Children of Morta is a story-heavy twin-stick shooter where you play as 6 characters from the Bergson family as they strive to find and eliminate the source of Corruption coming from the nearby Mount Morta. Calling it a twin-stick shooter is slightly misleading, as 4 of its 6 characters are melee units, but the control scheme otherwise lines up with what you’d expect from the genre. It’s Children of Morta‘s per-run upgrades and events that prove its most unique features, however; throughout dungeons are numerous temporary upgrades that can make you significantly more powerful, as well as rooms filled with events that can be anything from a simple memory game to a part of a sidequest that spans multiple runs. There’s a sense of interconnectedness that pervades everything Children of Morta does, and while some of its decisions sometimes result in unpleasant—and arguably unfair—difficulty spikes, the story beats always revolve satisfactorily enough to be worth a little extra trouble.

Children of Morta is a story about family viewed through the Bergsons’ eyes

The game begins with the Bergson family matriarch, Margaret, realizing that the Corruption—a plague of unclear origin that periodically arrives and turns all it infects into monsters—is beginning to spread again. Her prayers to the goddess of the land, Rea-Dana, go unanswered, so it’s incumbent upon the family of guardians to investigate the source of the Corruption and do everything they can to stop its spread. The cause of the Corruption and reason why Bergsons have a unique duty to stand against it are both eventually explained (and too much of a spoiler to detail), but in the beginning, it appears nothing more than a pretext to send characters into Children of Morta‘s procedurally generated dungeons.

Rea-Dana gave the Bergsons a sanctuary to use in troubled times, along with a crystal portal to the top of Mount Morta that can only be activated through the combined efforts of three spirits, so the only move that the family has is to trudge through dungeons and return with these lesser deities in tow. Children of Morta is a game about family, but interestingly, the Bergsons aren’t the only family of importance here; the various deities make up a family of their own, and you can discover monuments and codex entries that flesh out their relationships as you explore deeper into Children of Morta.

Don’t misinterpret this focus on family as an unwillingness to wade into darkness, though, because this isn’t a lighthearted game by any stretch of the imagination. In the middle of dungeons, you’ll stumble upon events that feature dead people and animals you can’t save, torture, slavery, and various other topics that can be downright gut-wrenching. Even the deities’ family history contains a fair bit of darkness. The Bergsons are a bastion against darkness in more ways than one, then, with their bonds and resilience representing the only real positivity or hope in the entire game. Each new character is slowly introduced in a way that makes them all memorable and likable, and there’s even a Corruption Fatigue mechanic that temporarily reduces a character’s HP if they’re used too often, forcing you to rely on other family members.

Children of Morta‘s storytelling is solid for the most part, with much of it consisting of high-quality voiced narration reminiscent of Bastion. The writing gets a little janky when you get to some of the text-only codex entries and flavor text, though. Family members will comment about people who are right next to them or worry about things long after they no longer pose a threat, for example, while the codex entries are just odd. This is most pronounced in the character descriptions, with their flowery, abstract writeups being difficult to translate into meaningful information.

The permanent and temporary upgrades make Children of Morta shine

Since your goal is to find the three spirits who open the portal to the top of Mount Morta, you’ll eventually have access to three portals that each contain three locations. These locations are Children of Morta‘s dungeons, and the goal is to survive several procedurally generated floors of enemies (and optionally, event rooms) and make it to the boss at the top. If you beat it, your character returns to the Bergsons’ home, the next area is unlocked, and the story progresses. If you die at any point in the dungeon, you’re teleported back to the house and still get to keep your obtained gold and any souvenirs that you found, but nothing unlocks and you have to try again. That’s the basic gameplay loop: attempt a dungeon, fail or succeed, and then return home to use the gold that you acquired during your run to invest in permanent family upgrades.

There are numerous statistical bonuses you can give to your entire roster of characters by spending gold, from increasing everyone’s damage output to ensuring that they all pick up extra gold. Characters also level up as they gain experience, with each level granting them a single skill point that they can invest into their unique skill tree. In keeping with the theme of family, however, reaching certain point thresholds unlocks perks for the entire family that can shield them from fatal blows, create a distraction, or increase everyone’s stats.

There are also per-run upgrades that only last as long as your current dungeon, and this is where Children of Morta becomes truly special. There are Obselisks that provide you with special abilities and bonuses for a certain amount of time, Runes that change your primary or secondary attacks for a limited number of attacks, Divine Grace items that provide bonuses and helpers that don’t wear off during your run, consumable Charms that can have a variety of effects but have to be manually activated, and Divine Relics that function as attacks or buffs that function on a cooldown timer. Every upgrade approach is represented here, and these can all combine to make you incredibly powerful. You might start a dungeon with a simple sword attack and area of effect secondary attack, but you can end up with a drone that randomly stuns enemies, a Divine Relic that creates pools that damage enemies, and passive HP regeneration. That’s a common scenario if you go out of your way to explore the various event rooms rather than rushing to the exit.

