There’s a part of us, the morbid, unspeakable side of us, and yes, I am including everyone in this, that wants to see something disgustingly abject. We let our eyes remain open, letting the image stain a freshly printed memory, whether for confirmation, validation, insecurity, or simple curiosity. You know, like when you peel open a used tissue, because you’re on day three of a nasty cold and you’re finally getting the gunk out, and you let that small peek linger into a full examination of what your body has forced out.
Imagine there being a little mouse on some unspecified quest for cards and cheese bits inside that used tissue, and there you have Morsels.
What a gross game. But this is a good thing. I’ll take full commitment to a hyper-specific art style over something bland. There’s a specific dankness to it. It’s somehow moist and dry to look at. The audio design really emphasises this unsettling, squishy feel to it, but the CRT filter air-fries the visuals. There’s a weird bounciness to the animations, which are oversoaked in highlighter colours. Once you’ve seen it, you can’t ignore it. Morsels will certainly stay with me.
Looking at it can get overwhelming. I think there’s a reason we eventually look away from something abject. Games like Morsels, twin-stick roguelikes, need a clear visual coherency so you can parse what is happening and react accordingly. In the five levels in each run, you’ll come across some unevenness between each biome. Areas with a more reduced colour palette make the action crystal clear, whereas others that have the game’s stylistically splotchy, melted crayon aesthetic make it much tougher to decipher everything on screen.
Morsels has a story, and it’s more of a fever dream than anything else. The game opens with some exposition on what’s going on. Cards that allow animals to transform into powerful creatures rain down from the sky, and some of the larger creatures have hoarded the more powerful ones for themselves. Playing as a tiny mouse, you find scattered cards that enable you to have a fighting chance in this hellscape. You’ll become different bits and bobs, like anthropomorphic bubble gum, a sunflower-adjacent biped, or a tapeworm, as you slink your way through mazes to progress.
The transformations are well varied, and they are what make Morsels feel different from other roguelikes. You can equip up to three and toggle between them. The principal reason to switch is to find which morsel-specific attacks and Morbs, randomised passive abilities, work the best for you. However, as I quickly discovered, there’s no universally shared health bar. Instead, each morsel has its own row of hearts to take hits. Scouring each level for a small arena will initiate a challenge in which you fight a beefed-up version of a morsel card you can obtain and add to your hand. Defeat the morsel, get another card, and get another 3 hearts.
The second design push to get the player to pick up and swap out morsels is that they age quickly. There’s a small blue XP bar that runs underneath the hearts of all the morsels, and you can level them up into more powerful forms. Should you rely on any one of them too much, they’ll expire. Morsels gives you a warning when you first level up one of your critters about this, and I took it maybe too much to heart.
In my time with Morsels, none of my evolutions expired, although plenty of them died. A typical run will have you swapping them out fairly often, with plenty of opportunity to do so. You can find the mini-arenas frequently, but there are also eggs you can hatch, or you can even get rid of some between levels at vendors. This kind of constant exchange keeps Morsels engaging and mitigates a problem that shows up too often in roguelikes: weapon pool saturation.
I don’t see this phenomenon talked about all too often, but it happens frequently, and it can sour a roguelike quickly. It goes like this: roguelikes are designed around repeated runs with a large variety of weapons. As you make progress, typically new weapons or upgrades are added to the randomisation. However, if there’s a particular setup that you enjoy, it becomes less and less likely you’ll actually return to that build. Instead, you encounter new builds that you either aren’t familiar with or simply dislike, which demotivates you in each new iteration.
In Morsels, because you have the opportunity to swap out your forms so often, it’s fairly easy to find the morsel you want to run with. The list of morsels isn’t all that long. There is the issue of Morbs, and they are randomly assigned to your characters, and you’ll earn more of them every time a run ends. Some of these are straight downgrades, in that they’ll make things more difficult, such as the immortal bug that circles and attacks you throughout a run. Others, like a damaging zap attack whenever you dash, will serve as a huge boon as you make your way to the final boss.
Along that path to the end, Morsels will feel like most other roguelikes you’ve played. The exception being the morsels, of course, and also the number of mini-games where you can test your mettle for some rewards. The mini-games are fine, and there’s a staggering variety to keep you coming back. But your compensation for clearing these games doesn’t work too well as incentives. You’ll earn one of two currencies, cheese bits and favours, which can only be used within a run. There’s no significant meta currency. You have an XP bar that shows up between runs, but the only reward there is another Morb to add to the collection. As mentioned before, there are vendors that show up between every level, and you can spend your money there. They are unholy abominations to look at, and not all of them provide any real help on your quest. From what I could gather, you had to interact with them in order to move forward. Sometimes this meant that if you didn’t have a favour on hand, you were forced to take some sort of punishment before continuing. Otherwise, you’ll have the chance to buy something from them, and while purchases are inexpensive, there’s no pressure to loot every enemy in each level to get more cheese bits since items and upgrades feel insignificant.
My runtime to beat Morsels was shorter than most, and that’s primarily because I soon settled into a speedrunner’s cadence. Skipping over most of the side content to get meagre upgrades, I greedily rushed to find more morsels, round out my crew with my favourites, level up the strongest one and then take on bosses. The challenges at the end of each level were straightforward bullet hell arenas. They’re tough, but too familiar.
Morsels reminds me of perceptual art, where at the right angle, everything aligns into something immensely creative and impressive as you see how the artist pieced together disparate objects into something refined. Usually made up of recycled bits, when looking at perceptual art, you only see a beautifully detailed image. As you turn the corner and view it at the wrong angle, you see each individual part and can judge how much it contributes to the final product. Morsels is a remarkable construction of discarded things, but it’s easy to peel away what doesn’t work and strip it bare to the bone.
