Rhythm and Soul-slike Double Review ("Pistol Whip" and "Mortal Shell")

I don't like to resort to the smaller review style too often, but every once in a while it's warranted. Sometimes I do it because I've gotten too far behind, sometimes it's because there are a couple games with similar themes that I feel are worth lumping together, sometimes it's because I've completed a couple small games for which there's not a lot to say, and other times it's because I happen to finish more than one game in a small stretch of time and decide that it would be best to knock them all out at once. In this case, it's both of those last scenarios. Both subjects of today's article, Pistol Whip and Mortal Shell, are on the smaller side, and I happened to complete them both recently. As it so happens, they also both happen to be quite good, so let's get started!

Available for: Playstation VR, Oculus Quest

Reviewed for: Playstation VR

In my consistent quest to justify having spent the money on a VR headset a couple years ago, every now and then I come across something that's both fun and useful. See, developers have seemingly realized that the medium of VR can be used to make exercise enjoyable. I remember playing To the Top and being amazed at how high my heart rate was getting by just standing in one spot and pretending to do parkour, and that combination of cardio and legitimately fun gameplay made that game the gold standard for VR titles in my book. I can't quite say that Pistol Whip dethrones To the Top, but it's at least in the same ballpark and is easily one of the best VR games I've ever played. While the game technically came out at the end of last year for the Oculus family of headsets, I'll be treating it as a 2020 release, because it only released for my particular VR headset in July, so be aware of that.

There isn't any story to speak of in Pistol Whip, nor is there any reason given for what you do. You're simply a John Wick-style gunman running down a linear area and shooting bad guys with no sense of who the bad guys are, why you're killing them, what goal you're working towards, nothing. So, I'm not going to linger on it. The gameplay premise of Pistol Whip is that it's a rhythm shooter that also works as a kind of de-facto dance game on the harder levels. Every level in this game is set to some sort of EDM track, and the goal is to get as high a score as you can by shooting enemies to the beat of the track and to survive until the end (which is sometimes easier said than done). In terms of the shooting, there's a heavy amount of aim assist, so your focus is 100% on shooting to the beat, and surviving these levels entails dodging both enemy bullets and physical objects in the environments, both of which are dodged by physically moving your head. This is why I say that Pistol Whip serves as a de-facto dance game: at some points, you might have to dodge both bullets and objects in quick succession, which could see you dropping it like it's hot to avoid a beam above you, then Matrix-ing your head back to avoid an oncoming bullet. In other cases, you might have to physically shimmy from side to side to dodge a series of pillars, then do some kind of silly cobra-like dance to avoid five bullets coming at you from different angles. I seriously shudder to think what kind of ridiculous footage Sony has of me from the harder levels, so intense is the level of physical activity that tends to be involved as you go through these later levels and harder difficulties on earlier levels. With my left leg still not quite up to snuff after the nasty fracture from last year, I legitimately don't think it would be possible for me to move past normal difficulty on most of these levels, and I wonder if I could do even normal difficulty on the later ones. That being said, this is something of a self-imposed limitation. Pistol Whip comes with quite a few modifiers that can be selected to make things easier, such as: a second pistol, no obstacles, no enemy bullets, no enemy armor, etc, as well as some modifiers to give you more of a challenge. Some of these modifiers impact your scores (for example, removing obstacles might cut off 20% of the score you would have earned without that modifier, but the modifier to remove aim assist would give you 25% more at the end), but nonetheless offer a way to make the experience a bit less physically strenuous. I just happen to be too prideful for that, and having recently gotten (briefly) into the top 15 global rankings on one of the levels, my scores matter too much to me. That's really all there is to say about the gameplay. It's an incredibly simple premise that provides a lot of replay value. Currently there are only about 12 levels, and the longest track is maybe 5 minutes, so if you never died, it would take you about an hour to clear the game. The real longevity comes from playing your favorite tracks repeatedly and getting better and better at them. That being said, replay value should be independent of the price tag, meaning that a single playthrough of a game ought to justify its cost. In the case of Pistol Whip, there just isn't enough unique content to justify even the pretty low $25 asking price. There is the promise of additional content as time goes on, but at the moment, that's the fact of the matter.

