I, like many other people out there, loved Hollow Knight. It was a beautiful 2D Search-Action style game with great atmosphere, lovely, tight, fun gameplay, and inspired a wave of renewed interest in the genre. I remain confident that one day its follow-up, Silksong will actually come out, but until then we have been graced with a bevy of similar games. Clearly, the folks at Disaster Games took some inspiration from Hollow Knight when making their own game, Morkull Ragast’s Rage, but I don’t think we can quite call it grace that brought it to us.
Morkull Ragast’s Rage is a tongue-in-cheek action platformer which follows an edgy god of death and darkness who is fully aware that he is in a video game and wants to find a way out. The puts him at odds with the games own programmers, and leads to some very in-your-face, Deadpool style comedy. The comedy never really connected with me. It never felt particularly interesting or clever, just edge for edge’s sake, but comedy’s subjective and not everything needs to be Shakespeare. In fact, less things should probably be Shakespeare. I’ve seen way too many takes on Hamlet, and now they just make me tired.
Morkull Ragast’s Rage shows its Hollow Knight influences the most with its moody design choices. The game is packed with some very lovely backgrounds and character designs. Clearly, someone cared a great deal about the way the game looked and it paid off with some great looking imagery. I went back and forth with how I felt aboutthe design of the titular character, he’s an edgy little skull headed guy with some very bone forward embellishments an a slight potbelly, and I think I like him.
“Morkull Ragast’s Rage shows its Hollow Knight influences the most with its moody design choices. The game is packed with some very lovely backgrounds and character designs.”
However, problems arise again once things start to move again. A lot of the animations look extremely unpolished, like they consist of maybe two frames of animation, including you primary attack combos. Enemies are similarly unpolished, especially in their reactions to being hit, making combat feel toothless and tedious.
My real problem with Morkull isn’t with it’s storytelling, it’s with just about everything else. The music is often just some repetitive, bland track that sounds like someone did a search for “inoffensive hard rock,” and came away with three or four songs. Every single UI element lacks polish to the extent that I constantly found myself wondering if they has sent over a pre-alpha build for review, but the gameplay is the greatest tragedy of all. The controls are sluggish and finicky, with a bizarre block/parry window, in a game that seems to be going for high difficulty and precision platforming. Mind you, that high difficulty seems to mostly result in enemies being damage sponges rather than any fun or interesting mechanics.
Ultimately, therein lies my major complaint. Morkull Ragast’s Rage isn’t fun. At no point in my time playing this game did I have an emotion similar to fun, which is disappointing. Some people involved with this game clearly cared about their work and, as a result there are some lovely backgrounds and sprite designs, but everything else came out unfinished, unfunny, and underwhelming.
