Unfortunately the co-op leaves a lot to be desired, I assume the couch co-op was ported rather lazily which resulted in an incredibly half baked online co-op experience.
Player A and Player B do not share progress online, you aren't able to upgrade as the second player and any upgrades Player A purchases are not given to Player B.

Children of Morta is a diablo style hack and slash game with six playable characters.
Two ranged - an archer and a mage
Four melee - a shield wearing warrior, a two handed warrior, a monk and a dual dagger wielder.

They play sort of how you'd expect if you've done any other RPGs at all. The mage can't move and cast while the archer can move and attack and that's their primary difference. Each of the melee characters is mostly focused on how fast they attack rather than anything else. It does make them play differently and tries to give a playstyle that'll suit most people.

The annoying side of this part is that even if you do find a character that clicks you can't go on loads of runs with them because the game gives them "corruption" which reduces their maximum HP. I'm not a fan of that - let me play who I want when I want please.

You spend a lot of time just left clicking to shoot off characters attacks. The story sort of brings the game to life even with this and the story unlocks each character - effectively after each failed run you'll get a snippet of story and work towards another character being unlocked.

A few characters will require an item from a run to unlock them when you hit a specific story point as well. Those are unmissable so you will eventually get the entire roster unlocked after say 3-5 hours.

The actual gameplay involves going through randomly generated corridors. There are 3 acts - act 1 and 2 have 3 stages and act 3 has 2. The stages of each act are basically identical. They'll mix up the enemies a little bit but the area you're traversing is pretty much the same.

This is where my disappointment comes with the game I think. Each stage will have 1-3 floors but those floors are identical. So you're kind of doing 9 absolutely identical randomised levels to get to a boss. And the bosses are a pain - I'm not calling them hard, but they all seem to be huge HP sponges and took a bucketload more time than I'd expect.

Each of the 3 acts has their own little library of enemies as well as "Corrupted" enemies which are present in every act. Act 1 has Skeletons, Goblins, Big Goblins, spiders, spitting spiders, big spiders and bats for example. And you're doing 8 or so corridors of that. It gets repetitive fast. Act 3 really lays on the corrupted enemies too, you're going to get REALLY bored of fighting them after a while.

After a few goes of this the lack of variety begins to bite. Do I really want to spend an hour going through three identical corridor levels and then 20 more minutes on a boss? I don't think I do.

The levels do have little walled off areas where you'll get some story. Rescuing a wolf to take home or a little robot girl. I like the idea of these but I don't feel like they do enough. My wolf has a kennel but he doesn't actually....do anything. They don't even mention him in the story bits. It was nice at the time but I wanted more, again.
Some of these little side quests also take forever, like watching the son of a Stargazer mining to make glass and following him around to protect him from enemies was just a slog.

The levelling up process isn't too exciting either. You get a point every time you level and skills cost 1 point to get to level 1, two points for 2 and then 3 points for three which is where they cap out. Taking 3 level ups to finally do something feels like a long time.

It's strange - I'd say out of the 13 hours I played I feel like I was just doing the same thing over and over and over and now even though it's a relatively short amount of time for a game I'm bored of that gameplay now. The game sort of tries to mix up your runs by dropping either usable artifacts or passive bonus artifacts, but there's so few that are legitimately actually useful that I usually just found myself going "...oh."
Effectively unless it makes you hurt more when you attack it's kinda pointless. What's the use of a DoT that ticks twice for 10 when each hit I do is for 40 and the enemy takes 6 to kill? Why bother? I'd say 70% of the items you pick up feel that way.

I'll also note that the English in the game isn't great. Some skills have descriptions where I'm genuinely not sure what they do. Some unlocks happen in weird orders that make no sense - you find a guy who fixes runes for example before the game has explained what a rune even is, and get skill ups that reference runes in the same way - and the story is told in this manner as well at times.

Those moments of "Wait, what?" ruin the story for me and make it so that the big selling point of the game falls flat and all you have is constant walking and shooting.
I also feel like the game is set up for Co-op and is expecting you to play that way. Maybe if I'd got it on my Switch instead I'd have liked it better but I'm not really co-op playing on my PC.

