Morbid: Lords of Ire Review

Morbid: The Seven Acolytes was an excellent top-down version of Dark Souls. It understood the tenets of exploration, experimentation, and big old nasty bosses. I never finished it but I loved a lot of what it did. Glad to see I wasn’t the only one at Xbox Tavern.

When Morbid: Lords of Ire was announced I was intrigued – how were the developers, Still Running, going to add more to this formula? The Striver protagonist is back again, after beating the Seven Acolytes of the first game, but I figured that it was going to try something fresh.

I was then utterly confused when I saw screenshots and instead of a pixel-based top-down game, it was a third-person game. Instead of rethinking Dark Souls it was basically becoming Dark Souls.

It was a weird decision that I found even harder to digest upon booting it up. The menus feel placeholder or, worse, archaic and this is not the only underwhelming impression. Once in game, the shift to third-person and 3D is a lower quality than people on Xbox Series are used to, and there is copious screen-tearing.

Lords of Ire has the same control system as Dark Souls ­– a light and heavy attack, a block (that can also parry) and a dodge roll. In addition to those moves there is some light stealth options and a gun that has one shot in it. Where it differs from Dark Souls is that it melds some Sekiro in there. Each enemy has a health bar but also a poise bar, reducing the poise bar to nothing stuns the enemy and allows for the Striver to perform a more devastating attack. Some weapons do more damage to poise and the one-shot gun (more on that later) can be used to stop an enemy in its tracks and reduce poise.

The core loop then becomes figuring out an enemy’s pattern, parrying to open up ripostes, then reducing their poise or health to finish them off. Obviously, it is more complicated in practice and highly reductive of the moment to moment, but that is the gist.

The fun comes from how the Lords of Ire throws combinations of enemies at the player to confound  – from hulking collections of limbs, to delicate ghouls that throw firebombs, to Elephant-headed hammer wielders.

But simply surviving these encounters is not enough as there is a sanity meter to contend with.

As the Striver performs combos, pulls off perfect parries and ripostes, the sanity meter will go up. This means getting rewarded more XP, the Striver gets better at parrying and also takes less damage. Being hit, trying to spam attacks through fights and certain enemy spells will cause the sanity meter to go down. The lower it goes, the less XP awarded, the more damage the Striver takes (while also dealing more damage) and when it hits a certain threshold the world turns purple… And some enemies will come back to life in a spectral form and fight again.

This tension adds more layers and offers a less conventional Soulslike experience.

The levelling system is also non-traditional. Most of the upgrades happen through the different weapons. There are 4 values on each weapon (with the Striver being able to carry up to two at any time) – Damage, Speed, Agility, and Impact – which can be improved by slotting runes into them. Once all slots are filled up the player can then fuse them (losing all the runes in the process) to create permanent upgrades. Do that enough and it is possible to reset the weapon to its base value and generate a powerful, unique rune. This system is sharp, although I managed to accidentally do a few things that I wish I could have undone to min/max some of my unique runes, nonetheless it created a more compelling levelling system than ‘numbers go up’.

There is also a limited character levelling system that involves using cards (with a maximum of three active at any one time) to bolster the Striver’s stats. There are skill points to increase the value of the cards – whether it is more stamina, more health, more powerful gun, and ones that affect the sanity meter (increasing or decreasing). This is one of the weaker elements – the grind required to max out three cards is hefty, and I had not done so by the completion of my first playthrough.

My word, though, what a playthrough. The first thing that struck me as I played was that each level took the Dark Souls mantra of curving in on itself and revealing secrets and short cuts. Poking in every corner rewards with new items, runes, or weapons. That or I would pull a lever, and find myself staring at my original ‘bonfire’ spot.

Some of the levels have a great sense of verticality, with winding staircases, platforms leading out over precarious drops. The level design is top notch and has a lot of care and attention, this is combined with some utterly genius moments of enemy placement.

I could speak of several moments that were inspired but my favourite moment in the game occurred while traversing an area known as Dunghaven. After having fought my way out of the slums the game presented two paths towards a golden elephant building. The first is through a waterlogged spot with two hulking beasts that were mini bosses in the previous area. Off to the side, the second path was a series of ramshackle walkways over deeper, and deadlier, water – that was populated by over a dozen low level zombies and skeleton-warriors.

I chose the second path. The logic being that these low-level enemies could be shot with the gun, destroying their poise, and then finished off with a final strike. The rest of the game relies on meticulous combat: parries, ripostes, dodges; it is about exchanges like a boxing match. This encounter, when done right, plays out like a combination of a twitch shooter and Devil May Cry. Instead of parry/strike/parry – it becomes shoot, run towards enemy, execute, pivot to next enemy, shoot them and avoid any income fire. There is a fluidity, a burst of energy that is tempered by avoiding falling off the platform.

This embodies what I think Lord of Ire gets right and why I came around on its visuals.

I already described my initial reaction to aesthetics. My second reaction was ‘surely no one else has this much fondness for Enclave on the original Xbox (author’s note: yes, I know they recently released an HD remake and no I don’t think it was justified)?’

The vibe of the game is a crisp reimagining of graphics circa 2003, but with the lighting of a modern engine and some truly gifted art direction. The further I got, appreciating the cathedrals, the crumbling towns, the brightly lit arenas, I found myself repeating the meme “I want shorter games with worse graphics…” as a mantra. The sense of scale in the level design, the moments of truly inspired asset placement (staring into desolate building and seeing blood pour from a giant’s hand onto a solitary, demonic figure) got me on the same level as what the Lords of Ire was trying to do. I ended up falling in love with its style, and I think some people will surprise themselves by also loving it, if they can get past the screen tear.

Morbid: Lord of Ire is a perplexing sequel, but in the best way. It shouldn’t work, it is occasionally clumsy yet there are so many great, and unique parts to it. A demake, an upgrade, a tribute to past tech, something new and fresh, but also familiar.

Conclusion

Morbid: Lords of Ire is the best kind of sequel. Confounding, different, but also spiritually aligned with its predecessor. It helps that it did not forget to be fun too.