Children of Morta Is Couch Co-op Fun

Recently I found myself blazing through Children of Morta. If the game was a buffet, I kept going back up for more until I threw up. Children of Morta is your typical roguelike with randomly generated levels, randomized loot drops and even randomized events. The game was developed by independent studio Dead Mage and released in 2019.

You play as a member of the Bergson family and are fighting against a fast spreading corruption. The story is pretty simple and does its job perfectly. You have a host of reasons to fight the corruption, and the few twists are genuinely entertaining. The game in general tries to subvert your expectations, often focusing on how grim and unforgiving the corrupted world is. While I do feel like they use this trick a few times too many, the dark side-stories are probably the best part of the game as a whole.

The game has a pixel art style that manages to convey a large amount of emotion despite the blocky world. If you aren’t a fan of pixel art games, this game won’t do anything to win you over, but it does have a large amount of charm. The game itself plays well too. The controls are simple and the combat adds enough to feel constantly fresh without overburdening the player. I did however encounter a large number of hitches while playing on the Xbox One X, but they were never too distracting.

The real star of the show was the couch co-op. In a world where we have more and more games like Wolfenstein Youngblood having a huge focus on co-op without local play, it is very refreshing to be able to kick back with a friend or partner and just lose hours playing together. I played virtually the entire game co-op and it was excellent. It probably took us 20 hours to 100% the game. Fair warning though: It isn’t immediately obvious, but you must first complete the tutorial before co-op is available.

Children of Morta is currently available on game pass, and is completely worth your time. Co-op is the way to play, but the game was still enjoyable the times I played solo.