Children of Morta may look like just another pixel-art rogue-like, but after speaking with Jakobsen Locke at PAX East 2018 I can safely say there is more here than meets the eye. Locke is the narrative designer and writer on Children of Morta and story is where the game carves its own path. Between dungeon crawling, hacking and slashing, and marveling at the dark, Studio Ghibli-inspired art you’ll also be treated to a persistent story that justifies the slashing.
The game opens with an in-engine cinematic that establishes the world as a dark, mysterious place full of magic and corruption. As a member of the Bergson family, you must venture off to discover the cause of darkness and stop it from spreading over your mountain. It’s easy to dismiss the story as an excuse to throw you into dungeons, but there’s more to it than that. Each member of the Bergson family has a story to tell and is impacted differently by the calamity. You get little snippets of this between dungeon runs, and it works to establish the Bergson house as more of a home than a game hub. You’ll also unlock randomly generated narrative moments while playing. For instance, I saved a white wolf pup trying to protect his fallen mother at one point. The pup then appeared in my house and unlocked a series of ambient dialogue sequences with other members of the family.
Of course, you’ll still be doing a lot a dungeon diving outside of the story bits. Each family member has a unique set of attacks and abilities. The two that were unlocked for the demo were a sword and shield wielding warrior and a fire ball throwing mage. Both varied in the play styles quite a bit. The warrior was melee focused and could take out a group of enemies with one swipe of his sword. While the mage had to keep her distance and kite enemies towards environmental traps. The combat is definitely satisfying with the option to unlock permanent abilities through training, and through the discovery of runes that imbue your character with powerful abilities, but only for that run.
The real beauty of the combat comes into play when two players join in co-op. Having a mage handling long-range crowd control while a warrior rushes in for hard hits against the stronger enemies is a beautiful thing. I played along side Locke on the PAX East show floor and can say that this will be the best way to experience the game. He said they took inspiration from Gauntlet Legends and Diablo, and it shows. You will able to do play the game with another person either online or on the couch.
Procedural rougue-likes often suffer from weak or nonexistence story telling, and Children of Morta appears to be trying to solve that problem. By giving you a hub that feels like a home full of unique family members, beautifully rendered and narrated cutscenes between chapters, and peppering in random narrative moments within it’s dungeons it may have just figured it out. Combine that with responsive, fun hack ‘n’ slash gameplay that can enjoyed with a friend, and I’m confident that Children of Morta will be scratching many itches when it comes out on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC later this year.
You can check out my interview with Jakobsen Locke at the top of this page for more info, and watch us play some co-op in the video below.
