I've been playing Children of Morta with my friend over the last month or so; a classic roguelike dungeon crawler with beautiful pixel graphics and fun hack and slash gameplay. However, there's much more to the game than that.
Children of Morta is a game with a strong storyline and an influential narrative. The game starts by introducing a family of heroes who are threatened by an unknown evil force and have to fight its noxious influence on the world, called the "corruption". You start the game as the father of the family and delve deep into the dreadful dungeons full of enemies and nasty creatures, in order to find the source of corruption. But soon, you realize that you're too weak to fight all those creatures on your own; you need help!
That's where the game starts to introduce and unlock new features and characters to come to your aid. Sure, at first it might feel like many other dungeon crawlers in which you're gonna have to hard-grind your way to the end of every dungeon floor by slowly upgrading your character, but the game does a fantastic job minimizing that feeling by introducing new elements to the gameplay and the story every now and then.
Each time you die in a dungeon, there is a good chance that you unlock new upgrade paths and (possibly) new characters, as well as receiving new quests. And do you know what's brilliant about all this? They all happen during new narrative blocks that open up the story "just a little" every time. This way, the game solves the problem of getting repetitive after playing it for some time, while actually keeping your interest and curiosity relatively high about the story and basically the question of "what's gonna happen next?!"; and it truly nails that purpose! I guess that's why I found Children of Morta to be one of those games that keep getting more and more exciting the more I play it.
The art style of the game is another feature that helps it stand out. Pixelated characters and environments brought to life by beautiful colors and smooth and lovely animations are things you can't find very often in today's commercial and profit-oriented games with their hyper-realistic graphics. Although it might take you some time before you get used to the game's new visual style whenever you unlock a new dungeon, it's still valid to claim that the game is a masterpiece in terms of graphics and art style! It's not easy to make pixel-art games with such quality; this is a choice the developers made because they love making games for the sake of creating pure art and the joy it brings them (and I mean it when I say it; because I know a lot of them in person!). This also holds true about the brilliant music of the game! They all did an amazing job, and now they're enjoying the fruits of their beautiful work.
The gameplay also consists of many fun mechanics and elements with high re-playing value. There are many one-time-use powerups such as divine graces, relics, obelisks, etc. that you find in the dungeons and then lose when you die (or finish the dungeon), and then acquire new ones on the next run. On the other hand, you can invest the gold you find in the dungeons to upgrade your characters permanently; and when you do, you actually upgrade all of the characters at the same time. That's a nice way to convey the notion of playing and fighting as a family; a concept that is emphasized quite frequently during the storyline. There are also specific abilities for each character that help other characters as well, by adding something to their gameplay; another mechanic, among many others, which helps represent that concept of family work!
Children of Morta has been developed by a relatively small team with a limited budget, but they have not abandoned the game after releasing it on major platforms. It has undergone many small and big changes, both to the gameplay, and the story and its cut-scenes since the first time I had the privilege to play the game early on as one of its testers. The story has become more twisted and intense, and even a new character has been added to the game: Apan. However, her storyline feels a bit separated and not connected to the game's main story. The game's voice acting is also very nice, but there are frequent moments during the game in which it is cut out for not being synced properly with the video and the subtitles. But if we just ignore those small issues, the game is overall an amazing experience and is absolutely worth playing alone or with a friend.
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