You’re provided the freedom to avoid tons of Children of Morta‘s content

Dungeons are generated to have a lot of branching paths, and many of these paths branch off to event rooms that are gated off by mystical-looking blue lasers (while yellow lasers indicate the presence of a free upgrade item). These events can be anything from a short escort mission to a Pong-inspired minigame, and while most of them are one-offs that are repeated, there are a decent number of recurring characters and storylines that make it worth going out of your way to leave no corner of the map unexplored. That having been said, there’s absolutely nothing stopping you from avoiding enemies and event rooms entirely to rush to the exit. You’ll miss out on worthwhile content, but it’s viable.

Sometimes, the emphasis on family manifests in really inconvenient ways

All 6 playable characters have their own unique attack pattern and special attacks. John is a melee character with fast slashes that inflict medium damage, whereas his son Kevin’s attacks begin slow and speed up as they land until his DPS becomes truly ridiculous. Joey, meanwhile, has slow hammer swings that inflict a lot of damage and have enough knockback to keep him safe most of the time. Linda is an archer who can strafe around while firing at the cost of stamina (which regenerates quickly), but her younger sister Lucy makes up for being fixed in place when shooting her fireballs by shooting “sidewinder” fireballs that do extra damage. Everyone also has different numbers of dodges (which also regenerate over time), so once you invest skill points in everyone’s skill trees and unlock things like Lucy’s regenerating shields that protect her from damage, everyone will specialize in a different combat approach. The dark side of this is that some bosses are significantly harder when using certain characters, and there’s no way of knowing who’s best against a given boss until you’ve faced it and seen its attack patterns. 30-45 minute runs can be wiped out at the very end because your character can’t dodge frequently enough or attack fast enough, and that stings.

Children of Morta is designed in such a way that you’re expected to fail each dungeon multiple times; each area has multiple story development cutscenes that play out after you fail, and successfully beating a dungeon on your first or second attempt means that you’ll skip ahead in the story without seeing the setup. At one point, I got lucky and beat a dungeon boss, only for a cutscene to explain that a family member’s fever broke. When I had entered the dungeon, however, the family member was simply unaccounted for, so I clearly missed at least one big story development. Basically, Children of Morta is set up to punish good play, and I hate that.

I also encountered some rare bugs such as getting stuck in the environment. That only happened twice in the ~21 hours I’ve spent playing and experimenting with various things, so it’s an uncommon occurrence, but the same can’t be said of a crash that occurs at the end of Children of Morta‘s penultimate boss fight—on 4 separate occasions, I spent around 30 minutes methodically clearing out the final, hardest dungeon, only to beat the boss at the end and have the game crash. Children of Morta only saves once you return to the Bergsons’ home, so all of that progress is lost every time, and the crash occurs on around 50% of my runs after beating this boss regardless of which character I’m using. At first, it appeared to have something to do with fighting it up close near where a staircase appears after you win, but then I experienced the exact same crash at the exact same point while playing as the archer and finishing it off from afar.

Children of Morta‘s art is gorgeous and more detailed than most pixel art

I can’t even begin to imagine the amount of work it takes to create a game that looks like this. The magical effects of deities in cutscenes are particularly stunning, often appearing as abstract waves of energy that crash and divide like opposing waves of water, and it’s downright stunning. Children of Morta‘s art style is great, but what really sets it apart is the sense of scale; when the camera zooms out, everything starts to look more like a painting than pixel art because of its breadth. Scaling and panning can sometimes lead to strange visual quirks because of the game’s nearest-neighbor scaling, however. Zooming in or out can cause objects that were originally one pixel to become two, leading to a strange effect that’s perhaps best described as a type of pixel shimmering, and there are also some points where black or white horizontal or vertical lines appear. None of this is a dealbreaker, though, and you’ll get used to it. Children of Morta‘s soundtrack doesn’t quite reach the same heights as its visuals. Mind you, it’s produced well and has some interesting instrumentation (including some sound effects that remind me of Mark Morgan’s classic cRPG soundtracks), but most of the tracks are a little too repetitive and/or atmospheric to act as anything beyond background noise.

Story: 2/3 Gameplay: 3/3 Visuals: 2/2 Music: 1/2 ★★★★★★★★☆☆ – 8/10
*Click here and scroll to the bottom for a detailed explanation of what these numbers mean

Children of Morta Review Screenshots

*A Steam key was provided for the purpose of this Children of Morta review. It took me about 14 hours to beat it, but its length largely depends on how many events you seek out.

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