Mortal Shell II is absolutely sloppy with parryslop: As your weird little homunculus wanders a decaying landscape where everybody is some brand of crazy—looking at you, “Always offering to wash the players’ feet” guy—you have multiple different “shields” you can equip to block incoming enemy attacks, from a traditional guard where you hold down a button to avoid damage, to the ability to turn yourself into a stone statue, staggering enemies who try to strike you just as you transform. (This latter ability, lifted straight from the very weird original Mortal Shell, lets you get up to some pretty silly stuff, since any attacks your character launched before be-Gorgoning themselves will continue once they come out of their stone stupor.) All of them, though, come back in one way or another to the basic parrying concept: Pushing a button when an enemy attack is incoming to a) stop yourself from taking any damage, and b) open up opportunities to punish your opponents.
Video games are lousy with parrying lately, and it’s easy to suss out why: Parries make things matter, on a near-atomic level. If every enemy attack can shave off a major chunk of your health—while being difficult to interrupt with other techniques, like rolling or dodging—then forcing the player to stand there and test their reflexes against the risk of taking an axe to the forehead makes every moment of a battle one where the tide can turn. (Possibly into a tide of blood, if you’re not that great at deflecting axe blades.) It’s part of a tradition that runs through both From Software’s Dark Souls games—where parries are often the ultimate high-risk, high-reward strategy—as well as games like Rocksteady’s more rhythmic Batman: Arkham games, which created their sense of being a one-man army battling huge hordes of enemies by not only making each baddie’s individual attacks easy to deal with, but flashing big indicators up on screen when it’s time to hit the “No, actually, you get your ass knocked to the floor” button.
It all makes sense: If the choice, when enemies in your game attack, is between “dodge it,” “tank it,” and “do something difficult that looks cool as hell,” why wouldn’t developers give their players the chance to feel completely kickass the majority of the time? One major part of the appeal of last year’s Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, for instance, was the way it took ideas about actionizing turn-based RPG combat—normally a “Tank it” proposition, by default—that dated back to Super Mario Bros. RPG, then turned them into a game where every attack could be deflected or riposted by a sufficiently prepared player. Parrying looks and feels cool; even more importantly, it feels intentional. You can’t just button mash in a parrying game, shutting off your brain while turning your opponents into a multiply stabbed slurry. You have to think about every sword strike coming in, the timing of every arrow or hammer fall. It shrinks the entire game world down to a single focused point of time and reflexes, one that makes you care about every single fight, and that’s ostensibly thrilling.
Ostensibly because, well… there’s no idea in gaming so good that it can’t wear out its welcome after the 1,433rd time you execute it, right? There are, after all, only so many ways you can make a video game bad guy swing a sword/try to stick you with its bloated tongue/slam into you with its giant all-skull frog body. (I will give Mortal Shell II this: It has some pretty gnarly monster designs.) If the player has seen them all—every attack animation, every weird little feint and delay and trick of timing that developers can work up to try to keep this all from becoming rote—what you’re left with is a rhythm game with a somewhat cumbersome inventory mechanic and a whole lot of blood bolted to it.
Developers began leaning on parries because it feels incredible to succeed at them—a genuinely exultant moment when, through fluke or flash of brilliance, you hit the button at the exact right moment to drag victory out of the flailing jaws of defeat. But there comes a point when even brilliance can begin to feel routine, and I definitely felt that moment set in as I was touring through Mortal Shell II’s blasted landscapes. That’s not necessarily Cold Symmetry’s fault—they’ve made something about 10 degrees weirder and more interesting than any number of more traditional “parryslop” games out there, and their commitment to giving players multiple ways to engage the mechanic is laudable. But slop is, inevitably, going to feel a little sloppy at some point, and seeing a parry tutorial pop up in a game is just as likely to deflect my attention these days as it is to get me excited for yet another round of “daring” counterattacks.
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