A lot of fun! It's basically a pixel version of Bloodborne. If you enjoy that sort of stuff, you'll enjoy this.

First off, great graphics, gameplay, and lore. There is some seriously beautiful pixelart. Some of the best actually. And the music is on point too!

As for gameplay, I had a blast. Sometimes the hit boxes seemed a bit weird. Sometimes I'd get hit when I felt like I was more than far enough away. Same goes for me hitting enemies. It wasn't a huge problem, but sometimes it was a bit bothersome.

Difficulty. I know I'm probably going to be a pariah when I say this because I've seen people complaining on the forums, but it was a bit too easy for me. I didn't even end up unlocking the "Die 100 times" achievement. Aside from the last boss (which took me four attempts), I beat most bosses on the first go, and those that I got beat by rarely beat me twice. Which leads me to my next point...

The elemental system is confusing and there's just too many elements. It's near impossible to know what elemental exactly works well against what enemy. In Bloodborne (which this game clearly was inspired by... which is fine by me because it's my favorite game!) there was a (relatively) clear system where enemy types belonged to a certain group (Kin, Beasts, etc) and that group was weak against a particular element. Maybe this game could benefit somewhat from a system like this. If the elemental system worked better, the enemies could be tougher under the assumption that the player could just use the right elemental shroom for help. Maybe drop some more hints in the game somewhere. There's a whole bunch of NPCs in the towns that just quote from a random list of phrases. Maybe some of those phrases could give us some clues?

This kind of falls in with the previous paragraph, but I wish it had better explained it's various stats. I still don't know what the fist icon means and I beat the game. I understand that the devs tried to do the From Software vagueness-as-a-feature thing, but I don't think it worked here. Vagueness is okay, but it's probably best not to be TOO vague, which is a trap I think this game falls into.

I know it looks like I just ripped into this game, but honest to god I had a blast! The problems I just listed, yes they are kind of annoying, but they certainly aren't game breaking issues. Seriously. I say give this one a try! I loved it. Maybe you will too!

Style over substance. Please don't get fooled by how good this game looks like I did and believe the reviews.

The ONLY positive thing i can say about this game is that the art is really nice which seems to have been the focus.

This game suffers from a ton of issues. Both you and the enemy attack hitboxes are bigger than they should be. The enemy AI is completely braindead. Every enemy including bosses have about 2 attacks maybe 3. Boss fights are tedious and unchallenging due to the issues listed above. Exploration isn't rewarding because of many dead ends with nothing in them but enemies.
I can't stress enough how much i don't recommend this game.

I really wanted to like this game.

It has great soundtrack and graphics, and the gloomy ambiance is both extremely well-rendered and declined in a variety of ways. Enemies and bosses look amazing, and the story's interesting, and addresses an adult audience more boldly than most games of this genre.

Now the gameplay just isn't satisfying. Even though it may look like it draws a lot of inspiration from Dark Souls, it plays more like a poorly executed Hyper Light Drifter, just with entirely different aesthetics. It's just so slow. It is by design, and I get that the devs wanted the action to look and feel heavy, but even the lightest "builds" (encumberment not being a thing, only the weapon you're using determines how fast you attack) will make you feel like there's massive input lag to every action, and every dodge roll feels like a cry for help.

Due to this, just about everything in this game is painstaking, as everything takes a lot of time to die, and zones are vast and swarming with enemies. Not to mention there's a lot of unneeded roaming around, as there are a huge lot of paths that lead to nothing, but you still have to make the effort if you want to find the occasional useful upgrade.

Morbid also has an underwhelming content issue. There's a ton of different weapons, but only a handful make sense to use, as the rest are either unreasonably slow, or plain worse, stat-wise. Also, the enemies are numerous, but a majority of them (including a good half of the bosses) just behave and are dealt with in the same way. Land an attack, maybe two, parry/dodge away. Rinse and repeat. This sort of gameplay never felt more like disguised QTEs to me as it did in Morbid. Some NPCs will also give you quests, but will never reward you with anything meaningful.

Finally - and it was a big deal to me - there's a lot of missing information, sometimes in critical departments. The game is just way too blurry about how powerful items are, how long buffs last, what the sanity bar is and how it affects gameplay, etc.

In a nutshell, I loved looking at it, but hated playing it.

Had to refund the game, the first impression is quite bad and closing to the 2 hour mark i found that while the art direction is very well made and quite striking, the combat is shallow and uninspired with clunky hit boxes, an infuriatingly slow protagonist and some of the most basic tactics i've seen in a souls-like.

