Families are a great way to develop a cast of characters, from the stories of William Faulkner to The Simpsons. In such works, each family member is defined not only by their personal characteristics but by their relationships to one another. Families also provide access to rich themes, from loyalty and kinship to parenthood and mortality. In short, it’s narrative gold.
It’s only fitting, then, that Dead Mage imagines the family as a roster of character classes in a story-driven action game: Children of Morta. The Bergsons are a family of guardians tasked with watching over the mystical Mount Morta. Each family member has their own unique playstyle, each of which corresponds to their personality and role in the family. With randomly generated dungeon levels and tons of surprising narrative encounters, Children of Morta succeeds at telling a gripping story through both exposition and gameplay.
When players begin Children of Morta, they’re introduced to a lush, fantastical, pixelated world that’s at once colorful and brimming with a sinister darkness. “There are two main narrative paths in the game: the overarching external events and the internal family story,” Dead Mage Team Lead Amir Fassihi said. As the Bergsons prepare to face the return of darkness to the mountain their family has guarded for generations, their relationships to one another continue to grow and mature.
In Children of Morta, the theme of family isn’t window dressing; it’s central to the way Dead Mage conceived of the game’s design. Each character, for example, exhibits a playstyle that corresponds to their personality and role in the family.
John, for example, is protective as the father of the family, so he wields a shield and acts as a tank. His son Kevin, however, is much more timid and flighty, so he makes himself invisible to evade danger and prefers stealthy tactics. The youngest daughter Lucy has a lot of energy and slings explosive fireballs as a mage.
It doesn’t end with their individualized skill sets; the theme of family continues to be ever-present throughout Children of Morta’s many systems. For example, though each character has an individual skill tree, certain stats are leveled up for all family members at once. It’s a clever reminder that the Bergsons act and grow as a unit.
Furthermore, it allows you to bounce from character to character without feeling like you’re neglecting anybody. “When a new hero shows up, it’s easier to start playing them even if you’re a bunch of hours into the game already,” Fassihi added. This will become a necessity over time due to the game’s “fatigue” system, which forces the player to allow characters rest if they’ve been deployed too many times.
Children of Morta slowly cultivates its story in the spaces between your adventuring. The game’s omniscient narrator helps frame the game’s events in a literary way, voicing over your actions in real-time as you take them.
For example, every time you return to the Bergsons’ house from a run, you get a chance to uncover details about the family and their lives via narration. In one early dungeon encounter, you might happen upon a wolf cub and its wounded mother. When you return to the Bergsons’ home, the cub returns with you, and a cutscene ensues in which you learn what you must do to care for the orphaned pup. In other words, this random event generates more random events, though they’re all strung together by narrative continuity.
“All side events are related to the main game story,” Fassihi explained. “So while they are generated randomly, they never feel out of context. They will always support the main narrative or further explain the game story and world to the player.”
It’s touches like these that allow you to feel like you’re interacting with a living, breathing story. As you learn more about the Bergsons and their situation, they, too, learn more about themselves and their relationships to one another.
Achieving such complex storytelling is rare in roguelikes, which lean heavily on random generation and non-linear gameplay. Nonetheless, Children of Morta is all about storytelling, and its creative use of the family structure to advance its narrative is something you witness for yourself. The fate of Mount Morta depends on it.
Children of Morta is available on PC today.
Recommended specs: