Children of Morta is so cute! I mean, it’s actually a pretty dark story, but I love the art style, and the story that they’re trying to tell. In short, the story is of a family that defends the realm from the encroaching darkness. It leans heavy into the Action RPG and Dungeon Crawler with a bit of Rogue Lite, mostly in the memorizing enemy attack patterns, and procedural level generation. Where it diverges a lot from typical Rogue traits is with permadeath. On either death or level completion, you keep all experience points and levels for your characters. You also gain a currency that is used to increase traits like attack strength, speed, max health, critical hit strength and chance, any most other metrics you would typically find in an action rpg.
A couple things I specifically love.
- I love a good rogue-lite. I love the fact that I can jump into a game, play for 30 minutes, then put it down and move on to something else in my day. This is a type of thing that unfortunate for me as a parent.
- I appreciate that there is a wide range of characters, each with their own play style and skill trees. What makes it cute in my opinion is that all the characters are presented as a family. Each character fills a personality archetype that is commonly found in any family. The fiery young one that has a very explosive play style; the sneaky middle child that attacks with and gets out of the way quicker; the strong and firm father who love his family and puts own safety on the line with his large shield and larger heart.
- In addition to their own individual skill tree, each character unlocks upgrades that applies to the entire family. This encourages you to ensure all characters are leveled up as you progress through the levels.
- Sometimes rogue-lites get a bit tough as you end up going through all the levels and all the biomes as you attempt to beat a run. This ends up acting more as a set of levels and world that you go through. Between that and character leveling up being kept between runs, the game becomes very accessibility.
I think my favorite thing about the game so far is how the story is presented to the player. In between each run, there’s a chance to get either some small cutscene or a short animation happening with a bit of voice over. These scenes present a small tidbit about the family dynamic, like, the daughter playing with the wolf that gets adopted and cared for from the beginning of the family, the brother practicing his combat arts in the training grounds or the uncle or grandma researching in their respective knowledge fields. To add a bit more tension, these cutscenes will either lead to specific objects that you are tasked with searching for in the dungeons/levels or will completely take you off course, forcing you to interact with completely different areas that aren’t accessible in the typical game runs.
Is good game. Will play more. 👌