Technically speaking, this game doesn't suffer from many of the issues that tend to plague VR titles. Because of how the game is styled, the visuals don't seem low-resolution like other, more realistic experiences do, which is probably the first thing you'll notice. The second thing you might notice if you're anything like me is that Pistol Whip doesn't constantly lose track of your move controllers like just about every other VR game does. There are rare moments where the gun's positioning will be ever-so-slightly off, but I never once had the gun rotating at the bottom of the screen when I was clearly holding it at face-level, and To the Top is the only other VR game where I didn't have that kind of thing happen, so this was a definite blessing. To list one more noticeable technical positive, the gun sounds in this game are excellent. The devs smartly utilize the headset's 360-degree sound capabilities to have spent casings hit the ground with the most satisfying clinks, and it's wonderful. Unfortunately, there is one technical problem I tended to experience in Pistol Whip, and it was infuriating. The headset, for whatever reason, tends to reset its position without input. Typically you'd hold down the "options" button on the move controller to recalibrate the headset and re-center the screen, but in Pistol Whip, I had that happen as a result of dodging. What this means is that I would clearly dodge a bullet, then the headset would reset its position and I'd get hit with the bullet in spite of being physically bent out of the way, then when I moved back to my normal position, it would reset again. This didn't happen every time I dodged, nor did it happen a majority of times, nor was it a reliably consistent problem, but every time it reared its head, I lost points off my score through no fault of my own, and it got a harshly-toned swear out of me every time. Another technical thing I noticed that I can't really take any additional points off for is the fact that the quality of the music really tanks in the last couple of levels. Not the sound quality, the quality of the songs themselves. They stop being tracks that you want to dance to and start just being...lame. Again, that's not the kind of thing that I can, in good conscious, punish the game for, but it's something worth noting. 

Because VR is still a teething medium so many years after its inception, for most VR titles, there isn't much to say, and Pistol Whip is no exception. It's a simple concept executed quite well, and it's both a fun time and a good way to get some cardio in without leaving your house or even a 3-foot radius. Much like To the Top, I can see myself continuing to fire up the headset to get a couple of levels in off and on in the future, and if you have the necessary hardware, I'd say it's a quality purchase even if the level of content isn't quite worthy of the price of admission at the moment. Since this is such a simple title, I'm going to be scaling the scoring system up to 2, meaning that I can take off a maximum of 2 points per negative aspect.

Let us review:

Value for purchase - 0.5

Technical shortcomings - 1.5

The final score for Pistol Whip is...

8.0/10 - Great

Good work, Cloudhead Studios, good work!

Available for: Playstation 4, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows (via Epic Store)

Reviewed for: Playstation 4

Ah, the Soulslike. Ever since the massive success of Dark Souls, many developers have tried to capture that lightning in their own bottle with varying degrees of success. Some attempts result in games like Lords of the Fallen, which I didn't play because just about nobody seemed to find it interesting. Other attempts result in superb games like CodeVein, which succeeded in capturing that lightning by providing a clear, unique artistic vision and just enough tweaks to the Dark Souls formula to be at least somewhat its own thing. And then there's Mortal Shell, which throws out all pretense and basically just exists as a love letter to Dark Souls. It's a love letter that's hard to read in some places because author Cold Symmetry was starting to get nervous about it, and it uses the wrong version of "your" in its proposal, but it's short and sweet to the point that Dark Souls might very well say "yes." Look, the point of this tortured metaphor is that Mortal Shell isn't perfect, but it's quite good nonetheless. So, let's get rolling.

In Mortal Shell, you play as...

um...

In Mortal Shell, the world is...

wait...

In Mortal Shell, what's basically going on is that...

.....

