Children of Morta

for the random dude that likes to buy random games on a impulse. this is a decent pick up.

---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☑ Beautiful
☐ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS
---{ Gameplay }---
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't
---{ Audio }---
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf
---{ Audience }---
☐ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☐ Grandma
---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☑ Potato
☐ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer
---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Significant brain usage
☑ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls
---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☑ Average grind level
☐ Too much grind
☐ You'll need a second live for grinding
---{ Story }---
☐ No Story
☐ Some lore
☐ Average
☐ Good
☑ Lovely
☐ It'll replace your life
---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☐ Average
☑ Long
☐ To infinity and beyond
---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☑ Worth the price
☐ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money
---{ Bugs }---
☐ Never heard of
☑ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs
---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☐ 7
☐ 8
☑ 9
☐ 10

---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☐ Beautiful
☑ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS
---{ Gameplay }---
☐ Very good
☑ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't
---{ Audio }---
☐ Eargasm
☐ Very good
☐ Good
☑ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf
---{ Audience }---
☐ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☐ Grandma
---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☐ Potato
☑ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer
---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Significant brain usage
☑ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls
---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☑ Average grind level
☐ Too much grind
☐ You'll need a second life for grinding
---{ Story }---
☐ No Story
☐ Some lore
☐ Average
☑ Good
☐ Lovely
☐ It'll replace your life
---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☑ Average
☐ Long
☐ To infinity and beyond
---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☑ Worth the price
☐ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money
---{ Bugs }---
☑ Never heard of
☐ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs
---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☐ 7
☑ 8
☐ 9
☐ 10

