Tiel is more of a rogue-ish Shell, capable of swift moments and dodging. Eredrim is more heavy-set, relying on colossal weapons and executing a Shoulder Bash that can stagger, break and damage foes. Proxima is more unorthodox, possessing a hook to pull enemies or herself before following up with a lightning attack. Take too much damage, and like the first game, you’ll be separated from your Shell until it recovers.

You can change equipment at the Marrow Keep, fast-travel across the world (which promises over 60 dungeons) and interact with various characters. Not everyone is friendly, though, and there’s plenty of dodge-rolling, riposting and breaking to be done. The latter leads to stylish executions, though, and you can wield some pretty gnarly firearms, including a gatling gun.

Mortal Shell 2 launches this year for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. The open beta will begin this Summer for PC via Steam – head here to sign up.

Mortal Shell 2 is a standalone sequel that, according to the developer, builds on the foundations laid down by the original Mortal Shell. The title features an interconnected open world, and will give players plenty of options in terms of upgrades and other forms of progression.

The story of Mortal Shell 2 revolves around the player taking on forms of forgotten warriors in their attempts to take down the False Gods spread out throughout a ravaged world. The world itself will feature plenty of variety in the form of various biomes, each with its own line-up of enemies.

Mortal Shell 2 will be coming to PC (via Steam), PS5 and Xbox Series X/S in 2026. The game is also available to wishlist on your digital distribution network of choice. Registrations for the game’s beta are also open through its official website.

Taking heavy inspiration from the Dark Souls franchise, Mortal Shell is a dark fantasy RPG set in a medieval setting. Players are put in control of different “Shells” as they fight their way through the game’s various levels. Each of the Shells is a different playable character with their own unique abilities as well as backstories.

Mortal Shell got its only expansion—The Virtuous Cycle—back in 2021. The expansion adds a roguelike mode to the game, featuring randomly generated levels. Players are able to make use of over 100 different upgrades from Fallgrim’s pillars, and can also play using the new Shell, Hadern, which revolves around using quick attacks with daggers.

For more details on Mortal Shell, check out our review of the base game, as well as our review of The Virtuous Cycle.

"The Virtuous Cycle’s addition of a roguelite, along with its new shell and weapon, make it worthwhile for the fans of the game who want a new way to play, but I hesitate to say it adds any value to the game itself for newcomers."

In its original version, Mortal Shell is a Soulslike through and through. It has an interconnected world with tough enemies whose attack patterns you need to learn and who respawn when you die. Its slight differentiation comes in its semi-linearity within each of the three paths you can take, each of which ends with a boss. In The Virtuous Cycle, there’s a new character in the Fallgrim Tower who takes you to what is effectively an alternate universe, where the environments are mostly the same but the game turns into a Soulslike roguelite, which doesn’t affect your progress in the main campaign at all. In this alternate universe, named the reverie, the walls of Fallgrim Tower are locked except for a single pillar through which you can escape, starting your next run of the game. To begin, you choose which shell, weapon, and instinct you want to use for your run through the game, and you’re spawned into one of a handful of locations around the game’s opening area.

Of course, the roguelite run that you’ve just embarked on is different than any of the traditional runs in the game’s primary campaign. Most notably, you succeed if you can defeat the entirety of the game in a single run, but any time you die, you’re transported back to Fallgrim Tower and have to start from scratch, all but erasing the type of step-by-step progression that’s so basic in Soulslikes. Instead, progression here comes in the form of pillars and touch stones. These are scattered around the world and provide benefits in ways similar to any other roguelite on the market. Most of these benefits are your standard increase in dodge roll speed, drop rates, or damage, though some less common ones give you bigger benefits, refresh the ability to recover your shell, or even provide boosts that last permanently instead of just for that run.

On the gameplay front, very little has changed from the base game. Enemies appear in slightly different locations and sometimes larger groups, but the core of stabbing, rolling, and hardening is as pure and satisfying as ever. If nothing else, playing through The Virtuous Cycle is a great way to get back into the gameplay and feel how tightly choreographed the fights can feel and how satisfying it is to take down any range of enemies. This means that what also hasn’t changed is the game’s punishing difficulty. In some other roguelites, any individual enemy might not be the most intimidating or have a chance to kill you on its own, but here there’s never a safety net. You have to be on your game at all times or you’ll die, and just as before, you will die a lot.

"If nothing else, playing through The Virtuous Cycle is a great way to get back into the gameplay and feel how tightly choreographed the fights can feel and how satisfying it is to take down any range of enemies."

Obviously, Mortal Shell is by design a frustrating experience. You’re supposed to get ambushed or killed if you make a wrong move or don’t manage your stamina correctly. The main game makes up for this within gameplay with the unparalleled feeling of satisfaction that comes when you finally do beat that pesky boss and can be done with it forever, but with the roguelite structure, The Virtuous Cycle inherently loses this feeling of progression and doesn’t quite make up for it elsewhere. Just like in the campaign, there isn’t much direction in which path to take, and this makes it feel like you can wander with no clear path forward or understanding of what you need to do next. In a lot of ways, too, the main campaign can almost be classified as a long sequence of very short roguelike moments, where every death is the start of a new run and every Sister Genessa instance starts the next sequence. Taking out the idea of pushing forward no matter how many runs it takes removes a lot of the overarching feeling of progression.

The only way The Virtuous Cycle allows for this sense of progression is with a permanent upgrade system that allows you to pay tar or glimpses for a chance at better starting Instincts or the ability to keep more tar at the end of a run. On a purely structural level, this is a good way of building in slow progression, but it took more than 20 runs of 25-30 minutes each around just the opening level to come anywhere close to having enough tar to open a gate to a new area, and at this point I was already getting tired of the single boss and relatively small number of enemy types in the opening area. Eventually, things started to open up as my tar retention upon death was high enough to keep me going without starting from zero, but I can understand anyone who gets frustrated with the snail-like progression in the first few hours, even more so than the normal game.

