- DEVELOPER: Nikola Todorovic
- PUBLISHER: Nikola Todorovic
- PLATFORMS: PC
- GENRE: Action rougelike
- RELEASE DATE: March 15, 2023
- STARTING PRICE: 19,50 €
- REVIEWED VERSION: PC
Mortal Sin is an intense action-horror roguelike where you must hack and slash your way through an endless nightmare. You can check the video review bellow from our newest collaborator KyotoCrank.
Game Premise
If you couldn’t tell already, Mortal Sin is a hack-and-slash, action roguelike, with a limb-detachment based combat system. Turn your enemies into a red mist as you headbang to a heavy metal guitar and swing your big ass sword or pummel them with your bare fists, or incinerate them with spells if you so desire. This game is very reminiscent of Doom minus the guns, instead you get up close and personal with your foes the whole time.
Visuals
The visual style of this game is spectacular, and works incredibly well. I really dig the Dark Fantasy look they’re going for. The contrast of colors makes it easy to distinguish threats as your screen gets covered with enemies or you're quickly running around to evade. The stark, deep shadows add to the gritty feeling of the hellscape you’re traversing. If you want to make the game look even more old school you can turn these lines on.
Music & Sound Design
The sound effects are great. The traps are very easily distinguishable and stand out from the music so you can still be aware of them if even you’re not looking directly at them while you’re fighting for your life, or afterlife, that part is a little unclear. Chopping off limbs makes a nice juicy squelch to match the spray of red your enemies emit. The music is wonderful. The intense guitar and rock music really matches the heart racing adrenaline you feel slicing and bashing away the endless hordes. Then when the fight is over the music dies down, just like the screams of your enemies when you’re through with them. It helps you feel the fleeting moment of peaceful silence you earned but as you wander the now-empty dungeon, the music and ambiance is still unsettling.
Gameplay Mechanics
So this game is a hack-and-slash roguelike. We’ll start with the hack-and-slash. Your left click is attack, and right click is block. You can charge your attack for a few seconds to do a power strike, and some weapons have a special effect when you do so, but more on that in a minute. If you charge your attack beyond a power strike you do a whirlwind move, which makes you spin your weapons around continuously for a few seconds, dealing the damage of a power strike. When swinging your weapons around, you can swing from side to side to deal damage to multiple enemies with lingering hitboxes, this comes in handy a lot, and is a necessity for slow weapons like greatswords.
Back to blocking, if you time your block just right you can do a parry, which blocks all incoming damage, stuns your enemy, and often leads into a powerful counterattack. Other than normal attacks, you can kick and bash. Press the spacebar to kick, dealing slight damage and stun effect to enemies, and press shift to bash, a short charge forward to deal more damage and stun than a kick.
A neat aspect of this game is the combo system. String together different combinations of attacks, kicks, and bashes to achieve different attacks and effects at the end of your combo, ranging from more damage to explosions. Different characters have access to different combos and effects. Personally, most combos I executed were on accident. I punch, kick, and bash when it seems appropriate and that took me pretty far.
Now for the roguelike elements. Depending on the class you start with, you may start with weapons and character traits. As you progress through the dungeons you’ll find bodies and treasure chests that when you interact with them will spit out a piece of equipment. Enemies will also drop these glowy crystal thingies that you spend gold to open for items. You have helmets, chest pieces, boots, and gauntlets. You can also carry two weapons at a time. When you’re looking at a piece of equipment, you automatically compare the stats, and if you find a high enough rarity item it will have a trait. Traits such as higher weapon or armor durability, health regeneration, or even minecraft thorns that instantly kill any enemy that hits you.
Often traits will consume your equipment’s durability upon use. Each class has a preference to a weapon type, and there is a small variety of weapons you can find throughout the levels so odds are you’ll find something good enough to want to change up your playstyle, or maybe your equipment is low on durability and you just need something new. It keeps the gameplay interesting to have to learn how to use a new weapon on the fly, and there are many classes to choose from as well. There is a surprising amount of variety in this game.
So about this weapon durability I keep mentioning. Using your weapons to attack and block uses up durability, and your armor reduces from taking hits and using their special traits. I believe parrying doesn’t damage your weapons or shields. If your things run out of durability, they will break, so you carry around handy dandy vials of wizard oil to regenerate some of that equipment health. You also have health flasks for yourself. You can carry a maximum of 4 of each, but you can refill them by gathering their associated essence, which you get at the entrance of each floor, killing enemies, or breaking pots and boxes. It really is worth going Link on every single pot you encounter to get essence, and sometimes equipment. I don’t know if this is supposed to be a Zelda reference but hey no complaints here. This game is plenty hard enough, I’ll take the extra stuff.
Then there’s the level design. There are 3 different areas: the dungeon, the caves, and the forest. The forest is locked until you beat both the dungeon and the caves in a single run. You have to clear all three in one run to unlock the final boss area, but more on that later. In each area there are 5 floors. At the final floor there is a bossfight to beat the area, and get some sweet loot. Each level you traverse through on your journey is procedurally generated. Some get reused, but for the most part they are unique.
