It's not that the Bergson's story is bad – it adds some nice background to the dungeon-crawling action – it's just not nearly as clever, complex or emotionally-involving as the narrative stylings like to suggest.īut to focus on these small negatives too much would be doing a disservice to all the things that Children of Morta gets right. Told through a single narrator's voice rather than have the whole family perform dialogue, it tends to be a little OTT and rather hammy, attempting to make grandiose this story which sets itself up as being deep and meaningful but is, in fact, pretty basic, run-of-the-mill video game material there's an evil corruption, you must stop it, the end. However, on the other hand, it feels odd when all you want to do is jump straight back down a dungeon to try again but are impeded by a story that keeps on trucking, no matter how you're performing, stopping you from returning to fighting at once as it throws up another little family drama, doles out a side-quest or pauses to give some bit of backstory or other.Īnother slight weakness in terms of how the story is delivered is in its narration. It's a novel idea, but it's also kind of a strange set-up on one hand, it helps make failure feel less punitive as the narrative keeps moving forward and you'll always be able to level-up or unlock something after a run. Whether or not you manage to succeed in a dungeon – and you'll certainly fail plenty of times early on – the Bergson's story will continue to progress every time you return home.
There are a ton of goodies here and, when added to the differing move sets, unlockable skills and playstyles of the six characters on offer, it gives Children of Morta a real sense of variety that keeps the inherently repetitive grinding from feeling stale. Sometimes power-ups will be hidden in treasure chests, other times you'll be forced to partake in a little memory game miniboss – or even a round of pong against a corrupted computer – in order to get your hands on some boon or other.
There are so many moving parts here and, somehow, Dead Mage has managed to ensure that, no matter how you decide to play, which character you concentrate on upgrading and what RNG luck spits out at you on any given dungeon run, there's always a nicely addictive synergy in how the various perks and boons stack up to help you on your journey. There really are an absolute ton of power-ups, skills and upgrades to get your hands on in this game, and it's the sheer volume of these that is perhaps Children of Morta's biggest strength. You'll then return home, whether you've been successful or not, watch a little more of the story unfold and spend some time unlocking upgrades and perks.
The general flow of gameplay consists of taking one of the six playable members of the Bergson family down into the multi-level dungeons below their home to fight your way to a boss battle and unlock a gateway to the next area, hoovering up Morv – the local currency – and grabbing various upgrades and boons strewn about the procedurally-generated levels as you go.
Dead Mage's Children of Morta makes a valiant attempt to join this exclusive list of titles with a truly gorgeous pixel art-style, addictive combat and unique family-driven set-up that sees you take control of various members of the Bergson clan as they attempt to stem the tide of an evil corruption that's spread across the land from the summit of Mount Morta.įor the most part, Children of Morta's family set-up works pretty well it does stumble a little to begin with as you only have access to a few characters who aren't the strongest of the bunch – we're looking at you, John – and you'll need to grind early dungeons in order to unlock others, but once things get going there's a lot to enjoy here, even if the narrative is a little simplistic and the whole thing is over a bit quicker than we might have expected. There's absolutely no shortage of excellent retro-pixel style roguelikes and rogue-lites on Switch, with the likes of Enter the Gungeon, The Binding of Isaac, Crypt of the Necrodancer and Dead Cells being just a few of those that stand out as must-plays on Nintendo's console.
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