Morbid: The Seven Acolytes Review

Developer – Still Running

Publisher – Merge Games

Platform – PC, PS4, Xbox One, Switch

Morbid: The Seven Acolytes is a new indie game that invokes the spirit of Bloodborne and Diablo with a pixelated isometric art style. It is a stylized horror Souls-like game that features monsters that look like they came straight from the Lovecraftian universe. Tons of blood, gore, creepy environments, and cool weapons fill the game from beginning to end. Morbid is definitely a great word for it.

You wash up on the shores of the Haven of Solya. A dark beach littered with broken ships and fish-man monsters. You are the last remaining member of the Order of Dibrom, a Strider. You take a sword from the nearest corpse and start your journey to slay The Seven Acolytes. The Seven are human vessels that have fallen prey to corruption by the Gahar. The Gahar are born of the subconscious, whispering bittersweet nothings to our minds, promising “power and wisdom”. Most people were able to resist their call, all but The Seven. They have now become the ruling class and have decimated the Order of the Diberon in their quest for power. From here you travel the world searching for the Seven, slaying each of them to release the populace from their stranglehold. 

The game’s combat is a straightforward affair of weak attacks, strong attacks, parrying and dodging. Each weapon you equip has a different attack animation and there are quite a few variations of weapon types, which is great. There are one-handed swords, maces, fist weapons, two-handed swords and clubs. There are also guns and crossbows for ranged attacks, which add a simple but nice variety to gameplay. 

One issue I have with the game in terms of combat comes from hitboxes and how easily the enemies can interrupt attacks. In the beginning, slow weapons are great to use as they can basically 1-2 hit everything in the game with a strong attack. You can easily time the attacks because the enemy AI isn’t as aggressive. As the game progresses, enemy movement and attacks are much quicker and environmental damage, such as blood on the ground, can easily interrupt your attacks so faster weapons become much more necessary. The hitboxes just feel a bit off. Enemy attacks appear to be a bit bigger than the animation, but there is a fix in an upcoming update for consoles.

When it comes to leveling and customizing your character, you gain experience by killing enemies and when you gain enough you level up. Leveling up doesn’t really change your character much – it gives you 1 skill point, it doesn’t increase any of your stats. The skill point that you gain is how you change your character by using the point to increase the level of Blessings. You gain a Blessing after you kill the first Acolyte so you can’t use your points until that point. This is an odd choice because you gain a few of these points and it felt like I missed something for the first hour of the game.

Blessings are the key to increase your character’s abilities and each Blessing can be upgraded 5 times. They include increases to your health and stamina bar, reducing stamina consumption for dodge and running, decrease damage taken, and increasing attack speed just to name a few. I was able to upgrade a lot of the Blessings pretty extensively by the end of the game. Every time you kill an Acolyte you are able to equip one more Blessing to your character, and you can switch them out at any time from save points.

Another way of customizing your character is through runes on your weapons. Through your journey, enemies and chests drop runes that can change the stats of your weapons by adding certain damage elements and increasing your attack speed. While this is a great way to change your weapons based on your play style, you can’t see enemy weakness to certain elements, so it is hard to try and focus on any one element to gain an advantage.

To make things simple, I just put the max damage runes of any type in the faster weapons and increased the attack speed of slower weapons. Some runes, such as life steal, I failed to see any benefit from as either the gain was too small or it didn’t actually work. I couldn’t tell. Unfortunately, you can’t remove a rune and keep it. The only way to remove a rune is by using a consumable item which completely destroys all the runes in the weapon. The alternative is to find the weapon again as most weapons drop a few times.

The bosses have excellent visual designs and each fight features different mechanics that make them feel unique. Two of my favorite designs are a giant frog and a musician. The frog has a huge tongue that flies at you like he is catching a fly, and the pianist plays classical music while fire is shooting out from the stage while other musicians attack you. As you progress, each boss fight seems to get faster and have more variety in their attacks, which I enjoyed. 

Graphically, I loved the art style. It really brought the game to life. The enemies are varied and full of pixelated detail, and when you kill them they just explode into pools of blood. I didn’t notice any graphical errors or bugs in my playthrough and it ran very smoothly on PS5. The only issue I had with the level design is that it can be hard to navigate. Paths seem to just lead to paths you have been through before and the environmental elements sometimes blend together, which was slightly confusing, but it wasn’t bad enough to cause much frustration.

One thing I want to make note of is that the developer is very active at making changes to the game based on the feedback provided by the gamers on their Discord. People are still actively voicing their opinions on parry mechanics, stamina consumption, and hitboxes, all which have changes implemented in a way that didn’t just pander but move to improving the game. Unfortunately, playing on console there is a downtime on getting these patches so I was unable to try the changes, but I have faith that any technical or balancing gameplay issues will be fixed fast.

I had a good time with Morbid: The Seven Acolytes. My playthrough was roughly about 7.5 hours, but unfortunately there are no difficulty or new game plus options. It’s a one and done type of game. Overall, for $24.99 it isn’t a bad experience, especially since the developer is actively making changes to the game based on suggestions. I would say if you are looking for another Souls-like game that invokes thoughts of both Bloodborne and Diablo with a retro charm this might be a great fit for you!