A fun and well-received roguelite game, Children of Morta invites you to light a beacon of hope in a world steadily falling into darkness. Join the Bergson family in search of the source of dark corruption, discover the powers running in their blood since many generations ago and kick some evil butts, just like the tradition dictates.
THE GOOD
There`s quite a lot to say about what makes the gameplay so enjoyable. Firstly, the learning curve. Being granted new powers, delving into new territories, encountering unknown enemies and unlocking new mechanics all comes exactly in time. During my initial playthrough I felt neither sorely unprepared for what`s to come (save boss battles, but that may be a common theme within the genre) nor punished for lacking required game knowledge. In time you`ll need to polish your reflexes and pay increasingly more attention to hazards with each stage of progression, but the game still makes a prime example of a "fair" roguelite title that never goes out of its way to punish you for no reason.
Then we have the flow. It`s greatly balanced with havoc and respite constantly intertwining, though without one ever overshadowing the other. Missions aren`t too long and are additionally split into smaller stages so neither overstaying your welcome in a single place nor unnecessary, tedious backtracking is a problem here. Also, movement and combat feel smooth - with a few negligible exceptions, like attacks made with delay.
Multitude of upgrades and powers makes every run unique. As it goes with roguelite titles, you get to keep certain resoruces gathered in previous runs to spend them on permanent buffs to press on harder next time. Apart from that, there's a number of run-specific extras in form of one-use items, double-edged powers, tag team abilities that may trigger automatically after meeting certain requirements, runes that modify your character's talents in many different ways. There's a chance that once you've beaten the game and indulged in NG+, you still will be discovering new power-ups and ability modifiers.
To add to the previous point, since Children of Morta is a family affair, there's a roster of several playable characters, each sporting a distinct personality, attacks and talent trees. There's John with his trusty sword and shield, focused on defensive playstyle, Lucy who shoots fiery lasers everywhere like a madwoman she is, the glass cannon Kevin who can sneak away from danger, a slow but powerful berserker type Joey and a couple of more options. Each character clearly brings something unique to the table, as well as enhances other family members from behind the scenes when upgraded.
Whilst the story is quite clichéd, the narration behind it, accompanied by colourful, pixelated cutscenes, create a feeling of retelling a warm, familiar fairytale with a strong moral about the importance of family bonds – even despite a rather dark atmosphere throughout. My personal favourite thing here is that the meaning and method of unlocking of every new feature revolves around the lore and story progression. The game expands its borders exactly when it needs to and that makes its story part organic.
Do you like pixel art? Awesome. Children of Morta does that very well. It doesn’t necessarily give the retro vibe, but at the same time is enough detailed and colourful to stand out in the crowd in a positive way. My only nitpick here are the cutscenes which happen to be significantly zoomed in and that’s when the pixel art lose much of its charm. Definitely not enough to write it off, though.
Co-op. It… exists! Just pointing out, since I’ve never tried it myself, but hey, you can!
THE DISPUTABLE
Replayability is a tough one in this case. On the one hand there’s the New Game Plus which increases maximum upgrade levels and tests the skills you acquired during the initial run to the limits. On the other, though, game’s power lies in its narrative, unlocking new characters, places, items and powers, and you won’t be doing that anymore during the endgame. Like stated previously, single runs don’t last long enough to become stale, but if you want to progress side quests, you’ll have to come back again and again to the same locations, since many special encounters are random. In a way there’s always room to go further, but whether it’s worth the hassle or not is debatable.
While ordinary enemies don’t mess up the overall difficulty level, boss balance seems skewed. Early on, while still short on powers and upgrades, I found myself struggling with boss fights mostly for grind-related reasons - resources turned out to be too scarce for me to prepare ahead accordingly. It was halfway to the end when these battles felt spot on – challenging, but not hopeless. And then, towards the last encounters, the major fights felt like a walk in the park. Not a game-ruining experience, but one that could use addressing, since it takes away some fun.
THE BAD
Speaking of balance, the discrepancy of power, and especially survivability, between ranged and melee characters is bad to jarring. There’s a couple of attributes that can make or break your run (and your back), from the number of evasion bars (how often you can evade attacks) to the more obvious hit points. For some reason, though, melee characters lack proper defensibility that ranged ones make up by staying afar. With the amount of sheer attack spam increasing with each zone, frequency of ferocious enemies’ spawn (their attacks cannot be interrupted) and negative conditions awaiting mostly in close combat, range-oriented characters enjoy much more freedom – and much longer lives. Yep, that shield doesn’t do jack later on, I mean, try to block thirty simultaneous attacks. Unfortunately, in most cases it also doesn’t translate to overall damage output, which feels more or less similar for every character or damage reduction abilities, which are scarce, but available to everybody as well.
Visual glitches are a minor problem. That is, until it turns out you’re taking damage outside of the designated area of effect or that you can be shot through that pillar you planned to use for a short reprieve. In time you can learn to avoid certain environmental structures or get further away from these deep purple pools of corruptive ooze, but unclear hit boxes should never be a thing in the first place. Duh.
OVERALL
Despite lacking polish here and there, as well as struggling with endgame balance issues, Children of Morta is still a gorgeously crafted roguelite title to be enjoyed for many hours. It does what a representative of the genre should, and does it very well, while adding sprinkles of freshness to a well-known rhythm of „go – die – upgrade – repeat”. It’s heavily rooted in its beautifully told story, combining mechanics and lore with proficiency a few roguelite games achieved. While not serving an endless loop of gameplay, its quality is well worth the money spent.

Many times I've seen folks, who wanted to have an option to give a game "meh" score instead of positive or negative. I'm in the club with this one.
I can see the effort from the dev team here. But it just doesnt click with me.
If you like Roguelites with cool synergies, different builds etc, you will be disappointed. Pretty boring active and passive items and there's not much of a variety of those.
Combat is the biggest meh. You must constantly kite the enemies, because Melee chars play around stagger and almost always you cant affect all monsters and Range have less stagger, but can attack from distance. There are 7 chars. 4 melee, 2 ranged, 1 mixed - mid range combatant
Sounds and music are quite nice.
Huge accent on narration, but the story isn't really interesting and was probably made for teenagers or even younger audience. Not saying this is bad.
I've beat it on Hard in 12-15 hours. I couldn't reach lvl 20 even with one character, but I played with all of the a little. Killed last boss with Lucy on 1st attempt, she was lvl 19.
For me it was like 5-6/10 game, but I can't say it's bad.

