Mortal Shell II Review: The Sequel That Grew a Spine

The first Mortal Shell was a curiosity. Six years on, the sequel is something else entirely: a small studio walking into FromSoftware's house, not apologising, and mostly getting away with it.

Mortal Shell II landed on 20 August 2026 for PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC via Steam, developed by Cold Symmetry and published by Playstack. Standard edition is $49.99, the Devout Edition $59.99. That fifty-dollar tag matters and I will come back to it, because it reframes almost every complaint I have.

Possession, not character creation

The Shell system returns and it is finally doing real work. Dead warriors are scattered across the world; find a corpse, possess it, inherit its stats and abilities. You are not building a character so much as collecting bodies and swapping into whichever one fits the fight. The sequel deepens the upgrade paths enough that I ended up with two shells I actually cared about - one lean and fast for exploration, one heavy slab I put on for bosses - and switching between them felt like changing weapons rather than changing difficulty.

Harden is still here, still the studio's best idea: turn to stone mid-animation, eat the hit, resume your swing. It rewards a completely different kind of nerve than a dodge roll does. You are not avoiding damage, you are choosing to stand in it, and knowing when to do that is the whole skill ceiling.

Faster, bigger, meaner

Combat is noticeably quicker than the original and the enemies hit harder for it. This is not a game that eases you in. What surprised me is how well the compact open world works - it is not sprawl, it is a knot of winding paths that keep folding back on each other, and wandering off the critical path genuinely pays. New shells, weird weapons, story fragments. I found more of value by ignoring objectives than following them, which is the highest compliment I can pay this kind of design.

The atmosphere is the other constant. Grey, wet, quietly grotesque. It has an identity that plenty of bigger soulslikes never manage.

Where it slips

There is no jump button, which in an open world you are meant to explore feels like an unforced error - I lost count of the ledges I could see and could not reach. The fast travel system is one of the most irritating I have used in the genre, full stop; it turns backtracking into a chore in a game that constantly asks you to backtrack.

Optional content repeats itself by the back half, some encounters are balanced with a shrug, and I hit technical hiccups on PC even after the day-one patch. Localisation is patchy in places too. None of it is fatal. All of it is noticeable.

Verdict

At full AAA money I would be harder on it. At fifty dollars, from a team this size, it is an easy recommendation for anyone who plays soulslikes and wants something that is not just another Elden Ring tribute. This is a studio that finally sounds like it knows what it is. Buy it, expect friction, enjoy the fights.

Score: 8/10

Image: Pawel Owsinski / CC0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sunrise_Fog_Over_The_Ruins_Of_The_Castle_Austria_(185545361).jpeg