Children of Morta
Developer: Dead Mage Publisher: 11 Bit Studios Rrp: £18.49 (Gog.com, Humblebundle and Steam) Released: 3rd September 2019 Available on: Gog.com, Humblebundle and Steam Played Using: Mouse and Keyboard Approximate game length: 20 Hours Family is a strange thing, it can be a great uniter and also a terrible divider. Familial bonds are simultaneously strong and weak. Of course it all depends on the family in question, in a grave situation one family may fall apart while another galvanizes against it. Children of Morta is an ARPG that takes a lot of queues from Diablo in its gameplay, however unlike Diablo the story in Children of Morta is much less straight forward. In this game you play not as a single character but as a family of guardians by the name of the Bergsons. Each family member has different skills and abilities that encourage different play styles. They also all have detailed entries in the family library allowing you get a real feel for who these characters are.
Like with most ARPG's you gain experience by killing enemies and in turn level up. In this case each level gives the character a skillpoint which you can use to unlock new abilities. However, if you wish to increase the ability of a skill that already has a skill point (meaning its at its first rank) then you will need to use two skill points. These skills max out at the third rank. As the family members level up they grant special passive bonuses to the other family members, for example the archer (Linda) will increase the movement speed of each family member while the swordsman (John) will increase the amount of health each family member has. It has to be said that it's rare to find a game that focuses on the concept of familial bonds, especially when those bonds are also represented as a mechanic in the game. The skills you unlock come in two varieties activated and passive. Activated skills once used have a cooldown time that gets reduced by various factors that will become apparent as you play.
Sometimes enemies drop money called Morv which is used to improve attributes. Morv isn't the only currency in this game, the other is gemstones (don't worry there are no microtransactions). Gemstones are used to purchase divine relics and graces from the store owner you occasionally find in the dungeon and can also be used to open certain chests. A short time into the game you will unlock the workshop and the Book of Rea, these allow you to spend the money you find in the dungeons on increasing the attributes of the Bergson family as a whole. The workshop focuses on physical attributes such as attack power and critical chance while the Book of Rea allows you to increase more meta attributes such as how much money you pick up and the reducing the cooldown times of divine relics.
What I really like about this game over most roguelites is that in Children of Morta there is no such thing as a wasted run. Even if all you do is kill a few enemies the story progresses and you'll keep whatever money and experience that you gained in that run and the family member you were playing as gets teleported home so you can play them again. The story of the family progresses regardless of how successful a run is, of course that lasts up to a point as sometimes the next part of the story requires you to defeat a boss.
The roguelite element comes in with the missions, specifically the map and what's in it will change with each new run. The game encourages you to cycle through the various family members, actually it would probably be better to say it discourages you from using only one. If you use a family member too often they will become fatigued which lowers their maximum health. Using another family member for a while will decrease the fatigue until it's eventually completely gone.
The pixel art on display in this game is incredible and the music is pretty good too, I found myself humming a few of its tunes while away from the computer. If I do have a complaint its that once you've upgraded all of the attributes Morv no longer has a purpose, which feel like a missed opportunity. If I were to make a suggestion perhaps having some way to convert the Morv into gemstones so that you can use them in the store.
At the time of writing there is no new game plus feature of DLC available, however these features plus more are planned to appear this year. This is a game I've told all my friends about, in fact I'm quite sure they're all sick of me going on about it. If that's not high praise from me I'm not sure what is. It should also be mentioned that even though I've said that the game takes about twenty hours to complete, I easily spent over fifty making sure I did every side quest.