Yeah, I've beaten the game and I still have no clue what the story was, who I was playing as, what the central conceit of the world was, or anything. All I can say is that you play as some mushy pasty white dude who can inhabit certain dead bodies, and your goal is to extract sacred glands from three temples so that you can give them to a giant bird man with a cool voice. What are these sacred glands, and what is the true nektar held inside them? No clue. How did the giant bird man come to be a giant bird man? No clue. Why are we doing any of this? No clue. The story here is so vague that it would probably take many replays to even get a glimpse of what it is. So, for the second time in a row, I'm not going to linger on it. Gameplay in Mortal Shell is going to be...mostly familiar to you if you've ever played a Souls game. You time your attacks, you learn enemy attack patterns, when you die you lose your chief currency and have to retrieve it again at the spot you died, you can rest at certain areas at the cost of all the enemies respawning, etc. But there are some key differences that will throw a bit of a learning curve. Instead of bonfires, your resting point is an NPC named Sester Genesa who has a couple of places she can spawn. Instead of Estes flasks, you use respawning mushrooms in the environment to heal. Instead of "souls" and "humanity" you have "tar" and "glimpses" respectively. Instead of leveling up by putting points into stats, each "shell" you can take over has a set of upgrades that can be purchased for a certain amount of both tar and glimpses each. When you die, you lose your tar but retain your glimpses, and when you use an item that lets you return to Sester Genesa, you retain your tar but lose your glimpses. Before I continue down this road, let me take a step back to talk about the shells. There are four bodies (or "shells") that you attain over the course of the game's runtime. Each of these shells represents a different build, ultimately eliminating the RPG elements of Souls titles in favor of a more CodeVein-esque equippable class system. There are three stats for each shell: Durability (HP), Resolve (max amount of special attacks), and Stamina (self-explanatory). Shell #1 might have average amounts of each stat, while shell #2 might have massive stamina at the cost of low durability and resolve, etc. Which shell you choose to use will depend on the build you want. One last thing to note before I resume talking about the differences between Mortal Shell and Dark Souls is that tar is accessible no matter what shell you're in, but glimpses are specific to the shell they were gained in. So, if you gain 5 glimpses in shell #1, those glimpses will stay in that shell and can only be used in that shell, so if you go to shell #2 and need 5 glimpses, you're going to need to earn it. Moving right along back to key differences, in Mortal Shell, you get a second chance upon losing all your HP much like you do in Sekiro. If you remember, you play as kind of a pasty white dude who possesses bodies, so when you lose all your HP the first time, rather than dying, you get knocked out of your shell and reduced down to your pasty white dude form. While in this state, you'll get killed in one hit, but if you make it back to your shell at the spot you lost your HP in, you get a second chance to prevail in combat with a full health bar. Once you lose all your HP in this second chance mode (without the use of a particular item), you'll die. Nextly, perhaps the most striking difference is that in Mortal Shell, you don't have a "block" ability. Rather, you have a "harden" ability that negates all damage from the first attack that hits you while in that state. At any point, you can turn your whole body into stone for as long as you choose to hold down the L2 button or until you get hit, and once you use your hardening, there's a brief cooldown of a couple seconds until you can use it again. But what I want to emphasize is that you can activate your hardening ability at any point. So, if you start an attack and notice that your enemy has also started one, you can turn to stone in the middle of your attack, get hit by the enemy, then brush off the damage and potentially stagger the enemy while automatically finishing your attack when the opposing attacks breaks the hardening. It takes a little while for the song and dance of harden timing to click, but once it does, you can take this game by storm. That's the final key difference between Mortal Shell and Dark Souls....Mortal Shell is incredibly easy. It isn't so easy that you can get too big for your britches and stop being careful, nor is it so easy that the moment-to-moment tension that you find in Dark Souls isn't there, but once the combat truly clicks, most of the actual challenge goes out the window. Throughout the course of this game, there were exactly two bosses that I died to (that weren't meant to be lost): the first boss in the first area (which happened before everything clicked), and the second story boss. Every other boss in this game I beat on my first try...and only the final boss managed to knock me out of my shell...and a couple of the bosses never laid a single scratch on me. That's how simple this game can get once everything clicks. Remember back when I was talking about the second chance process? Remember how I alluded to a particular item that could grant you an additional chance? I didn't know that was a thing until after I'd already beaten the game. There are so many items you can use (such as various scriptures that give you buffs) to make things simpler, but once combat truly clicks, you'll likely have no need of anything but your own skill. To be clear, I'm not listing this as a negative. As I said, the tension that you tend to feel in Dark Souls, where it's been way too long since you last found a resting point and it isn't totally likely that you're going to walk into the next room and get clobbered by some new enemy, but it's an undeniable possibility, is still there in spite of the overall lack of challenge. It's moment-to-moment tension without frustration, which is a difficult balance to achieve. One could argue that only needing to change up your strategy and really learn attack patterns for two of the bosses kind of defeats the purpose of a soulslike, but in the hands of a small indie studio like this, taking the more traditional soulslike approach could've easily lead to overly frustrating bosses. 

