If you’ve been following this channel for any amount of time, by now I’d hope that you’ve gathered the fact that I have a love for pretty much all things roguelike. Give me the challenge, give me the risk and reward, give me the meta progression (preferably), and keep on finding new genres to mix with to continue to prove that you can add mileage to just about any type of game with well-implemented roguelike features. Of course, given the proliferation of such titles in the eShop over the years, the bar for what’s amazing and even what’s simply average has risen considerably, but that’s only part of what makes Morsels a bit of a disappointment.

Starting with the positive, if you like your game environments, critters, and play styles to be a little on the odd side, this is a game that will capture your attention. Reminding me quite a bit of the excellent Atomicrops in terms of visual style, the game absolutely has a distinctive look. After just a few minutes with it, you’ll also discover that the general feel of play is quite different as well. Depending on how you choose to play you could be going with more of a classic twin-stick shooter feel, perhaps work with what amounts to a short-range shotgun, more of a melee style, or any number of increasingly odd styles you’ll find the further you go. Pair that with a variety of different traps, enemies, and perks that feel just as likely to hurt as help you and there’s absolutely an unpredictable side to just about every run you’ll have in the game.

The problem is that unpredictability turns the corner from being exciting to being extremely aggravating pretty quickly and easily. Considering the sheer number of roguelike shooters I’ve played over the years, there’s no question that some are easier to wrap your arms around conceptually than others. A learning curve isn’t an outlier of your average game of this kind, it’s almost always a feature. That said, I can’t recall ever having been as confounded by a game’s lack of direction, visual cues, or any helpful method of understanding half of what you’ll encounter. What help text there is tends to be entirely too vague, even with some trial and error I was often left wondering what the heck just happened as I died yet again for reasons that weren’t entirely clear. There were enemies that sometimes were invulnerable and other times killable, the need to have a cooldown on your attacks entirely too quickly, it’s honestly just an unfriendly mess. 

The thing is, it isn’t just that this is the worst offender in this area that I’ve seen in the genre, my issue is the degree to which it is a problem. Frustrations are by no means unusual when tackling roguelike games, they’re sort of a baked in assumption. The problem is that the great games out there in the space will give you tastes of what could be when you get your act together, sucking you in for the long-term challenge by dangling just enough carrot in front of you for you to endure the punishment of the stick. Morsels, in my mind, is pretty well all stick all the time, and unrepentantly so. If that was the goal, good for the developer, but at some point you need to meet the average player half way to make the experience worthwhile or people are going to find something that does it better… and there are loads of options out there that do so.