It's a fun game but I wish they incorporated the co-op a bit better as well as make the lvl up progression faster.
The gameplay is just typical roguelite dungeon stuff. Kill monsters and find relics, get stronger with upgrades at homebase, level up and unlock new abilities, it’s straightforward. The leveling needs to be faster though. By the time we finished the game none of the characters were close to being maxed out and only 2 were even past halfway up the skill tree.
The story is alright. I wasn’t too engaged with it but it was interesting enough. I liked the narration quite a bit. Props to whoever did the voice acting for that.
The co-op is something that needs to be redone. Idk if this game was originally co-op but it feels like it was just a thing tacked on at the end. I remember it used to be local co-op until they released online co-op. Regardless if you’re local co-op or online, the co-op partner can’t do anything at the base. Only the host can upgrade anything and (I have not confirmed this so no points taken away yet) people have said the upgrades don’t even affect the co-op partner, only the host. The co-op can still upgrade their own skills in the character trees so that’s a plus.
It’s not a bad game, but it needs some work, especially co-op. I had fun playing but I think you should wait for a sale to buy.

I've never really been a fan of roguelikes and roguelites.
I've played a number of them, but none ever really "clicked".
This game is the exception.
It's a wonderful mash-up so far (at 8.0 hours in) of a narrative-driven RPG, a hack & slash, and the almost endless grind of replaying randomly generated dungeons until you level up your characters and shape their skills and develop their fighting styles.
The randomly generated maps can be wonderful- relatively easy without huge mobs and Ferocious Monsters (think mini bosses), or ones that lock your path to progression behind pathways both filled with spike traps and obviously large mobs waiting to get you stuck on the traps. The game will troll you- but since you do not have permadeath in the main story mode of the game, your progress and morv (gold) collection carries over for the next skill buy and next run in a totally newly generated dungeon.
The music is pleasant and appropriate.
The sound effects during exploration and battle are appropriate.
The graphics are stunning- some of the best pixel graphics I have seen in any game.
The voice acting is quite good (most of the story is delivered in text bits, but there is a narrator for the more significant events (with text that says the same thing).
The game is a bit confusing to learn- the tooltips and "tutorials" are a bit vague- but I am finding that for me, figuring it out on my own feels good. Each success feels more significant. The randomness of who and what you will find in a dungeon means that a step-by-step walkthrough isn't going to help much, IMHO. My game will be different than your game will be different than their game will be different from someone else's game.
I have not tried online co-op yet, but will do so with a friend or two in the future, once I feel like I have a better grip on how things work and what the best fighting style is for each of my characters. Same goes for the Family Trials Mode (which is permadeath).
For me, the big thing is I have not rage-quit yet and uninstalled the game. If I play it more than 2 hours, it means I like it and am willing to grind out achievements and see how far I can get. I really did not expect to enjoy this game as much as I have so far. I am hopeful that I will continue to enjoy it for many more hours.
I did buy the game years ago as part of a multi-game bundle here on Steam, and just got to playing it while trying to work down my enormous backlog. Feeling a bit sad that I waited so long.
Worth it at full price?
Quick edit to answer this, now that the game is no longer on sale... (April 30, 2023)
Yeah.
After 50.2 hours into the game, I feel like full price would absolutely be worth it for the enjoyment and challenge this game has given me, keeping in mind that I have always enjoyed heavy-grind games- as long as the grind is fun. And in this one, it is.
And I will keep playing and enjoying the increasing challenges and the slow unfolding of the story in the main game, and the skills challenge of Family Trials Mode (though it gets rather twitchy for these old hands).