Positives: The art style is very pretty, I like the ambiance. The main hub feels nice.

Negatives: The character movements are rigid and the abilities mostly allow one strategy: deal damage while fleeing the best you can from masses of enemies. I picked the game for its local coop with another player experienced in rogue lites, both of us had the same impression: the fighting is a bit simplistic for our taste. Positioning, the timing of the button presses, from where you strike the opponents, etc... is not being rewarded much, which means you're mostly mashing the attack button and waiting for jauges to refill while hordes of enemies mindlessly march toward you. For instance, having Linda's range or attack power being impacted by how long you maintain the attack button would in my eyes make it much more fun. Having to time the blocks precisely with John to stun the enemies or any form of reward as well. Basically, anything that makes the common action feel less samey.

Overall, I would not recommend it because I did not enjoy the feel of the core gameplay despite playing many similar games in the past. However, if you're looking for a coop experiment with players that are less experienced in this genre of video games or with video games in general, I guess the relative simplicity of the gameplay might play in your favor and you might then have a better time we did.

After 7 hours of playing I realised that I dont want to come back to this game. Though artistic style is stunning and beautiful, core gameplay is rather boring and repetative.

This is a absolutely stunning game, that puts to practice many storytelling archetypes in a very satisfactory way, really making you feel like the house is the center of this world, and the Bergsons, are the heroes of your journey. That is why i am being compelled to write this pretencious little piece on its gameplay, i like the game on the merits of its storytelling and art, but...

You will find out that the only defensive mechanic most characters have access to are 1) The dodge and 2) Hitting enemies, making them stutter, wich i will call "Hitstun". Waiting for the enemy an attack (Whiff Punishing) is not possible due to the number of enemies and the speed of the recovery animation. This game's combat revolves in clearing rooms with really great numbers of enemies, ranged and melee.

The decision to put these crowds of enemies on the game should have signalled the devs that the gamefeel of the characters must revolve around the way you clear large mobs of monsters. The defensive mechanics, should have been handled differently; the dodge has way too much cooldown/ few charges to evade these mobs repetedaly (even with support from secundary defensive mechanics), and the size of the player's attacks, or their attack rate, makes enemies way too likely to exit Hitstun, and attack you, ending your advance through the room. Your enemies attack quicker than you can defend and/or evade.


First off, each character must level up one aditional level in order to put points in the second tier of their skill trees, as a conscious design decision (i suppose). This feels bad and slow when unlocking characters, in a already grindy game.

As for my actual point, take the "Assassin" character for instance: Starting out you only have a slightly better main attack, all things considered, and a amazing dodge; As you put points into this character you unlock a seconday ability, wich is a crime against character gameplay design and serves no defensive (lack of animation invincibility) or ofensive (Lack of reliable single or multi-target damage or pierce) purpose on practice. After unlocking the lackluster attack, you unlock the invisibility, wich really rounds out the flavor and gamefeel of the character; Only to find out it can not be used as a core part of his gameplay, due to having 30s cooldown, on a game about fighting mobs of enemies in sequence. Characters like the Monk have crowd controll abilities on a third of its cooldown, for comparison. The Assassin's upgraded dodge is another great tool for him, although it also recharges way too slowly, as i've pointed out in the previous section, to be used in sequence.

These examples can be expanded to the rest of the cast, and show a game design constant i've felt so far in this game: The dodge is scarce enough to make you want to play it as a slow, souls-like. The mobs of enemies are dense and dangerous enough to make you want to play like Hades. This game is neither of those, it is simply a game where you deal low damage and must face the fact that you are ill equipped to deal with the flooding mobs of monsters.

Solution, in my dubious opinion: Rethink the speed and strenght of game's defensive mechanics, to make the gameplay loop more consistent or slow down the pace of the enemies, so that your slow defensive mechanics can shine more.

The game does a lot right.
There's passion put into it.
There's good ideas in it.
Some of the writing can be a bit unnecessarily poetic, but it sort of works to give the game its own identity.

However! The gameplay of the game has pretty big issues.
If you've played Hades, Ys, Diablo-likes, Crawl or other games like those, you might feel something's not totally responsive or right about Children of Morta.
The visuals and the way enemies deal damage and how your character receives it isn't implemented in a good way.
You will often be like: "Why did I die? What happened?" and you might go from 70% HP to 0% hp within 50 milliseconds and be unaware of what hit you and how.
The game doesn't feel responsive or have invulnerability after taking damage, like many games do. Enemies also don't have much of a visual cue for them being about to attack. Some bosses also show which area they will attack, but at the last moment that changes in a way which seems like a bug.

The gameplay of the game is its weakest element.
If the gameplay was a little better, it'd be easy to recommend it due to how the other elements in the game can make up for slightly lackluster gameplay.

This is a gorgeous game with a well written family and a good variety of playable characters. Every single other aspect of this game is executed poorly and I honestly hesitate to even list this game as a roguelite due to its near complete lack of anything the genre is known for. Any and all aspect of randomness to this game feels like it was added to pad the length of game that was made to tell a story, rather than being added to make a fun game with endless run variety.



- The art and sound of this game are both beautiful

- The family dynamic is well written and has many scenes

- The characters and their relationship to each other and the world at large is believable

- The way the story is told is done well, with interesting word usage and a good narrator

- The main hub area of the game is very interesting and well put together

- Lore journals exist and are unlockable for players who are interested in learning more about the story (I did not read any of them because of reasons listed below, so I can't speak for their quality)


- The primary conflict of the game, the corruption, is not implemented into the world well enough to be a believable threat

- The world itself doesn't feel like anyone except the family and a couple of random people were living in it, further adding to the problem that the conflict isn't as bad as it is made out to be

- The mysteries and ending to this game are not believable, not interesting, not memorable, and honestly just all around terrible. Spoiler: The corruption was caused by a god who got pissy that his wife left him when he started berating her for giving their child more attention than him. The corruption is then ended when, for no explained reason and after thousands of years, she decided to come back and be with him again.




- Each playable character feels unique from one another

- A majority of the perks are interesting and change the way you play


- Combat feels clunky and boils down to stunning enemies so that they never attack, rather than attacking during openings and dodging away at the correct time despite feeling like this was what they were going for

- Dodge roll gives no i-frames and is effectively useless in almost every scenario

- Dodge roll regeneration speed is extremely slow for the times you do need it

- Very few different enemies

- Some enemies are designed against the way combat is handled, leading to some encounters just being annoying rather than difficult

- Very few bosses

- The first boss is reused multiple times for random event rooms rather than having a new one

- The hit-boxes on some enemy attacks are really bad

- Very few items

- A majority of the passive items are not interesting and never create interesting synergies outside of plain stat increases

- Most of the active items (Divine Graces) are just not good and are easy to forget you have them

- There is a second active item type (Divine Graces) who's purpose is to give temporary buffs or spawn consumables and currency, but is cluttered with items that should have just been passive items because they give permanent bonuses on use

- You are never told the specific numbers behind any stat increases or decreases from any item, leading to not knowing if an item that gives both a positive and a negative is worth taking, or if an item is even good in the first place. Not even the wiki for the game knows the numbers behind most of these and just lists "???"

- Leveling a skill on a character costs more and more skill points every level up, and multiple tiers of some perks are required to reach further into skill trees leading to some level ups having no benefit

- Respec'ing is expensive and limits build experimentation

- Character balance is very bad

- Very short with only 9 levels across 3 zones and couple of story interludes

- Game length is padded by making enemies much stronger than the player and by making healing drops rare, forcing you to grind for small stat increases like health and luck repeatedly

- World generation randomness within the same zone is nearly non-existent besides what event rooms you get and the actual shape of the zone you play in (which has 0 effect on gameplay)

- Event rooms are more annoying than anything and tend to grind the pace of the game to a halt

- Tons of back tracking and just generally walking around combined with slow movement speed

- Unlocks are almost entirely random and decided by event rooms, rather than specific things you can try to achieve on a run

- Requirements for unlocks are not transparent and lead to needing to use the internet if you care about them



- The fact that co-op was added at all is great


- The client player's personal save file is unaffected by co-op, meaning that progress made with a friend is not reflected in your own save

- The client player is not able to even view the upgrade menus in the house (hub area) to give input on what should be upgraded next, what the team's current bonus are, etc.

- The client player's game will randomly lag independent from both ping and frame rate, to the point where they won't be able to move and will get hit by attacks that don't exist during fights

- When a player dies in co-op, they can't move at all while downed. Dying in some circumstances means you are completely impossible to revive because of this

- Items are not instanced, meaning that the world has a single player amount of items split among two players

- Since the consumable type for opening chests (which is where you get the bulk of the money for upgrades) and for buying items during a run, is not only the same thing, but also not instanced, you will likely not be able to open chests and purchase even a single item during a co-op run without either heavy investment in the luck stat, or by giving all gems to only 1 player

- When two melee characters are hitting the same enemy, the enemy tends to get knocked out range of the other player, so if you both play melee characters you pretty much need to attack enemies from opposite sides which isn't always possible

Co-Op Horribly Bugged. YOU WILL LOSE YOUR SAVE PROGRESS! BUYER BEWARE!

Played for 2 and a half hours solo, Hopped in a friend of mine's game to play. He had JUST finished the prologue and unlocked multiplayer, we played ONE match and then he had to go. I go back to find my save was overwritten with his! All of my character's progress GONE, levels, GONE. Was focusing on Linda, the archer, got her up to level 9, Now she's level 2... I don't have it in me to start over. I wish I'd seen a review or comment noting this, otherwise I wouldn't have joined Multiplayer. At this point, I wish I could refund, because I'm so angry these bugs were allowed to persist.

Children of Morta, in my opinion, is an example of imperfect game design. I don't have any problems with the art side, with exception of mostly bland level art in dungeons, and I'm mostly okay with the plot. It won't set the world on fire, but it has some effort put into it.

Below I'll be explaining main points which made me give this game thumbs down.

TL;DR: you are forced to grind to meet DPS/health checks

Imagine a hack-n-slash / ARPG where you have to heavy grind the same random generated areas over and over just to meet damage per second / survivability requirements. No, not just clearing side areas once to get better loot / skill points (Diablo 2, Path of Exile). Not just replaying the same location with different characters to complete kill challenges (notorious hot Nobody Saves the World). In Children of Morta you need to make runs again and again to earn coins and buy the very basic stats like basic attack damage and health, as well as more advanced crit and dodge chance, and crit multiplier. Even the movement speed stat needs to be grinded. In the beginning almost every character will move like a turtle, and only tickle the most basic enemies, while dying from several hits. To be honest, if the initial numbers weren't so small, the game would be much, much shorter. It is possible for skillful player to complete Hades, Crypt of the Necrodancer, Wizard of Legend on the first run without investing into permanent upgrades. Children of Morta? Totally different story.

TL;DR: you basic attack baddies 90% of the time, skills are bland and don't make impact

There aren't many active skills, only 2 per character. These can sometimes be interesting: ranging from summoning a cyclone that pulls enemies in, to an area attack that stuns the enemies and ummm... pulls them in. And ummm... there are ranged area attacks. And just strong melee area attacks. And area attacks that apply slow. And knife throwing. These skills have really big cooldowns and mostly deal unimpressive damage. The problem is, only one active skill is available in early game (and a certain character gets it even later).

In the midgame, if you endure several runs with one character, they can finally learn the second skill (with even bigger cooldown). And you can unlock rage state. Once the character makes about 1-2 minutes worth of basic attacks, they can enter a rage state for a couple of seconds, in which the basic attacks are faster/more powerful. One character simply creates a barrier instead.

The other skills are passive. Either increasing the character's dodge or crit, or creating a simple % proc effect. Some modify the character's dash. So, even when you spend skillpoints, the combat barely becomes more juicy.

Sometimes you can find active items during the run and take up to two. You are able to use them with a huge cooldown. While there are a few cool ones, most of them just summon creatures or do weak area of effect attacks.