With that, let's get into some design choice and technical power topics. Visually, this game is Dark Souls but less pretty. It gets some of the bleakness right, but you're never going to have a view like the one you get when you first meet Solaire of Astora. Buuut I didn't dislike the visuals and Dragon Age: Origins is my favorite game, so I don't really get to talk negatively about visuals unless I really didn't like them. Just know that going in. In terms of technical strength, I never had any texture pop-in or hard/soft crashes, nor did I experience anything in the realm of audio/visual glitches. For most of the time the framerate was smooth, but I noticed that it had tendency to stutter a little bit in the final story area when ghost enemies used their rock spells. The only other things to note from a technical standpoint are basically nitpicks, but they're worth noting. Firstly, there's basically no soundtrack outside of some bass tone droning and some forgettable boss tracks. It's hard not to feel disappointed by that, especially when you consider that Dark Souls had an incredible soundtrack and even a soulslike like CodeVein had a pretty great one (even if it was one electric guitar away from being a collection of anime openings). Secondly, the text in this game is sooooo small. I don't recall seeing an option to fix that in the menus, so I had to squint to read basically anything that was ever on the screen. Finally, the game doesn't give you much feedback in regards to confirming an upgrade, etc. This wasn't something that I personally experienced, but after talking with someone who did, I could totally see why. This is one of those games where you have to hold down a button to confirm upgrades to your shells or weapons, and there's basically nothing indicating that you're...actually accomplishing that. There's a faint audio effect that sounds like scampering bugs and a slight yellow tinge that circles the upgrade until it forms a complete circle, but the audio is, as I said, faint, and that yellow tinge is even smaller than the text. My default setting is to try holding a button down if just pressing it doesn't do the trick, but typically there's some kind of feedback like text reading "HOLD X" or a little line circling around the button prompt or something like that which means I don't need to guess in the first place. It's just a weird bit of feedback omission, especially considering how unpopular the "hold" style of confirmation is.

So most of my technical negatives are nitpicks or just head scratchers, but where my complaints lie in Mortal Shell is in some of the design decisions. The first one I want to discuss is the game's approach to items. Items in this game operate on a "familiarity" system, which is a concept that I like...on paper. Essentially, before you use an item for the first time, you have no clue what it does. Once you use it, you find out, and once you've used it enough times, you'll glean some secondary effect or the original effect will be magnified. The problem I have with this is that first step. This is partially because one of the first seemingly-consumable items you can get in this game is a certain kind of mushroom that initially inflicts massive poison damage on you. Once you gain max familiarity (which, if memory serves, is attained by using it a second time), this item instead gives you complete poison resistance, which comes in very handy in certain sections. The problem is that this sets a precedent that any item can be a trap at first. Your first thought might be "well, isn't it in the spirit of Dark Souls that part of the challenge comes from uncertainty?" My response to that would be to emphasize that in Dark Souls, what lies ahead is what's uncertain, not your own capabilities. In Dark Souls and even a lot of soulslikes, you can tell what healing and buff capabilities you have just by looking at your inventory. You can see that you only have one Estes flask, but you also have x amount of this herb that could come in handy but that you might want to save for later, so you know what exactly you can do going forward, but you don't exactly know what you're going to face going forward. In this way, even though there is uncertainty, you're able to make informed decisions about what to do next, whether it be pushing onward just a little while longer in case there's a bonfire in the next room or turning back and getting a couple levels in. With Mortal Shell's item system, however, you don't really have that ability. Your choices are to use items for the first time out in the field and potentially have it backfire (for instance, having it cut your health to give you stamina or inflict massive poison damage), or use them for the first time while safely at a Sester Genesa location and potentially have that backfire as well ("now your health has been fully restored, thank goodness you used this in the heat of battle instead of right by a healer!"). In my humble opinion, it might've been better to give the player baseline familiarity with everything, remove the initial uncertainty, and keep the rewards for attaining maximum familiarity. To return to the example of the poison mushroom, the player would see that it's going to inflict poison damage, and they might think "hmm, what might I get if I use this obviously awful item enough?" I can see what the intention was with this familiarity system, but for me, it just meant that I used basically nothing I didn't already know the effects of. For real, why would I look at an item called "scripture of despair" with a description stating that it looked like it had been crumpled up and tossed aside and think, "yeah, I think I'll try that out." Maybe I'm alone in this, but the precedent this system set probably kept me from experiencing a lot of what this game has to offer. 

