Mortal Shell
Skip · RPG · 2021
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
SKIP IT.
The value isn't there at $29.99.
- Length
- 10.7h
- Value
- $2.80/hr
- Reviews
- 67% positive
Recent reviews trending down: 57% over the last 30 days against 67% all-time.
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Minimum on the Steam store: 8 GB of memory, NVIDIA GTX 970 or AMD Radeon R9 290, 12 GB of storage. Windows only.
Their Flesh is Your Armor. Mortal Shell is a deep action-RPG that tests your sanity and resilience in a shattered world. Survival demands superior awareness, precision, and instincts. Possess lost warriors, track down hidden sanctums of the devout, and face formidable foes.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
It has never been cheaper than $1.49. That was June 2025. 29 discounts in the 5 years on record. They run about 70 percent off, roughly 6 weeks apart.
It is pricier than 95 percent of its genre, and less well reviewed than 81 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Darksiders III ($39.99, scores 35) beats it on value, while it beats Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty ($19.99, scores 1).
Steam's global achievement data says about 2 percent of players ever finish it. On a 10.7-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. Players rate it 67 percent positive over its lifetime, but the last 30 days run 57 percent. Something recent has soured the room. Of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 6 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written December 2025 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 37 percent of the 2,131 reviews written there were positive, against 67 percent overall, and those are 20 percent of everything written about it.
Finishing takes 10.7 hours; clearing it takes 24, which is 2.2 times the campaign.
At 10.7 hours it is a handheld-sized game, and Valve rates it Deck Verified.
The drop-off
85% start to 2% finishMost players never reach the end. On a 10.7-hour game, that's a lot you pay for and may never use. Steam global achievements
Players
9 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
Cold Symmetry revolutionized the genre by making the very first zone a poison swamp . The early game is very, very difficult and explains few of its systems. It's also short-probably took me less than 11 hours of active time to complete, and the first two and a half hours were almost entirely me confusedly running in circles in the starting zone. If you like the genre, wait for a sale and there's some good to be...
This is gonna be a long drawn-out analysis. Letting you all know my route was Ice Temple, Fire Temple, Earth Temple, I would definitely say doing Ice first was a pain in the ass. Just going to give some starting disclaimers for my playthrough of this game, because I hardly did use most of it's mechanics. First of all my run through this game was entirely through using the basic Harros shell and Hallowed Blade, not...
Almost didn't pick this game up because of the mixed reviews. Glad I ignored them. Doesn't seem like it's going to be a long game at this point after the first dungeon but it's a unique souls like experience that's worth experiencing. Based on what I've seen people say about Mortal Shell 2 and it's improvements, glad I played it before getting the new one.
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic).
Cite this score
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Mortal Shell scores 17/100 on the BANG Score (a skip). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/1110910/mortal-shellThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 18, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.