TL;DR: one character is OP, most are weak as a kitten. But devs force you to use all of them

One character shoots while moving and has an AoE skill. Other is able to block a few attacks completely and also has an AoE skill. The third attacks faster with each melee attack and throws knives, the fourth attacks faster with each ranged attack... but there's Mark. His basic attack auto-targets enemies, closes the distance to them, stunlocks them, and simultaneously lets Mark evade other attacks. Oh, and he has the largest AoE stun in the game. Which pulls enemies. And also Mark is able to get damage resistance just by beating everyone with basic attacks. And the damage resistance boosts his attack in the midgame. And he has one more stun. And high crit chance. Mark is cool. Be like Mark.

It's okay to have powerful classes, but there should be some downsides. Not in this case though. How are developers mitigating this? First, when you level up characters, they give passive boosts for all family. Not that they are good enough until very high levels, but it's still cool. What's uncool though, that when you play one character their health drop drastically for some time, forcing you to do runs with non-viable, non-upgraded characters. It would be okay, if not for the fact that only Mark is actually overpowered, right from the beginning to the high levels.

TL;DR: how would you like unskippable animations during fast-paced combat?

There are unskippable animations happen in combat (and outside of it). When you open a chest in the heat of battle, with the enemies on your tail, hoping for something useful, your character decides to stand in place for a second and half. When you activate a Diablo 2 style buff shrine the character is also unable to defend or attack. When you cast a skill the same happens. Even Mark with his 90 degree stun cone will get punched in the face if you miss a single enemy - it will have enough time to hit you. I'm not even talking about the ranged attacks that might be targeted at you.

Moreover, the map is made of "rooms" separated by doors. In order to open a door you need to step on the button. After you've done that, you have to wait three seconds for the door to open. Of course, you can move around, but it's creating unnecessary waiting about hundred times per run.

I got really tired of this game. I'm even glad that me and my friend didn't wait for the online co-op release. Because for me from the gameplay perspective Children of Morta was nothing but disappointment.

For roguelite lovers I would also recommend looking into great titles like Hades (single player), Crypt of the Necrodancer (local co-op), Wizard of Legend (local co-op), and Nine Parchments (online&local co-op, but make sure to cheat-unlock all the characters).

A hack-and-slash game with rogue-like elements, Children of Morta unfortunately didn't provide me with any of the satisfaction associated with either genre.

I usually like to start with the positives but they're scarce here. The pixel art looks excellent but even that is squandered in drab and uninspired levels, of which there are mainly only three types: a cave, a desert town and a volcanic industrial area.
The music, although competently made, sounded very unmemorable to me. None of the tracks were catchy or went beyond doing their job.
The programming itself was stable during my playthrough, apart from a bug that prevented me from loading the game right after beating the last boss, forcing me to redo that fight for the save file to register their defeat.

When it comes to gameplay, you have a short campaign with levels that must be beaten in succession but can be revisited at will. The longevity of the game comes from its difficulty, as it's easy to get overwhelmed and die, in which case you must start the level from scratch. Before entering a level, you must choose from one of the unlocked characters to play as; they all have their own gameplay style and skill tree, which can be upgraded by leveling the character up.

During a level, you'll find several ways to improve your character for that run only: Divine items will grant passives, active skills or buffs, obelisks give you buffs that last a short while, and collecting Runes slightly modifies the character skill they're applied to but they have limited charges. Outside of a level, you're able to spend earned gold to permanently boost the attributes of all characters for future runs.

Therefore, you have a considerable pool of options when it comes to making the game easier. The problem here is that none of these options display the depth of the genres they come from. Characters have very limited skill trees and you're not so much making a build for them as you are prioritizing skills that are clearly better than others. Items rarely feel interesting or have gaming-changing impact, acting more like small power-ups. Permanently boosting your characters' attributes with gold lowers the uncertainty factor of every run onward, turning your victory into more of a matter of "when" than "if".