The next thing I'd like to discuss (without spoilers) is the final boss. To start off, I'd like to state that I beat the final boss on my first try, and the one earlier boss that managed to kill me multiple times will likely be getting a spot on my best boss list at the end of the year, so it ought to speak volumes that a boss who couldn't kill me even once gave me enough qualms to warrant his own little discussion. No two story bosses in Mortal Shell are the same, nor are they totally like the enemies that come before them. But in spite of this, the levels leading up to these bosses do a good job of tutorializing the aspects of these bosses that make them stand out. To avoid giving any spoilers about bosses in this game, let me take an example from another soulslike that does this well: CodeVein. The example that comes to mind the strongest is the boss at the end of the desert level. Enemies in this level don't use sand attacks, but when you touch sand, you can clearly see the status effect it inflicts. So when the boss at the end of the level starts whipping up attacks made of sand, you can tell that getting hit by them will do more than just hurt your health. The level leading up to this boss tells you what's most important to know about what make this boss unique (because again, uncertainty isn't what makes the challenge). It isn't quite that subtle in Mortal Shell, as the tutorializing does tend to come from enemies in the level, not the environment, but the principle still remains...until the final boss. How to put this in a way that's as un-spoiler-y as possible...well, you fight the final boss in a particular type of arena that you fight a number of smaller bosses in. It isn't exactly the same, but the key...environmental detail...is. Yet, the final boss can do things with this environment that the game doesn't once have any smaller bosses even allude to. I have to reiterate that this boss never killed me, so it's not like his tricks took too long to figure out, but I couldn't help but keep thinking as the fight raged on about several ways that boss x or y might've been able to demo a smaller version of a particular attack, so that I wouldn't have been prepared for the increased magnitude, but I would still have an idea of what was going on. It's just puzzling to me that every other major boss in this game had enemies in the preceeding level to help clue you in, but the very last challenge had to be learned from scratch in spite of several "they don't even know we're tutorializing them!" opportunities throughout the game. Equally unfortunate in this final boss is the AI of both it and the camera. The final boss is the biggest boss in the game, and it's clear that not a lot of effort went into making sure the lock-on camera was usable at close range. If you lock on to him when you're in range to strike, the camera is going to go wild. You'll land your attacks, don't you worry, but it'll still be jarring and you might miss the cue to dodge if you're unlucky enough. In terms of the boss AI, it's fine up until a certain health threshold...at which point it was clearly programmed to just delay the inevitable. At a certain point, it starts moving in such a way that you only get one attack in before it leaps off into the distance to go through one of its attack cycles. You'll have gone through these attack cycles so many times by this point that you're not likely to take any damage, so it just becomes a song and dance of getting your one hit in and going through your tried and true countermeasures...and it takes forever. It kind of feels like the developers wanted this to be the boss that really screwed with people and they ran out of ideas for what he could do in the last threshold. I want to emphasize here that this final phase isn't hard...it's just drawn out, and I found myself getting pretty annoyed by it, thinking to myself "just let me hit ONE MORE TIME!" So, the game leaves off on kind of a sour note, which leads to my final complaint.

Mortal Shell is a short, short, short game. I wanted to end the section on this topic because it's the most nitpicky out of the bunch. See, Mortal Shell costs only about $30, half the price of admission for your average game, so it's not like one should go into it expecting the hundreds of hours of gameplay you can get out of something like Dark Souls, but even so, Mortal Shell feels noticeably condensed. There are exactly four areas in the game, all of which are pretty small, and none of which provide much in the way of opportunity (or incentive) to explore. There are areas that seem like they have exploration potential, but...let me put it this way: One of the areas has a podium in the center of a big stretch of land. You interact with this podium and nothing seemingly happens. My first thought was "I bet I'm going to have to find more of these podiums in order to progress," so I went to the areas to the left and right and sure enough found two more of these podiums. Did I have to? No clue. It kind of looked like I might've needed to interact with all three podiums in order to open a door, but I couldn't tell. The point is that though there were two areas to the side of the place the first podium was in, all the exploration potential seemed like it needed to be done anyway in order to progress. It's as if the levels were only made with the bare minimum in mind, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but in a soulslike one expects a bit more. Perhaps I'm alone on this as well, but I felt there just wasn't enough meat on these bones even with the reduced price.

Every night that I played Mortal Shell, I was excited to play it (once everything clicked) in spite of the clear issues it has, and I feel that this statement is the best way to summarize my experience. To summarize with different wording, when describing this game to other people, I've tended to say "It's not Game of the Year material, but I've been having fun with it." And to be honest, I'm kind of having a difficult time rounding out this conclusion because I feel like those two summaries plus the knowledge that this is a soulslike makes the verdict speak for itself. If you like soulslikes, chances are good you're going to have a good time here, and while I wouldn't say it comes even close to dethroning CodeVein as the best soulslike, it's definitely one of the more compelling ones out there.

Let us review:

Technical nitpicks - 0.3

Familiarity system effects - 0.5

Lackluster final boss - 1.0

Not much substance for genre/price - 0.5

The final score for Mortal Shell is...

7.7/10 - Pretty Good

Decent work, Cold Symmetry, decent work