I like to think I know my stuff when it comes to roguelikes. I’ve been a huge fan of the genre for 15 years and covered it professionally for a decade. I’ve played everything from dungeon crawlers to deckbuilders to a slot machine in hell. I can usually wrap my head around a new one pretty quickly.
Morsels has me baffled.
It’s not the basic premise that’s so confusing, though it is odd: you play a mouse living in the sewers, who must battle his way up through the corrupt society above. The clearest inspiration is The Binding of Isaac, with winding dungeon levels, top-down shooting, and a cute-but-gross art style.
The biggest twist is the morsels themselves. Each run you choose a card that allows you to transform into one—a kind of ugly little monster with its own unique attack style and special ability. New cards can be found over the course of the run, and you can hold up to three at a time, so you can shift between forms.
But with that framework established, Morsels immediately throws you in at the deep end. Its world is utterly chaotic and full of unexplained phenomena, and it quickly starts to feel like an exam you forgot to study for.
Oh great, this pick-up gives me “more tofu”—what does that actually mean? This new morsel comes with a daisy—is that good? At one point a monster sitting on a washing machine asks me “Do you want to shuffle your morbs or your fuzzies?”. This is not a question I am remotely prepared for.
There’s an element of discovery to it—after a bit of experimentation, it’s satisfying for example to work out for myself that daisies block one hit like a shield (obviously!). But the overall experience is so chaotic, with so much happening at once, that it’s almost impossible to be methodical in your learnings.
Some enemies are invincible and some aren’t, without clear explanation. Sometimes when you pick up a card, it seems to come with what could be a buff or could be a curse—it’s often not obvious even after the effect has taken place. Tunnels in the walls lead to strange minigames, with unexplained rules and often ambiguous rewards. At one point I rescued a monkey from a crushing trap and carried it all the way to the end of the level, and I still have no idea whether that did anything.
Underlying all that confusion is the growing sense that Morsels is structured quite unlike any other roguelike I’ve played—especially in recent years. Particularly there isn’t much sense of growing in power or crafting a build over the course of a run.
The morsels themselves are deliberately temporary. When picking up a new card, you seem to be forced to replace an old one if your roster is currently full, and various events require you to sacrifice a morsel to proceed. They gain XP over time which can evolve them into a new, more powerful form—but if they fill the XP bar a second time, they ‘retire’ and are removed from your roster, effectively giving all of them a limited lifespan.
That forces variety and adaptation, as you jump between the wildly different attack styles of each of your creatures—but it also means it’s impossible to commit to one for any great length of time, and given almost all morsels seem to exist at about the same level of power, your roster doesn’t grow in strength either outside of a handful of lasting buffs. There’s no sense of any particular run having its own feel or strategy.
I think that’s deliberate. Morsels wants you scrambling in chaos, not building to perfection, and treating any advantage you gain as something to quickly spend to get you to the next level. That certainly suits its underdog premise and grotesque, muppet-y setting, and it’s reflected in the fast and loose (and frankly sometimes frustrating) top-down shooting.
But I’m not sure it’s giving me any reason to keep coming back. There’s definitely part of me that’s curious to dig into all of Morsels’ many secrets and learn to master its strange world, but it doesn’t have that ‘one more run’ feeling that hooks me into my favourite roguelikes. I’m unlocking new things but I don’t really understand what those things are, and without clear build-crafting I don’t have that sense of wanting to keep trying different strategies.
After two hours, I think I might already be done puzzling over Morsels’ strangeness—but if you’re a more curious and patient soul than I, you can check it out on Steam now.