There is no late game, secret bosses, areas, or challenges. There are a few optional quests you can pursue during levels but they'll mostly reward you with an item for that run only, a decoration for the house or a piece of lore. Once you beat the final boss, you've beaten everything the game can throw at you. There is a New Game Plus option available, but all it really means is increased numbers.

So ultimately what this is is a one-and-done, short hack-and-slash game with power-up and character variety. It relies entirely on its core gameplay and plot to retain player motivation, and I have to say both didn't do it for me in the least.

Combat felt like a chore, with enemies that are tanky, pesty, and come in large amounts which is compounded by summoners, dragging combat even further. Skills are often underwhelming. Every level is a bland looking collection of small rooms and corridors. Some of these rooms require you to play a mini-game to get an item and they're all bad, from the awful Pong-like one to another that simply gives you a 33% chance of getting the reward. There is no reason I would ever play a level in this game for fun.

Then, despite allowing you to play as any character in the same playthrough, this is hardly used in a tactical way such as requiring the player to consider who to use and when, since the only real challenges in the game are bosses. Sure, the choice of character adds variety to a playthrough, but since each character represents a time investment you have to consider whether it's worth playing as them at all versus just getting through the level with another, more powerful character. Compare that to the more classic system of having the player pick a character from the start, which allows for distinct playthroughs where challenges must be overcome with a character with their own strengths and weaknesses, thus increasing replayability.

As it is, in Children of Morta I feel it's simply human nature that people will gravitate towards 1 or 2 characters they particularly enjoy playing as and/or have found the most success with. Predicting this, the developers have implemented two mechanics to try and increase the value of this whole system: skill passives called "family traits" that are unlocked from each character and affect the entire roster but, again, represent just one type of small bonus in a pool of them and make you ponder whether it's something even worth pursuing; and, unfortunately, a health penalty for using a character too much, which only goes away after a number of runs with other characters or by spending a rare item. This penalty, if ignored, will eventually grow to unworkable numbers.

Now, this penalty isn't a huge issue if you enjoy playing with more than one character as you can simply rotate between them (though I've found you need to play as at least three for this rotation to completely work), but the principle of it bothers me. It artificially extends playtime by berating the player for having a preference or, Heaven forbid, having found out there's no good reason to switch characters all the time, and it disallows playthroughs where the player limits themselves to a single character in an attempt to generate challenge and/or replayability. It's just generally a negative way to make a system "work". I understand it's also a vehicle to reinforce the family theme, but I don't defend theme over design. It's an unconvincing way of pushing this theme anyway, as it only forces you to play with a couple other characters, hardly the entire family.

Then there's the story. The plot is intriguing at first but becomes real standard fare. Nothing particularly surprising happens, things just move on with little effort. The ending is unsatisfying. Worldbuilding is poor; nothing is given proper development or context. The levels you visit are supposedly located around the eponymous Mount Morta, but because you access these areas via teleporting only, they never feel like real, organic places with interesting landmarks. The player has no freedom to explore, to discover anything interesting; the game's structure just doesn't support it. There are notes you can find containing more information about the world, but those are no substitute for actually experiencing things for yourself. The narration, although made by a good voice actor, gets old since it is the only voice you ever hear and nothing in the game progresses without his take on it.

When it comes to the family of characters, the game fails to develop any of them beyond what can already be mostly surmised by their first impressions: one is young and playful, another is old and wise, etc. The narration robs the characters of their own voices and thoughts, and, thus, much of their ability to express themselves. Instead, we are incessantly told how they feel, how they act, what happened here and there. Instead of being fully-fledged, they feel like tiny actors only there to be observed. Better developing these characters and their bond would have contributed to the family theme far more than any ill conceived gameplay mechanic ever would.

All in all, although I've given it as fair of a shake as I could, there was pretty much nothing in this game for me. I like the premise of a family of characters and being able to play as them, but none of the systems at work here have grabbed my interest. The game does nothing particularly well, and by blending genres without adopting any of what gives them depth, it provides a shallow experience accordingly. It feels overly unambitious. It's a shame, because I can see there was real love behind this game and I fully went into it expecting to like it. But it is what it is.