If you want a 2d soulslike you'll get far more value from Salt and Sanctuary.

Morbid is a good game. At first I was wondering why it wasn't so talked about as Hades or Hollow Knight, but after a couple of hours I understood why.

First the good:
Morbid is very close to what a soulslike would had looked like if it was released as a Sega Saturn pixel art soulslike. The pixel art is astonishing. The enemies design is superb and the game really have that disgraceful atmosphere the genre requires.
The combat system has the bases to be a great soulslike game. What separate it from a real soulslike is that the game is not that hard.

The bad:
The level design left a lot to be desired. All areas of the game look the same, not in terms of visuals, but in terms of what to do. We basically are lost and have to find the way to proceed, with nothing remarkable to differentiate one area from another. The storytelling is soulslike style, but fail to keep things interesting like Hollow Knight does. The combat system though very cool, don't bring much new stuff after a while.
Most of the game is very repetitive, often getting to the point of being boring.

I enjoyed the game, played until the end. Fighting the Acolytes is very cool, but to lore is not that intriguing although is nice to read their stories.
Although I liked the game, I don't see myself getting back to it.

What can I say about this game. The art is what's going to draw you in. The grotesque world that somehow still has colors, the monstrous creatures, the areas that have thick atmosphere. But then you start playing the game and the problems start to pop up one after the other. The artstyle is beautiful but but everything is cluttered, you don't know where you can pass and where you cannot, The combat is clunky and slow. The stamina bar lets you more or less do 1-2 hits with bigger weapons and maybe 3 hits with smaller weapons before you are winded. The dodge takes up too much time and eats a huge chunk of your stamina. The parry is so unintuitive that it is useless. Sometimes it works sometimes it does not, the window of parry is super short and it actually just deflects one hit, but does not stagger the enemy. Meaning they will continue to beat you up. Ok there is no mini map, but the only way to see where you are is when you are on this game's equivalent of a bonfire...Seriously. And the map is pixelated and unintuitive. The combat is literary hit the enemy ones, dodge their attack, hit the enemy one, dodge their attack, wait for 5-6 sec until your stamina has come back, rinse and repeat. The quests are uninspired fetch or kill quests, the rewards are uninspired as well. The enchantments on the weapons are a hit or miss - some of them do not do anything. I have not seen any benefit from using the lifesteal, poison or fire enchantments, in my opinion they either do nothing and are bugged or are useless. I beat a couple of bosses and mini-bosses until I got to the big city, where the enemies are even more spongy and have more or less no animation tells for what they will do. Also their attacks are hard to dodge as they don't indicate their reach in any way. Absolutely a game that had almost no playtesting and was just made hard because "hurr durr darksouls hard git gud play 10000 hours and shut up" Don't waste your time.

Morbid: The Seven Acolytes is a isometric action game. As the only survivor of Strivers of Dibrom, players need to navigate through the accursed kingdom and battle against the seven Acolytes of Gahars, further freeing this land from the terrifying clutch of this eldritch deity. I have a mixed feeling for this game. On one hand, I really like the artstyle and the designs of each mob. The eerie, creeping, bodily-horror always seizes my eyes, and the sense of dread emanating from mere pixel sprites invariably tantalizes my taste for this kind of pixel art. Yet, on the other hand, the level design is quite weak, falling short of depth and the incentive to explore. The combat is sabotaged by enemies' easily-exploited movesets, inaccurate hit boxes, and some questionable design choices. Still, Morbid: The Seven Acolytes manages to deliver an decent, albeit flawed, experience for lovecraftian horror action game.


1. Otherworldly Haunting Artstyle
The game presents a fantastic artstyle in both levels and enemies. The bodily horror of each enemy design, or as the developers stated: "Cronenbergian" horror, is disturbingly terrifying and yet eerily mesmerizing at the same time. It pushes the limit of your sanity. Every encounter is a testament to the reality you think you know, as well as the visual presentation of how further the cruelty of this malevolent deity could go. The aesthetic of the level is also something worth experiencing. From the dreaded beach where corpses, ship wrecks, and unspeakable beings washed ashore, to the garden filled with unknown plantation and monsters lurking between the grass; from the seemingly civilized steam punk city only teeming with eldritch horror from the inside, to the strange woods in which inhumanity experiments are conducted wildly and unsightly, for the screams never leave between these leaves.

