.

Children of Morta is kind of like a mix between an action roguelike and an RPG. The bulk of the game is the campaign, where you run through a series of around nine stages, each comprised of a few randomly generated maps. During a stage, your character gains gold, experience, and items. Items expire at the end of a stage, but can grant powerful active or passive buffs. Experience can be used to upgrade your character on their talent tree, while gold can be used to purchase upgrades for all your characters. You have a total of 7 characters who lore-wise form a family, each playing like a different class. Slow, fast, ranged, melee - something for everyone. There is a minor incentive to actually try different characters, as leveling each gives passive bonuses to all the other ones, and playing one for too long inflicts a debuff on them that decreases as you don't use them.

There is also a more roguelike mode, which does not let you get any upgrades between runs, but makes the runs 13+ maps long, and gives you a a random choice of powerups upon level-up, as well as a lot of currency to purchase and upgrade items at shops that occur every now and then. I found this mode both more fun and more challenging than the main story mode, although there are basically no gameplay differences. It just adds more randomness, and lets you more heavily customize your character with items before the run is up, potentially unlocking very strong combinations.

There's no mechanic that stands out, and I can't say the game's super well made either. I definitely found some smaller bugs, balance issues with certain characters or upgrades being too strong or weak, visual clarity problems, and other imperfections. I think the strong side is the storytelling. The main story actually has a voiced narrator, and the characters have a lot of animations and well-defined personalities that make them feel more alive. Of course, I've never been one to prioritize that too much, so why do I, despite the unimpressive gameplay, like this game? I thought about that for a while, and I actually don't know. Perhaps it helped that I played it in co-op, sticking mostly to ranged characters. Most characters felt too slow for me, some being so immobile and slow to attack while having very few upsides, I wonder why anyone would want to play them at all. I did find one character I really liked who could attack and move at the same time, which caused me to play a lot of the game like a twin-stick shooter instead, but then again, what's stopping anyone else from doing that too, if that is the most fun way to play.

While Children of Morta is far from my favorite action roguelike, it's definitely up there. From a more objective standpoint, I don't think the game's all that good and there are probably similar games out there that are better, but at the end of the day, I liked it. So personally, I would recommend it. It's not super long, not super replayable, not super difficult, but I got a good amount of fun out of it and perhaps you will too.