Best game.

About 60 hours in I still absolutely adore this game. Having had a review key early for my podcast, I already beat it in about 40 hours on standard, and am currently in new game plus on "Night Mode" which is their hard difficulty (to activate it, light the candle atop Morrow Keep. It will also make the game graphically darker, but you unlock more gameplay, items, traders, and lore to reward the extra difficulty).

All told, Mortal Shell II is a masterpiece. The combat is smooth, the art style, graphics, and world design are phenomenal, and the shells being easy class swaps keep it from ever feeling even at all repetitive. Because along with various ranged and melee weapons to try out, or the plentiful tarstone loadout options which change abilities to the point they become totally new builds when paired for synergy, or the tons of trinket "familiars" you can set as both an active or a passive - each shell has its own easily resettable talent tree to change up game play entirely.

Also I love the dungeons, in another timeline I must have been trapped in one and have Stockholm's syndrome - and there are endless ones to do here (and you can mark them off on completion if you are anal like me). Not to mention all the open world rituals, puzzles, gates (no not annoying like Oblivion ones), and beacon shrines to cleanse. Tracking down everything in the game is a joy, and I honesty never once got frustrated. In fact I chose to grind spots for gold and gloom just for the raw fun of it (FYI Proxima is the best to farm money with because she can make enemies drop an extra item you can sell once talented).

It's amazing that only 30 people made this and priced it fairly at 50 dollars. The game also seems very well optimized with ultrawide support and all the PC options like DLSS, frame gen, ray tracing, etc (no fov slider but you can turn on "action cam" to pull it out and that worked well for me), and unlike some other souls games this feels great on mouse and keyboard too!

My advice: Buy it. Beat it. Twice. Collect all the eggs. But don't rush, meticulously explore every inch like I am doing, or you WILL miss something useful or interesting along the way. More on my Video Game Outsiders podcast review this week! PS the foot guy in the keep made me laugh.