Morsels Review

One of the best things about the indie game landscape is just how free developers can be to push the creative boundaries. It’s for this reason that I’m often drawn to indie games above AAA experiences – I don’t want blockbusters, I want new. Indie developer Furcula’s debut game Morsels first caught my eye with its eccentric personality, and as an ardent fan of roguelikes, I was sure that this was going to be another strong entry in the Annapurna Interactive catalogue. Alas, we didn’t get that idiom about mice and men for nothing, and Morsels proves that the best laid plans most certainly can go awry.

The game opens with a brief cutscene, showing off the distinctive design and pixel art which are, unfortunately, just about the only aspects in which the game shines. Some time ago, magical cards fell to earth, allowing the creatures who possessed them to transform into monsters. The strongest of these creatures, an implied cabal of evil cats, now rule over all others, leaving just scraps – morsels – for the underdogs. You play as a mouse who has fallen into a sewer, and it’s vaguely conveyed that you need to escape, or possibly defeat the cats, or both? If you have questions, that’s something you’ll need to get used to, because this ends up being just about all of the information you get from completing a run on either easy or hard mode (and you won’t want to stick around for longer than that). Now, action-heavy games don’t always need much story, so the flimsy premise is hardly a mortal sin. However, for a game whose visual design is so noticeably bold and cohesive, the lack of depth here is jarring in contrast, and it’s symbolic of how Morsels begins to fall apart as soon as you take more than a couple of steps into the whole experience.

Morsels’ strength is its visuals, but it falls apart quickly from there.

Gameplay starts off with a brusque tutorial that covers your basic abilities before you embark on your adventure in earnest. With an initial morsel to transform into, you work your way through a series of hazard-filled levels to reach the area boss, whose defeat allows you to progress to the next biome, rinse and repeat. The fundamental structure here is simple and the levels mostly follow a clear path from your spawn point to the exit, making it straightforward, if conceptually bland, to move through the world.

Combat is where you typically expect to enjoy your time the most in action-heavy games, but this is one of the many areas in which Morsels falls short. Most of your morsels are extremely weak, with low damage output and cooldowns on their basic attacks, and it takes a surprisingly long time to defeat each one of your numerous foes. There’s no real creativity needed for your own attacks, making combat itself a chore; strategy effectively boils down to slowly (oh, so slowly) poking enemies to death while avoiding their attacks, which is tedious and unrewarding in equal measure. Boss fights, despite some creative character designs, offer little more, effectively just representing the same avoid-then-attack pattern on a larger scale. Environmental hazards are similarly unexciting, and it mostly comes down to avoiding traps and otherwise not running into things to keep yourself alive.

While you might expect a game with such broadly straightforward play to be a walk in the park, this is not the case. Hazards are abundant, enemies are aggressive, and, on the default difficulty setting, you can only take three hits before you die due to your low health reserves. Alongside the dull combat, this leads to a strange combination of monotony and punishing difficulty that makes enjoyment hard to come by, even once you’ve mastered the technical aspects enough to make it through a run in one piece. Miniboss fights would be the only gameplay high point, rewarding you with a little more fast-paced, strategic play as well as morsel cards that allow you to expand your roster of monsters, but these represent a small proportion of the experience and are often over quickly.

No thoughts, head empty.

Morsels’ central mechanic is the ability to switch between the unique, eponymous creatures that you collect on your adventure. These critters are based on odds and ends such as chewing gum or a pebble, and the designs here are creative and offbeat. Each one has a unique attack and special; Gummsel, for example, attacks using bubbles and has a special that halts projectiles and slows enemies down. Details of the morsels’ abilities get recorded in your Guidebook as you unlock each one, and while this helps as a quick reference, a handful of these entries are unclear, making it difficult to learn how to use the more unique critters properly. There’s one morsel, for example, which attacks by eating enemies, but which also shrinks and dies seemingly by doing nothing. I think that this might be if it doesn’t eat enemies fast enough, but the game offers no clues, visual or otherwise, about the underlying mechanic, and the morsel shrivels up and dies so shockingly fast that it’s hard to thoroughly test any theory about what is going on.

This is one instance in a pattern of information design that is so astonishingly bad it will leave you using “but what does that mean?” as a curse. Powerups, stat boosts, and abilities are often presented with no explanation, and many of their effects are not clear from context, making it impossible to learn what they do. You meet characters between levels who offer you tradeoffs both good and bad, but the quirky language and scenario designs get in the way of understanding what your options are. You are regularly thrown into new scenarios or minigames without instruction, but since working out the rules involves the same difficulty as the rest of the game, you’re likely to die repeatedly before you have any real chance to understand. Learning the rules and strategy of the game often comes down to stumbling into information by sheer luck or slowly brute-forcing your way toward an understanding, and wading through it all is an unnecessarily unrewarding slog.

But what does that mean?

Morsels also suffers from extensive balance issues. Objectives are often designed without taking practical realities of gameplay into account; you cannot attack while carrying non-weapon items, for example, but there’s one fetch-and-carry quest whose item you can’t put down for more than a few seconds before it blows away in the wind, making self-defence and combat entirely impractical. Other balance choices seem like they might have been meant to encourage you to swap between morsels but end up doing the opposite, as the morsels’ intended strengths are too heavily outweighed by their weaknesses. At the other end of the spectrum, there are a few powerups that are so powerful as to make your mechanical skills redundant, since once you get them you can cheese through everything in your path without taking damage at all. There’s seemingly very little care around how individual elements should fit in the bigger picture, and the lack of equilibrium across the game’s systems prevents you from reaching any real state of flow during play.

There are also numerous technical aspects of the game which just don’t work within the broader context, such as a UI that doesn’t clearly display which buttons you’ve mapped each morsel to, making it awkward to swap on the go. Some morsels also control drastically differently to others, and regularly swapping between critters with such unique movement and attack styles makes it difficult to build up the kind of responsive, second-nature muscle memory that makes playing and improving at challenging games so rewarding. The cheese on top is a bug which intermittently causes the game to crash, which sends you right back to the beginning of a new run.

Final Thoughts

My hopes were high for Morsels, but the newest release in Annapurna Interactive’s catalogue falls astoundingly flat. It feels as though the game was designed by taking a shopping list of game ingredients and throwing them into a pot with no real care to how their unique flavours should work together. There’s undoubtedly a vision for what Furcula was trying to achieve here, but Morsels is missing the compelling “just one more run!” magic (and just about everything else) that turns roguelites into gold.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch 2 // Review code supplied by publisher

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