October Assassination #3

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Morbid is a mid-game that is almost acceptable, but falters near the very end. TLDR: beautiful to look at, a chore to play

Let's be honest, it looks great -- the artstyle is detailed and consistent throughout, and there is enough variety in enemy designs and locations that you almost always know where you are and what kind of enemy you can expect to find there. The maps are nicely done, not showing everything but showing enough to keep you entertained. The sound design is generic but not objectively bad. And the designer intentionally keeps the lore cryptic, delivered through item descriptions, which at this point is an old trope, but kind of works here.

But that's the extent to which we can praise the game. The most important part of any action game is the gameplay. I wouldn't really mind the lack of a proper plot that interested me if the moment-to-moment gameplay was good, but alas, it is not. Combat is incredibly simple, to the point of being boring and repetitive. There's very little variation on what you do in combat. It usually is a game of positioning instead of a game of timing and reflexes. Attacks are very high commitment and, for the most part, incredibly slow, so you need to know where you are in relation to your enemy and how long will it take for it to reach you, in order to know whether you'll have enough wind-up to hit your foe before it retaliates. Writing it that way makes it sound acceptable and even fun, but playing it is anything but. Besides a strong attack, you have no variation in your arsenal.

You do get a lot of different weapons, but all play the same and feel the same. Even in terms of power creep, you end the game fighting like you did at the beginning, with your health similar to what you had at the beginning, with similar damage numbers you had at the beginning. Enemies get more health and stronger punches, but you hardly get stronger as the game progresses. Sure, you have Blessings to customize your build, but it's so hard to upgrade them and they are so generic that one can't help but wonder if the game wouldnt' be better without them. You have dodge and parry, but parry timing is not super easy to crack and I always tried to avoid it when I could, except in some enemies that absolutely need it to close the gap (like the ones that shoot missiles up and Lady Tristana). Attacks take too much stamina vs. running and dodging, so you'll be out of stamina more often than not

Add to it a small inventory that can be completely taken over by three or four weapons you find in the path, a lot of buffs that only stack up to 10 so you'll be constantly using things you don't need to be able to pick up more, or leaving loot behind. There's a sanity system that adds close to nothing to the whole ordeal, and a very linear map that tries to pretend it's super interconnected, but it's just a bit annoying to navigate.

I would be willing to overlook all of that if it wasn't for the last battle. Not only it's a 3-phase juggernaut, it's just too slow to begin with, and when it picks up pace you'll probably already be tired of it and depleted of resources, at which point the difficulty just ramps to 11. I almost dropped the game after literally 7 hours because of how much I struggled at the last boss. It's not a challenging fight, it's just annoying and boring. Lady Tristana was the only fight I genuinely enjoyed in the game and she would make a much better last boss than what we have here.