Mortal Shell 2 Review — The Best Soulslike of 2026?

Mortal Shell 2 is a shining example of the perfect sequel. Cold Symmetry took the original's best ideas and developed them further, while completely reworking its more questionable concepts. The small, contained locations of the original have given way to a full-fledged open world with a vertical structure and plenty of dungeons. The combat system has become far more varied thanks to new class skills, an expanded arsenal, and a progression system that lets you freely experiment with builds. There are plenty of new additions and unique features, and nothing feels superfluous. Still, there was room for a few shortcomings. In this review, we'll go over everything in detail.

The journey begins with a linear prologue. The protagonist, the Harrower, makes their way to Bone Keep. Their main task is to find the fruits of a sacred being known as the Undermother. One of them will be found on the way to the keep, but there are still many more, and their exact locations are unknown. To bring them back, the Harrower will have to journey across the two kingdoms of Fallgrim, which are suffering under the malign influence of some mysterious entity.

True to the genre's tradition, the game doesn't spoil you with story, and its core premise — collecting the Undermother's fruits — isn't especially motivating when it comes to digging into the lore as a whole. So this part of the game can confidently be called its weakest link. That said, the main narrative thread, told through the memories of eight fallen heroes, does carry a certain intrigue. But to see every memory fragment and piece together the full picture, you first need to track down these heroes' shells scattered across the open world.

The Steam page for Mortal Shell 2 describes the open world as small, but that mostly refers to its footprint. Thanks to vertical level design, even a small patch of the map holds plenty to explore. For example, one location starts in a village, with the multi-story ruins of a castle above it, and beneath both the castle and the village lie a couple of dungeons, with a bandit camp tucked in between. Nearly the entire game world is built on a similar formula: instead of huge empty fields, you get dense, multi-layered locations that are also fairly varied.

The Harrower's dutiful quest to collect the fruits will take them practically everywhere. Expect the ruins of once-majestic castles, forests, barren wastelands, grim swamps, striking autumnal locations, and entire underground settlements reminiscent of the Plague Town from Dark Souls. All of this looks cohesive and is mostly set within the open world, but there are also separate linear locations you can reach through special gates. The worlds beyond these portals are tied to story bosses, so each one has its own distinct atmosphere.

The gates to boss worlds aren't hard to find just by exploring, but their location will show up on the map regardless if you talk to a creepy raven named Ruk — he acts as a guide in the game. If you run into him out in the open world, he'll mark the gates on your map. Talking to this bird is essential anyway, since most of the map is covered by a fog of war that doesn't clear even after you've visited a location. So if you venture deep into the world while skipping the raven, you'll have to navigate blind, relying purely on visual memory. That's one small hardcore touch — but far from the only one.

In the Mortal Shell 2 preview, I talked about the game's low difficulty, but I suspected the balance would shift by launch. And it did. In the release version, enemies hit harder and have more health. So you definitely can't call Mortal Shell 2 easy. On top of that, the beta didn't have the freedom available in the full version — and it's precisely during world exploration that the difficulty is felt in full.

Most of the main world's locations can be reached through several entry points. Their branching structure also lets you choose different routes as you play through them. This design benefits exploration, but there's one hardcore quirk to it. Beacons, which serve as this game's equivalent of Dark Souls' bonfires, are extremely rare. Sometimes an entire location has only a couple of them. If you're lucky, you'll find a beacon almost as soon as you arrive in a new area, but more often than not, you'll comb through nearly the whole location and not find a single one. As a result, you end up wandering for a long time without a checkpoint, with almost no health left. That kind of trek frequently ends with the loss of all your souls — or in this case, Tar.

Even so, the standard difficulty isn't the highest it gets. After the prologue, you'll get the chance to obtain the "Flame of the Tarnight." If you light this candle atop Bone Keep, night falls across the open world, and the game gets harder. At night, enemies grow stronger, and you also gain access to points of interest and quests that aren't available during the day. Because of the increased difficulty, defeated enemies yield more Tar. Completing night quests also nets you a genuinely valuable reward.

Various quests pop up fairly often in the open world. Sometimes it's a big task that can lead to a new shell or weapon, but there are also short quests, most often tucked away in dungeons. In one of them, for instance, I ended up caught in a trap and found myself in a dungeon cell with no gear. The quest required escaping a small cave full of bandits. Along the way, I found a couple of notes explaining what was going on. It might not sound like much, but thanks to the presentation, a run-of-the-mill dungeon clear turned into a mini-adventure with a bit of a story attached. That kind of moment is usually found in narrative-driven RPGs, but within a soulslike, this approach feels fairly unusual.

For all its strengths, the shift to an open world also brought a flaw common to virtually every project of this kind. Most mini-bosses are just buffed-up regular enemies used to fill gaps. They're often completely devoid of originality, so fighting them doesn't require any new mechanics, a special approach, or a change in tactics.

But this downside doesn't apply to most of the story bosses. They have unique traits that, before certain fights, make it worth reassigning your build settings or even switching shells.

Shells in Mortal Shell 2 are essentially classes, and each one represents a distinct playstyle. For example, the barbarian shell Gragyr heals using a unique artifact that charges up as it deals damage to enemies. This mechanic is similar to replenishing vials in Lies of P. And the alchemist Sariel's form lets you recover part of your lost health through counterattacks, similar to Bloodborne.

There are eight shells total in Mortal Shell 2, and you can develop them without fear of ruining your build. The flexible progression system is built around three resources. Tar is used to develop base stats, which increase automatically as you level up. Glow unlocks access to shell skills, and upgrading those skills is done using non-consumable shell points. These can be reallocated at any beacon. That means you can experiment with skills and redistribute them depending on the situation. This kind of progression design also noticeably lowers the barrier to entry for newcomers.

Special stones called tarites can also be considered an integral part of build-crafting. They occupy equipment slots and come in three types. Some grant passive bonuses, others grant combat techniques, and a third type applies various temporary buffs while draining the "Resolve" gauge.

That gauge is mainly used to activate class skills. For Gragyr, it's a powerful stunning blow; Sariel unleashes curse-inflicting spikes; and the monster hunter Proxima uses a cable equipped with an electric shock. Resolve is replenished by dealing damage, so an aggressive combat style will let you use skills and powerful techniques more often.

The revamped combat system has become more dynamic overall, since the stamina meter is gone, replaced by a stagger mechanic. Although it's borrowed from Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, combat in Mortal Shell 2 still feels closer to Bloodborne. That's partly down to class customization, which lets you skip parrying altogether if you want, and to the regular use of ranged weapons in fights.

There are no notable flaws in the combat system. That said, there are certain issues with reading fast enemy combinations. The block animation, which doubles as the parry, has a certain recovery period, which makes quick, rhythmic parries simply impossible. This is likely a safeguard the developers put in place to make timed blocking work correctly. But this minor issue only shows up if you're playing through parries, and it's fixed by switching up your tactics against fast enemies.

To sum up, it's worth stressing once more that Mortal Shell 2 is a model sequel with a thoughtfully designed open world full of secrets, a flexible progression system, and a variety of classes, each offering its own playstyle. Despite its borrowings, the project retains its own identity thanks to its visual side and unique gameplay ideas. As a result, Mortal Shell 2 has become one of the best projects in the soulslike genre.