3.5/5 ★ – Yojimboi's review of Children of Morta.

A pretty solid little indie game with some roguelite elements and a pretty decent story (though not without its flaws), and pretty high replayability. Sort of a diablo vibe with the dungeon crawling ARPG gameplay. Plenty of side objectives to handle and even an infinite pure roguelike mode. You play as a family fighting corruption in the world, known as the Bergsons. When you begin you have only a few characters (family members) unlocked, and you rescue more as you progress through the story mode. As you go through, you uncover more secrets about how things are, and how they got that way. The art style in this game is absolutely stunning. Everything in the game is represented in a beautiful pixel art style, and the animations really pop for a lot of the Bergson's abilities. There was not a single moment playing this game that I wasn't completely in awe of how good everything in the game looked. The upgrade systems in the game are also genuinely interesting. On top of the standard roguelite "gather currency, bring it out of dungeon, spend it on stats" progression that affects the whole family, each family member upgrades each other as they level up. For example, reaching level 20 on Mark (the monk type character) adds an extra evade bar to every family member. This doesn't come without it's downsides though. If you use a single character for too long, they get "corruption sickness" which basically punishes you for not diversifying your play styles by significantly lowering their max HP. Ordinarily I wouldn't mind so much but some of the characters are just objectively worse than the other offerings you get later in the game, and it seems that you're punished for using the good characters over the less powerful ones. On top of that, while the story was pretty good, its end was pretty anti-climactic. Everything was building up to the fight with the big bad, and once you got there, you sort of just punch him until he gives up, and then good triumphs. It felt like it needed an extra zone to develop him as a villain a little more. All that being said, it's a pretty entertaining game, and if you have some decent runs, the story isn't really all that long. Thankfully, since it's an indie title, the price tag is very low, and it's even available on mobile, so it's worth a shot if you've got the time and resources.