Mortal Shell

Mortal Shell is a 2020 Soulslike action RPG developed by Cold Symmetry and published by Playstack, released August 18, 2020 for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. It holds a Metacritic score of 76 on PC and 74 on PlayStation 5, and has sold more than two million copies since launch — a genuine word-of-mouth success story for a debut studio’s first game, built around a possession mechanic no other Soulslike had really tried before.

It’s also, as of this writing, about to become the “original” half of a much bigger story: Mortal Shell II launches August 20, 2026 — less than two weeks from now — as a standalone, open-world sequel with a considerably larger scope than anything Cold Symmetry built the first time around, covered in its own section below.

Technical Specifications

A Small Debut Studio’s Souls Gamble

Cold Symmetry was a newly formed indie studio when Mortal Shell was revealed, built around a small group of veteran developers with AAA credits behind them, working under publisher Playstack. The project went under the working title Dungeonhaven in early development before landing on its final name and identity: a Soulslike built with clearly limited scope and budget compared to genre giants like FromSoftware, but designed to compensate with a genuinely original central mechanic rather than trying to out-scale its influences.

The Foundling and the Shells

Players control a formless, wandering entity called the Foundling, guided by a mysterious, sardonic Narrator through the decaying realm of Fallgrim. Rather than customizing a single character, the Foundling possesses the preserved corpses of four fallen warriors — Harros the disgraced knight, Solomon the scholar, Eredrim the venerable, and Tiel the acolyte — each functioning as a distinct class with its own stats, resistances, and combat style, freely swappable once found rather than locked in at character creation. Story is told with deliberate minimalism, through item descriptions, environmental detail, and the Narrator’s cryptic commentary rather than direct exposition — a choice Polygon and others noted as intentional, even if it risked alienating players hoping for more overt narrative content.

Hardening

The game’s signature contribution to the genre is Hardening: at any moment, the Foundling’s current Shell can turn to stone, absorbing a single incoming hit that would otherwise deal damage and often opening the attacker up to a punishing counter. It’s a defensive tool built to reward precise timing over pure reaction speed, distinct from the roll-dodge and parry systems most Soulslikes rely on, and it became the single most consistently praised element of the game — reviewers who otherwise found the game derivative of its influences still tended to credit Hardening as a genuinely new idea within an increasingly crowded genre.

Reception

Critical reception landed solidly in “promising but uneven” territory, reflected in the gap between its two Metacritic scores. GameCritics called it the best FromSoftware-inspired Soulslike they’d played, praising how confidently Cold Symmetry built its own identity around familiar bones, while PC Gamer and others found it enjoyably tough but rough around the edges for a studio’s first release. The most consistent criticism was brevity and thin RPG systems — a roughly 10-15 hour campaign with limited itemization compared to genre benchmarks — while atmosphere, combat feel, and the Hardening mechanic were praised almost across the board.

The Virtuous Cycle

A free content update, The Virtuous Cycle, added a roguelike-structured mode with randomized encounters and new gear on top of the base campaign, giving the relatively short main game meaningfully more replay value without asking players to pay for it. It was generally well received as a smart way to extend a game whose main critical weakness was simply not lasting long enough.

A Slow-Burn Commercial Success

Mortal Shell‘s commercial trajectory built steadily rather than exploding at launch: 500,000 units within nine months, past one million by 2023, and more than two million by the time its sequel was announced in 2025 — figures that don’t even include the substantial audience that played it through Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Plus subscriptions. Playstack’s VP of publishing, Rob Crossley, pointed to unusually intense fan investment as part of what set the game apart even at modest sales numbers, citing player-made tattoos of Mortal Shell characters and a Discord community that grew to 70,000 members theorizing the game’s deliberately obscure lore.

Mortal Shell II

Announced at Summer Game Fest 2025, Mortal Shell II is a standalone sequel rather than a direct continuation requiring the original, built by an expanded 30-person Cold Symmetry team — considerably larger than the studio that made the first game. It trades the original’s linear, hand-crafted areas for a compact but genuinely open, interconnected world containing more than 60 dungeons, expands the roster of playable Shells from four to eight (including returning names like Tiel and Eredrim alongside new additions like Proxima the Broodseeker), and reworks combat to remove the original’s stamina restrictions in favor of faster, less constrained fighting. An open beta launched on Steam in June 2026 around that year’s Summer Game Fest, drawing over 600,000 downloads and a 93% positive rating across more than 1,800 reviews before console players got access at all; a PS5 and Xbox Series X|S open beta followed in late July. The game launches worldwide on August 20, 2026 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S, priced at $49.99 for the Standard Edition, with a $59.99 Devout Edition offering up to 72 hours of early access, and a PS5-exclusive physical Revered Edition — which sold out at most retailers within eight days of preorders opening — bundling a steelbook, art book, and fine art prints.

Where to Play It Today

Mortal Shell is available on Steam, PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and Amazon Luna, with the Enhanced Edition upgrade (PS5/Xbox Series X|S) and The Virtuous Cycle expansion included at no extra cost for existing owners.