2. Good Boss Design
Other than the impactfull aesthetic, bosses in Morbid: The Seven Acolytes provide moderate challenge and some with tragic but charming lore. In general, all the bosses possess limited moveset and no noticeable changes when health drops to certain degree. Some may deem this easy, and for a time I do have this kind of thought. However in retrospect, I find this design fair and square. In my opinion, the agility of any mobs should be designed around that of the playable character. The developer seems to have the same philosophy and creates these bosses with predictable but still manageable movesets Nothing ridiculous, Nothing unbearable(maybe Yaga Moer has too much going on, too much blood splatter may cover up the ground spike attack.)


Weapon System And Limited Upgrades
In Morbid: The Seven Acolytes, weapons have no superiority over others, for each of them has its own advantages and disadvantages. This feature can avoid situation such as players enjoy A weapon but forced to use B weapon later on because B outshines A in any way possible. Players can use whatever they want and upgrade it with runes. Simple and solid. While I do find myself adoring this feature, I somehow feel no sense of progression about this system. Most the action RPGs implement weapon level upgrade system for the sake of empowering characters, and to a degree progression mark. Upgrading a weapon to max level not only shows players' dedication to that weapon, but also fulfills the sense of progressing through harder levels. This is the feeling Morbid: The Seven Acolytes currently lacking for me. I really enjoy using the poison claw, but the limited upgrade system cannot drastically improve the game play.


1. Bland Level Design
One of the fatal flaws of this game. The level design is just mediocre at best, unrewarding at worst. To put it simply, every level is merely "run a long way around, find the short cut, pop the pox, and fight the Boss." This design may work fine for the first few levels, but when stretching to the whole game, it really feels like a chore rather than a adventure. The devs do try to encourage players to explore some narrow path to find various upgrades, which players only need to simply find and turn at the right corner. The game needs to put some work in offering the incentive, igniting the spark of wanting to explore this part of the map, either through clues or some side quests. Then rewards those who are observant enough to see through the clues.

2. Inaccurate Hitbox
The wave-based attacks (crow's screech, sperm of Gahar's sanity attack, automaton's stomp, etc.) have the most deceiving hitboxes. The actual hit box is bigger than the animation suggests. This is annoying because you cannot reliably judge enemies attack and solely maneuver the character to where the attack will exactly end, forcing you to either dodge or take the hit. In some case this situation really throw my pace off. Take the automatons in Yortael for example. They have the ability to shoot several fire balls when the player is far away. Most of the time you've better stay near them since their melee attacks are more manageable. Here comes the stomp. If the shock wave depicts exactly as it presents, I would stay within automatons' melee range. But for the deceiving nature of the attack, I am forced to dodge away and face the more annoying fire ball attacks.

3. Easily-exploited Enemy Moveset
Most of the enemies are really helpless when you stay on top or below them. Their already-limited attack do not do them justice. You can basically and literally sit on their heads and watch as they vainly attacking the air. Fortunately some bosses and elites are spared from this fate due to their wider attack range.

Morbid: The Seven Acolytes is a challenging game which generally incorporates both the good and annoying elements of a Souls-like experience. Still, it manages to stand out thanks to its strong dark fantasy presentation, rich Lovecraftian lore, and gameplay systems that offer methodical combat and plenty of features to make the adventure satisfying. It’s a difficult game, for sure, but it doesn’t forego quality-of-life features for the sake of being difficult, and so in this sense, many players outside of the Souls fandom can get something out of it.

It is not fun. The combat is uninspiring, all melee weapons I've seen have samey attacks. You left click once then left click again. Some of them attack slower than others, but it is all the same attack. The enemies are not interesting, you hit -> roll away -> hit -> roll away, it is incredibly boring. The loot does not make sense, you're given these runes to slot into your weapon very early on. However there are no ways of taking them out. You can only destroy all of them. Which means there should be no reason for the lesser runes to exist since you will want to fit the best runes in, it is not like a big fire attack rune takes more space than the small fire attack rune. The level design is bland, it is seperated by zones and each zone are scattered with not important loot and some linear pathways. I only fought one boss, and it has three attacks in total, THREE.

It's a chore to play. Aesthetically neat, but combat is tedious and simplistic (hit, roll up or down, repeat), and waddling all over the maps to find stuff isn't very rewarding.

Runs fine, cool idea, but wasn't ever fun.