The UFO 50 Diaries: Mortol

'It's ok! I had another guy!'

It’s hard to think of Mortol as anything other than a salient, possibly even evergreen, statement about the futility of war. The machine that churns up the flesh and sinew of young and old in a futile attempt to prove some fleeting sense of dominion.

Was it all worth it? To lay down your lives for king and country? To give everything of yourself, bones and all, to a cause that won’t even remember your name, that doesn’t even respect you enough to try to keep you safe?

Nah I’m just kidding.

This is a fun game! Infuriating at times, but fun.

What Mortol is doing on a mechanical level is really interesting because it’s essentially using the lives system as an in-universe tool for traversal.

Your guys have one of three abilities that they can use in the field (on top of running and jumping): a dart that pins you to whatever vertical surface your first come into contact with, an explosion, and turning into a stone block.

Right from the get go it explicitly tells you that these abilities can be chained together. You go into the first level understanding that there is a mastery of the mechanics to be made not only through the process of learning the game but in itself a means of progression.

And just as quick you realise there is more weight to your decisions than you previously thought. You only have 20 guys to begin with. That quickly becomes not enough.

Mortol’s hidden depths come to the fore so rapidly that I’ve run the risk of missing the forest for the trees here. It’s a game I struggle with because it’s far from easy. Because your lives are also your abilities, you have to be really bloody careful about how you navigate the myriad trecheries of this hazard laden landscape.

Inevitably, this is a ludolic experience across two strata: Skill, and resource management, which invariably become one in the same. You have to be calm and collected and well timed in your actions, all of which are qualities I do not possess.

Many times I sped through sections in a beautiful flow state only to lose five guys to a single avoidable hazard because I was getting tilted. On the occasions I made progress I’d end up in an unwinnable state due to running out of options.

It’s a death by a thousand cuts, something where failure can be quite gruelling, but the thing that’s really clever about this game is that the answer to your troubles is not just ‘get good’, it’s also to ask another question of it: Is there a way to get around this obstacle without making the sacrifice? Is there something smarter I can be doing here?

Once success inevitably beckons you forth, as it did for me, you discover an extra layer to this challenge. In order to best the game you need to complete all 10 levels. Lives carry on between levels, and thus this tactical strata is added to your approach to the game.

‘I beat this level, but did I beat it well enough?’ is a question that immediatley springs into your head at this moment. It is this element where Mortol shares a bit of design legacy with an earlier title, Paint Chase, which also employed a similar element to its score chasing secondary objective.

Here, however, it feels far more like an essential function of your continued survival in these hostile lands, and along your journey there are risky but potentially very rewarding power ups lurking in this world’s most dangerous corners.

Essentially Mortol is a conversation about how the player engages with the world they inhabit. Not as an obstacle course or some abstract, liminal space, but as a tangible entity which physical properties that we have to reckon with, a place not to be hoarded but shared.

And yet, inevitably it carries with it the grief-riddled sting of knowing that progress simply cannot be made without sacrifice.

Farewell my brave friends. I shall see you in the next life.