The only areas reused are the multi-wave arena rooms halfway through, and the boss rooms. So for the most part you will be encountering unique layouts of hallways, traps, and beasties lying in wait. To move on to the next floor there are buttons on the floor you must push, and if you get lost and need help finding them, the game glows a red line on the floor when you sit still long enough. Press the number of them shown on the top of the screen and you will open the hatch in the floor to move on. It is at this point moving on to the next level you get a little boost of health and wizard oil essence to help you out, but not enough to fill a whole vial.
The essences you get from the doors restore more of your vials than ones you pick up from enemies. As you progress through the levels, you’ll reach some statues on certain floors that offer you some character traits. Traits such as increased luck, increased punch damage, life steal, among many others. If you don’t like the ones offered, you can shuffle them by spending gold. You can sometimes find similar statues at random during the levels offering traits and even health potions and wizard oil vials for gold.
Some levels come with challenges that unlock sometimes permanent rewards. When you enter a floor with a challenge you have not completed for a specific class, it will appear at the top of your screen. These can be anything like, parry 5 times, or kill 10 enemies with kicks. When you complete them you speak to this lady in the hub area and she will offer you your reward. If it’s anything other than weapons and armor I think they are permanent.
For the rest of the hub world, there’s a bit to see, and most of it you’ll unlock over time. There’s this guy you can beat the shit out of for practice. This arena where you try to beat the shit out of a bunch of guys for rewards to help you on your current run. An anvil where you can craft 3 random rare pieces of gear in exchange for gold, by the way this anvil will sometimes randomly appear in the levels. Then there’s these two statues that sell you vials.
There’s a statue to check your progress on what levels you have completed, and their associated challenges. Each area, dungeon, caves, and forest, have 3 different variants, A, B, and C depending on the order you tackle them. Lastly, and my favorite, there’s this thing you can throw money at in order to increase all of your stats by a little bit. You don’t keep all of your money between runs, so it’s a good idea to go ahead and spend what you have. It just might make the difference.
Last thing to talk about is the enemies. Each area for the most part has their own variety of enemies. The dungeon has normal dumbos with no weapons or special skills, they just throw themselves at you, as well as spearmen, fireball throwing ghouls, and a minotaur boss waiting at the end. The caves have the normal dumbos as well as these horned guys who summon more dumbos. Sometimes there might be spearmen, and sometimes you might encounter a mummy. At the end level the boss that awaits you uses area effect magic attacks and normal attacks.
The forest has normal dumbos, these guys wielding sickles, and pumpkin heads that summon more baddies. The boss at the end uses physical attacks and scares. I couldn’t figure out a segway earlier but here we go. Scares are an area effect that summons at any point while you’re in a level that isn’t the hub world. A giant pentagram circle looking thing appears, centered on you, and if you don’t exit it in a couple seconds, you will get jumpscared and take half a health bar’s worth of damage. So yeah, the forest boss is a toooon of fun to fight against. It’s impossible to sit still, because he summons scare after scare after scare after scare.
The final boss area is ruthless. You slog through several waves of boss type enemies, and before you encounter the final boss, there are a few items you can pick up if some of your gear breaks, which is nice of the developer. You’re going to need all the help you can get for the final boss. My best strategy for this guy was to get good at parrying, and get a weapon that sends out magical attacks during a whirlwind. He sends out flying skulls that move pretty slow, so you can get a parry off of them and throw some projectiles while keeping your distance. I’ve only beaten him once so far, but that’s how I did it.
Story
After dying many times and getting a lot of these weird messages, I don’t think there’s an overarching story, at least not yet in early access. You are just an unnamed lad thrown into this hellscape attempting to fight your way to the final boss, the maw of sin. In modern English we understand this word to mean mouth or teeth, but it also derives from an old German word magen which means stomach, so maybe that’s referring to the final area as some kind of “belly of the beast”. Regardless, when you defeat this final boss he says something along the lines of “you thought you could absolve yourself of your sins, now you will know true pain.” Very ominous.
Then there’s this golden lady in the hub area, who assists you in your struggle. Perhaps she’s some kind of guardian angel helping you seek redemption by killing the embodiment of sin. But in doing so, you return to a more difficult gamemode. Perhaps this is some kind of meaningful dialogue about how virtue cannot exist without sin, light cannot exist without dark, some kind of yin and yang thing. I’m excited to see if the plot gets more fleshed out as I play the game more, or when the game gets a full release.
Conclusions
In conclusion, holy crap this game is so good. This might be my favorite roguelike I’ve played in a while, and I played Risk of Rain Returns on release day. You’ve heard me splurge about it already but the combat is just so fun and engaging. The art direction and color use is so striking and interesting. And this game is still in early access. 20 dollars was such a good price for what already feels like a finished game! I can’t wait to see what else comes out about it.
Review copy provided by the publisher
English (UK) 
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