Mortal Shell: Complete Edition

Mortal Shell: Complete Edition is a competent soulslike with flashes of brilliance in its shell swapping and atmosphere. Its ambition is held back by shallow systems, inconsistent difficulty, and technical rough edges. It’s a worthy attempt for fans craving a grim challenge, but it falls short of the genre’s best. The technical performance was an utter disaster on the original Nintendo Switch, but fares much better on Nintendo Switch 2. It will still be a haggard-looking and rough game with subpar image detail, but at least it plays significantly smoother.

We do not feel like rejecting the work that Cold Symmetry, because in the vast majority of cases, especially during the main campaign, Mortal Shell has also managed on Switch (especially in portable mode) to offer a satisfactory gaming experience for stability and image quality, although the compression has been particularly aggressive and we have found several drops in performance in the most agitated situations.

Mortal Shell is a straight forward souls and the game definitely is great for fans of the genre that are looking for a classic Souls experience. Unfortunately the Switch is definitely not the best place to experience the game, if that's your only platform might be ok but if you have a PS5 or Series S|X there you'll find a better game experience.

If there’s anything that Mortal Shell has done for me, it’s that I am now slightly more interested in trying Souls-like games again. While much of the experience has been the type of frustration you would expect from a player new(er) to the genre, I’ve become kind of addicted to the vicious cycle of getting stomped for a couple hours, finally emerging victorious, and then getting stomped again. Games like this require patience and one of the biggest tips I’ve heard from Souls fans is that learning attack patterns is key.

At its core, this is still the excellent Mortal Shell we all fell in love with two years ago, but do bear in mind that the setbacks caused by this game being ported to the Switch largely outweigh the pros. The novelty value of playing yet another “impossible port” on the Switch is fantastic, but you will have to deal with unbelievably long loading times and some really poor framerate issues.

Mortal Shell: Complete Edition for Nintendo Switch is a very worthy version of the success of the Cold Symmetry studio. We find ourselves with a soulslike adventure that does not hide its influences with respect to Dark Souls but knows how to print its own personality. This unexpected edition for the Nintendo console is more than welcome in a catalog that does not have as many representatives of this type of game as other systems.