The shadow of Dark Souls looms large over gaming. From the truly great (Blasphemous) to the perfectly serviceable (Ashen) to the nigh-unplayable (Lords of the Fallen), many of the basic elements of the Souls games have filtered down through game design. Less common are games that take influence from Dark Souls‘ much-loved sibling, Bloodborne. The turn towards horror over fantasy, specifically a sort of Lovecraftian cosmic horror, seems harder to bite without wholly ripping off. Morbid: The Seven Acolytes is one such game. Surprisingly, it’s also a successful one.
Mostly.
“The age of Dibrom is over.”
You are a Striver, a member of the Order of Dibrom. Dol’Gahar, the Goddess of Sadness, conquered your nation. She exiled your people. And she empowered seven loyal followers to watch over the land. Many from the Order of Dibrom have tried to kill the acolytes and free the country from Dol’Gahar, but none have succeeded. Recently, Dol’Gahar attacked and destroyed the Order. You are the only survivor, and the only one trained to fight her.
The game goes a little too hard on Capital Nouns as a method of storytelling. Early on, the game throws a lot at you. You are a Striver from the Order of Dibrom, yes, but you are not Exalted. Only the Exalted may enter Yortael, where they can Transcend to reach the Necropolis. It is overwhelming, and because the game is relatively short (~10 hours) it comes on way too quickly. Without looking at the lore dumps that come when you find a new area or defeat a new boss, much of it will be relatively meaningless to you. However, the lore dumps are often too obvious, too in-depth. (There’s also one that is weirdly fatphobic. Can’t say I expected ‘Fat Conrad’ to be handled well, but I didn’t expect my mother to write his lore dump.)
That said, the strength of Bloodborne‘s storytelling lay in its environments, monsters, and people. The dialogue in Morbid: The Seven Acolytes may be ponderous. It may lack the interest in subverting Lovecraft’s cosmic horror. But when it comes to crafting a world worth exploring, to telling a story through your actions rather than through the text, Morbid excels. Eventually.
“TO RECALL IS TO GO INSANE AGAIN!”
For the first few hours of Morbid: The Seven Acolytes, I was a little worried. I enjoyed exploring the initial location, a beachside shantytown. But sadly, that gave way to two of the game’s weakest areas, a pretty drab cave area and then a massive forest that was both drab and difficult to navigate. It was here that I grew worried. The design of the forest made it hard to tell what grass was passable and what wasn’t, leading to me to get lost for hours.
A shoddy fast-travel system compounded that concern. As with many of these games, you have the ability to teleport from one rest area to another. In Morbid, however, the fast-travel takes you to entrance to the area, regardless of what shrine you choose. So, big areas, like, say, a forest, end up leaving you with no ability to go from shrine to shrine. If you progress a ways but feel like you’ve hit a dead end, there’s no easy way to get back to the furthest shrine.
That said, I eventually figured out where I was going. And once I did, the game really opened up. The bosses got more visually interesting — King Cornelius and Lady Tristana in particular were excellent bosses, grotesque and horrific without being overly gory. You got a sense of the nation’s slide into a dystopian cult. I was interested in the way the game eventually stops giving you side quests, as the civilians you meet in the capital are more fully bought into the cult, while those living on the fringes of society are the ones who have lost everything to it. When it stops worrying about bombarding you with Proper Nouns and tells a story with its world, you find a compelling tale of submission and corruption by the nation’s elites, and the tragedy that trickles down to the people on its fringes.
“What are you still fighting for?”
Again, this is where I say the game’s weak opening soft-sells things. Your tools are limited. You have a parry that you probably won’t use, because it doesn’t stagger enemies long enough to be worth learning. You have a dodge roll. And you have three attacks: Light, heavy, ranged. Up through the first boss, that’s really all you have. It doesn’t feel like enough. The first major boss of the game, for instance, is pretty easily handled by attacking a couple times, rolling away twice, and resting. You don’t have any tools, so the boss goes relatively easy on you.
After you beat that boss, however, you find a handful of statues you can smash. Doing so nets you a series of ‘blessings.’ The first blessings are basic: More health, faster stamina regeneration, more healing. But you can only equip two of the three then; beating bosses lets you equip more. As you explore, you’ll find more blessings, which let you create builds. The catch? You only find more blessings if you explore the levels. It is very possible to miss a number of excellent blessings. Because of this, the game both rewards exploration and slowly lets you find your play style before locking you in a build. It’s a really great system that I hadn’t seen anywhere before.
As with Breath of the Wild, you have limited space for weapons. Pick things up and throw them away when you find something you like better. It doesn’t feel great, particularly in the late game when you seem to just find weaker versions of things you already have. Customize weapons with runes, giving them elemental buffs. Admittedly, Morbid doesn’t do enough with those effects. Does Lightning hurt some enemies more than Fire? I don’t know, and I never had to. Because of this, only three runes felt worth it: Life drain, Sanity drain, and Attack speed. A more robust combat system (or more obvious rewards!) might have forced me to play around with the elements. That said, there’s a degree with which the purity of the fight — dodge, hit, space, rest– was strong enough that I was rarely bothered by how little I had to engage with the advanced systems.
“Master Odius has promised us Transcendence.”
Morbid: The Seven Acolytes isn’t absolutely essential playing, the way Blasphemous or Hades was. It’s incomplete in some ways. Treasure chests seem to respawn when you rest, allowing you to permanently farm items you shouldn’t be able to. There are times weapons seem to hit based on pixel location that don’t make sense in a 3D space, causing some frustration in key fights. The inability to fast-change between weapon loadouts is frustrating. And the shrine fast-travel system just seems wrong to me.
That said, I still found Morbid a memorable experience. The gameplay feels good. The creature design is creepy, from regular monsters to bosses. The bosses in particular deserve a nod. Many games trying to build off what FromSoft did make their bosses small, fast, hard to predict. Winning feels unearned or uninteresting. Morbid‘s bosses are big monsters, fast but distinctively animated. Because of this, you learn to read them. One of the great joys of the game lay in ‘solving’ a boss like this, learning the precise pattern, developing a strategy, and then executing it. They built a solid balance into the game in how long you go between shrines, making it challenging without being frustrating.
The developer, Still Running Games, is a six-person Finnish team, and Morbid seems to be their biggest project by far. For a small team taking a big step up, I’m staggered by how much they got right in a genre that demands pretty rigorous balance. Because ultimately, the game’s core loop — explore maze-like levels, fight challenging monsters, unlock a shortcut, challenge a gruesome boss — works beautifully. I confess, the game frustrated me deeply while exploring Grimwald’s Grove. And yet, at the end of my experience, I wish there was more of the game. I wanted one more wonderfully designed monster, one more intriguing maze to explore. There’s room for improvement, but the game is still a worthy action-horror experience.
Availability
Morbid: The Seven Acolytes is out now for PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. For this review, I played it on the Switch. I purchased the game.
Morbid: The Seven Acolytes was developed by Still Running and published by Merge Games.