Mortal Shell 2 is a good game that’s fascinatingly bad at specific things. The open world’s egregious lack of checkpoints, for example, was hastily fixed in a patch after everyone told the devs that this feels like a prank. The lighting is so dark that I, with mild cornea problems, had to crank up the brightness and gamma to see anything, yet key items are still hidden in a black smear half of the time. And the final boss, even with the secret MacGuffin designed to counter it, is among the worst I’ve ever seen – buggy, spongey, and spamming a grab attack so bullshit that it could fertilize corn fields.

But the real steel-toed boot to my kneecaps came in the opening hours of Mortal Shell 2. Outliers in player behavior are something that game journalists like to write about, and few are more painful than people realizing a bazillion hours into a game that they’ve missed a key feature that was signaled by yellow paint, waypoints, and NPC dialogue, and surrounded by neon signs reading, “You’re really going to need this.” This time, it happened to me, and it nearly made me uninstall Mortal Shell 2. In my defense, it was mostly down to bugs, which are not in short supply here. I did ultimately finish and enjoy the game – beating that awful boss and finding all the collectible Ova in about 22 hours – but the first six hours of Mortal Shell 2 were easily among the worst gaming experiences I’ve had in 2026.

Fool me once

I began to suspect that Mortal Shell 2’s PS5 build might have problems when, minutes into the game, I couldn’t use the items I’d equipped during the tutorial section about using items.

To make sure, I consulted the control guide in the options menu. Yep, that sure is a “use” button. And while I was in the options menu, I tried to adjust some graphics settings only to learn that they don’t work. At all. I could toggle them, but pre-patch, nothing actually changed on PS5. Luckily, intentionally dying fixed the item problem. I knew it was bugged, because I didn’t change anything else, but it suddenly worked. This, I later realized, was foreshadowing.

A bit deeper into the tutorial, I was introduced to the tiny dungeons found inside checkpoints called beacons. Like the dungeons dotted around the world, the layouts are pretty similar, with the beacon dungeons frequently opening with a circular room of alien, off-white marble. In the center of one of the first of these dungeons sat a strange, grayish stone altar, almost bench-like in its proportions.

I do have mostly functional eyeballs, so I did notice and investigate the obvious gray box in the giant white room. But my probing, from all sides and distances, turned up nothing. “It must be decorative,” I thought; I couldn’t move the altar, destroy it, or interact with it, so like a man blissfully locking his keys in his car, I moved on and forgot all about it. My memory of game environment decor lasts about as long as an ice cube on a sidewalk in Louisiana – or, roughly one paragraph.

An exciting new bug appeared shortly after I left the tutorial. Suddenly, I couldn’t interact with anything, including the strange, grayish stone altars, which are apparently chests. There’s a village right outside the first checkpoint, and for whatever reason, both the prompt and ability to open the chests inside of it had vanished for me. Reloading the game fixed this, and so I pressed on, losing even more trust in the game.

The other shoe

Six hours in, after clearing the first main dungeon and boss of Mortal Shell 2 as well as much of the surrounding map, a thought occurred to me: “Man, usually a Soulslike lets you upgrade weapons pretty early on. What gives?”

My sword was stuck at level one, and it was starting to feel pretty puny. I had found two of what I’d assumed to be three pieces necessary to repair the blacksmith’s forge and upgrade weapons – game doohickeys work in threes, after all – but I couldn’t find the third, and the smithy himself had no helpful advice for me. For reasons known only to Satan, even if you have some of these key items in your inventory, the blacksmith’s dialogue doesn’t change and is about as helpful as those graphics settings.

Suspicious, I spoke to a friend who’d started playing Mortal Shell 2 a few days before me. He assured me that I should definitely be able to upgrade weapons by now. Alarm bells start ringing. What did I miss? Something was stuck in my brain like a fish hook through a worm, but I couldn’t place it.

I avoid looking up tips for games until I finish them (see: my 46-hour 100% Silksong journey), so I revisited the early areas of Mortal Shell 2 with a fine-toothed comb. Still brandishing a base sword, I re-explored multiple dungeons and points of interest, but I came up empty. At this point, Google was calling to me like the Green Goblin mask in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, and I figured that if the game can’t be bothered to work properly, then I can’t be bothered to work hard. I looked up where to find the blacksmith’s thingamajig and my blood ran cold.

It’s in the chest in the beacon right at the start of this godforsaken game, flanked by candelabras and framed by a literal spotlight. I missed it because I couldn’t interact with the chest due to a bug. I didn’t see a prompt showing that you could interact with it, I didn’t know that this was a bug at this point, and my brain didn’t register that this is what a chest looks like because this is not what chests look like. The two pieces I had found for the smith? They’re for your other gear, but you’re supposed to start upgrading your melee weapon very early on. I was able to instantly juice my sword to +9, as I recall, and start melting enemies.

As a result of all this, I beat the first 20% of Mortal Shell 2 with unupgraded weapons, unupgraded guns, unupgraded skill stones, and a cluster of bugs bothering me like gnats. Wouldn’t you know it: Mortal Shell 2 is a lot better when you aren’t accidentally wearing Rock Lee’s training weights. It’s also much more fun after being patched, and thank goodness for that.

Mortal Shell 2 review: “The best Soulslike I’ve played since Elden Ring.”