The Virtuous Cycle also offers a new shell in the form of Hadern and the new Axatana weapon, both offering more variety than any shell or weapon before. Hadern is a cool addition as one of the main bosses in the main game who kicked my teeth in a handful of times, so getting to play as him is satisfying, especially since he’s a combination of the rest of the shells. The Axatana is a mashup of the eponymous axe and katana, which allows you to switch between agility and power quickly. While both of these are great additions to create some more variety, I never felt they were better or more fitting to my playstyle than the combo I had almost mastered through the campaign, so I never felt a need to use them more than just trying them out.

"Eventually, things started to open up as my tar retention upon death was high enough to keep me going without starting from zero, but I can understand anyone who gets frustrated with the snail-like progression in the first few hours, even more so than the normal game."

Mortal Shell certainly had some new ideas to offer the Soulslike genre at launch, and with The Virtuous Cycle, I applaud Cold Symmetry for trying new things and giving players a ton of replay value with a new, if somewhat derivative, roguelite mode and variety with the new weapon and shell. What I don’t like about the new mode is purely in its comparison with the main campaign, as it feels like the satisfying feeling of beating bosses with finality is taken away with less of a sense of progression or improvement to take its place, especially because many sequences in the campaign, as with other Soulslike games, have their own roguelike characteristics. For anyone who’s played or wants to get into a Soulslike, Mortal Shell is a great place to look, though it loses a little something when it takes away that rigid structure.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 4.

The main appeal of The Virtuous Cycle is its new roguelike mode with randomly generated environments. As players progress, they’ll take advantage of over 100 different upgrades from pillars throughout Fallgrim. The new Shell, Hadern, is all about daggers and absorbing damage, while the new weapon, the Axatana, can be used either as a pair of katana or an axe.

Those picking up the game on Steam can avail of a 10 percent discount, which includes the base game and The Virtuous Cycle, until August 25th. For more details on Mortal Shell and how it plays, check out our official review here.

Ahead of The Virtuous Cycle’s release, a launch trailer has been released for it (which you can check out below), with some other interesting news also being confirmed. The DLC will be free for everyone to download for five days after its launch, until August 23. Following that, players will be able to purchase it for $7.99.

Mortal Shell is available on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, Xbox One, and PC. In our review of the game, we awarded it a score of 7/10, saying, “Mortal Shell has a lot of things that allow it to be notable in its own right, but it makes it hard to forget that it’s taking from a giant whose shadow it never truly escapes.” You can read our full review through here.

The new Shell is called Hadern and has numerous abilities ranging from mastery of daggers to a damage absorption technique. It will be playable in both the base campaign and the DLC. The newest weapon is the Axatana which can function either as a heavy axe or a pair of katana, each possessing unique moves.

But that’s not all. The Virtuous Cycle also introduces a new roguelike mode which sees players venturing through a randomly generated world. With over 100 upgrades to earn, including new weapon enhancements and moves, the mode promises lots of replay value for fans. For more details on the base game, check out our review here.

Not much was revealed about The Virtuous Cycle though it will be coming to Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, PS5 and PC. Along with the Epic Games Store, it’s also bound for Steam, where the base game releases this Summer. So if you’ve been eagerly awaiting the Steam release, it looks like it’ll be happening in the coming months and bringing some new content.

For more details on Mortal Shell, check out our review here. The Enhanced Edition recently released for Xbox Series X/S and PS5 in February with enhanced textures and support 4K/60 FPS performance. It’s also a free upgrade for Xbox One and PS4 players.

Cold Symmetry launched their Souslike RPG Mortal Shell for PS5 and Xbox Series X/S with an Enhanced Edition a couple of months back, letting players experience the game with improved visuals and performance, among other upgrades and enhancements. But the Xbox Series S, being significantly weaker than PS5 and Xbox Series X, did not offer some pretty crucial options, with a 60 FPS mode in particular being a notable omission.

That’s been remedied. Cold Symmetry recently confirmed via the game’s official Twitter account that Mortal Shell’s latest update has added a 60 FPS/1080p mode on the Xbox Series S. The other mode is, of course, the one that the game launched with, which runs at 4K and 30 frames per second.

A recent report revealed that the game enjoys notably better frame rates on Xbox Series X as compared to its PS5 version. Read more on that through here.

Mortal Shell is available on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, Xbox One, and PC.

Xbox Series S players, we hear you: enjoy Mortal Shell at a fluid 60fps with the new 1080p setting introduced in the latest update ⚙️ pic.twitter.com/GxCndHPfGV

— Mortal Shell (@MortalShellGame) April 8, 2021

Cold Symmetry’s Soulslike action RPG Mortal Shell launched not too long ago for the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S with an enhanced edition, boasting improved resolution and frame rate as compared to the game’s PS4 and Xbox One versions. But how do the two new next-gen versions compare with each other? Thanks to a technical analysis done by VGTech (reported by Twisted Voxel) we have a clearer idea about that.

On the PS5, Mortal Shell renders at a constant 1800p after its latest patch, with the UI being shown at a native 4K resolution. This does, however, come at the cost of performance issues. While the game targets 60 frames per second, it often drops to the 50s, occasionally to the 40s, and can even fall as low as the mid- to high-30s. In comparison, the Xbox Series X version does a pretty good job of maintaining a solid 60 FPS- though something that that version has working in its favour is its usage of dynamic resolution, which the PS5 version doesn’t have. Here’s hoping that gets added to the PS5 version soon.

Mortal Shell is available on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, Xbox One, and PC.