Amazing animations, mixed pixel-art style, simple gameplay loop, slightly repetitive. Children of Morta has an interesting story that even got my wife’s attention and curiosity, bringing her for some fun in a couch co-op style.

Wikipedia summary:

Players take on the role of members of the Bergson family, with more members being unlocked as progress is made through the game. Each family member has its own playstyle and gameplay mechanics and levels up as it is played, granting improvements to themselves and the family as a whole.

The players must traverse a number of procedurally generated dungeons within the caverns of Mount Morta to clear them of various enemies and bosses.

Review

Setup

  • Version: PlayStation 5
  • Difficulty: Hard
  • Total playing time: 17 hours (based on PS5 save stats)

Comments

The game started out as quite fun for me, the initial character, John, was interesting and I liked the way it did a knock back on enemies on attack. However, soon it became clear that any enemies that did not get knocked back were troublesome to handle. After a while, I unlocked the second member of the family, Linda, and basically did not even try as I preferred the melee style. It soon became clear, though, that continuing to focus on a single character would not be viable, since the maps themselves somewhat forced you to switch characters to make use of their strengths. For example, one of the bosses was a Giant Spider that killed me a couple of times on John, but was easily handled by a first run on Linda.

While I understood immediately that this was an indication that I would have to level up all characters and make use of their key abilities at different points, it was a bit annoying as I am the type of player that prefers to pick a role and then go with it until the end. Unfortunately, more mechanics (like the Fatigue system) were added to quite literally force you to not repeat the same character over and over. I was not super amused, but decided to continue through because I found the game fun at the beginning. Killing hordes of enemies is quite fun, after all. Then the third and fourth characters hit and each one felt like they were just overpowered in comparison to the enemies we had to face at the time they joined. Each member added felt like a much higher jump in power than just repeating cycles over cycles to gather money to improve abilities.

Some “side-quests” seemed interesting, but I either missed something or they all just got conveniently added in your path regardless of what you wanted to do. In the end, they were optional just because you could intentionally choose to skip their area when finding them. But it felt a bit forced that each event that needed some item would have it conveniently be part of the next map you are in currently, instead of making you search for it, or even better, go out of the “main” areas and maybe walk around the forest near the house and do something there instead.

Story

The story evolves around the Bergson family, which lives near the Mount Morta. An evil corruption is infesting the life in the mountain, creating strange monsters and suffocating all existing healthy life. The family goes on a mission to find out what happened and how to stop the corruption, eventually figuring out that it was caused by the mountain god, defeating it and bringing peace again to the region.

After the initial drawbacks I had with the game, I was not very excited and considered stopping and dropping it. However, the way the story and its key points kept evolving after every other cycle kept me coming back over and over. Then, my wife kept pressuring me to know what was going to happen next, until finally getting so hooked that she decided, proactively (that’s a victory!), to join me and co-op until the end.

Some characters developed in a way that got us attached to them, and so we had very anxious moments with Lucy, Mary, and the new baby Hope. I found these developments, and my wife’s excitement, so interesting that I kept playing mostly for them. So, while the main storyline itself was alright, the specific events happening with some characters were really keeping us on the hook for more.

Characters

Playable characters include:

  • John, the Warrior
    • Was fun at the beginning, but I could not figure out how to properly use his shield as much as wanted to. With the lack of sustain, I just thought it was a bit useless
  • Linda, the Archer
    • Was fun all around. The beginning was a bit hard when running out of stamina to walk and shoot, but soon this became less problematic, and so she was a very good DPS, that made a good combo with Mark. My wife loved her until unlocking the firecracker Lucy
  • Kevin, the Assassin
    • The second melee character, was a welcome change in pace because I was a bit annoyed with John. Kevin was fast and that fit my playstyle better. However, anything not getting staggered by his attacks would cause enough damage to make sustainability a problem again
  • Mark, the Monk
    • This quickly became my favourite character, as I found his skills were more fun and useful than the other melees, and the playstyle also matched mine. Additionally, by being able to pull a lot of enemies together, it made a very good combo with Linda, and that is where our play-through started to shine as my wife joined in, making a good duo.
  • Lucy, the Pyromancer
    • This little firecracker got our attention since before she was available, through the story that showed her evolving and learning to dominate her skills. When she was made available, my wife jumped in and never let go. She only switched away when fatigue would settle in too much
  • Joey, the Brawler
    • My least favourite melee character. Too slow for my playstyle, and at the beginning his hits were as weak as any of the other leveled up characters. So I disliked him from the get go as I felt it was useless to play with him when others dealt more damage. Turns out it was quite necessary as his hammer was very useful for the later maps, but still did not enjoy the playstyle.
  • Apan, the Healer
    • Our least favourite and played character. We could not see any clear benefit from this “healer”, sustain was not obviously/actively increased in any direct way (like through spells or abilities), so we found her “class” to be “wrongly advertised”. Nevertheless, she increased passive healing, so we just leveled her enough to get some bonuses

Difficulty

While I do not know what kind of changes happen on higher difficulty settings, I picked Hard to begin with. At no point I felt like the difficulty was a problem, although I did face challenging moments that I would just put under the “game was designed to be this way” bucket. For example, some maps are clearly made to be preferably cleared by some specific characters, and I do not think that a different setting would have helped as much as just picking the right family member. Additionally, I started the game solo, but later got to play most of it as co-op, and that helped a lot because we could make a good combo of melee-with-crowd-control + ranged DPS.

After we got higher levels, the duo of Mark + Linda or Mark + Lucy was very deadly. At some point, we leveled Lucy so much that my wife could clear entire parts of the map with a single guardian’s rage usage. Actually made me feel underpowered (even almost useless) in some fights, which was a quite new and fun thing to experience, as usually I am the one doing the carrying!

Graphics

I had a bit of mixed feelings with the art. Definitely, the pixel art style is beautiful, specially the animations. All characters had a fun and cool design, with small details that were amazing, and some idle animations that made it very fun to just lay back and watch for a while (e.g. when at their home, they would just be doing mundane things, like playing with each other, brushing hair, etc.). The maps were also quite beautiful and diverse, with a range of different creatures as well.

However, the main “home” screen was quite overwhelming for me. I can not pinpoint exactly what I did not like, but it just felt like it was too much, visually. While all the idle animations at that point were great to watch, the scenery around it felt like just too much was drawn in a single “canvas”, and felt a bit messy.

Every time there was a “cinematic” of sorts, it was quite wonderful. There was one in particular where John and Mary are dancing was just so beautiful. The one where Mary was kidnapped actually had my wife near the point of screaming in despair, which was both amusing and funny to me, to see how immersed she was into that little universe.

Menu & Map

There is not much to note regarding the menu, it was clear and intuitive enough. The game also had some overlays that could be reached through the directional arrows to show some tooltips.

The minimap was quite useful. Sometimes, during our “mindless” farm runs, I felt like I spent more time looking at the minimap than the screen itself.

Sound & Music

All the hit effects, spells, abilities, and background noises were nice. The music was nice but nothing super remarkable. The narrator voice sounded awesome, and there was quite a lot of lines for it to tell the story and how it developed.

Pros

  • Beautiful “cinematics”
  • Beautiful map areas
  • Some fun characters to play with, covering different playstyles
  • Well-made animations for spells and combat in general
  • Nice story and its development, kept me coming back and hooked my wife from a distance

Cons

  • Lack of abilities to support health sustain was a bit annoying
  • The game somewhat “forced” us to play with characters we did not enjoy due to how their bonuses would affect the rest of the family. Also, the fatigue system made sure that you could not escape playing other characters for too long
  • Without the staggering effect of most basic hits, the game would have been way harder. Perhaps this was a design choice, but then again, having it made it way easier than it could have been. At the same time, whenever an enemy that did not stagger with basic attacks appeared, the combat basically became a hit-dash-hit-dash cycle. It was made a bit worse when playing co-op because you could only move so far before getting out of camera view