Here is a list of waste items I can see from my desk, at the time of writing: one piece of mud tracked in from a nearby forest, with a curl of oak leaf poking out of it; two condensed, possibly sentient balls of spiderweb; two fingernails (I know, it’s a terrible habit, I promise I’m not this gross in proper office environments); three screws that really should be part of my bed; one discarded bottle of antivac; ten unidentified somethings.
What do all these objects have in common? Obviously, they would make amazing roguelite protagonists. I know this because I have been playing… Morsels!
Edwin: I was expecting Morsels to be a belter, after sampling it at Summer Geoff Fest, and Furcula’s creature-collecting roguelite didn’t disappoint. It’s a stomach-churning palimpsest of worlds themed around mutant rubbish – both literal gobs of sentient trash, and various pop culture gargoyles that recall both Goya and 90s animated TV shows.
There are giant noses in hoodies, map-invading adders, beached whales, chortling dumpsters, and cats that transform into crabs and carnivorous plants. It makes for a borderline unreadable experience, and that’s just the way I like it. More games should flirt with being unreadable. It’s a joy to encounter a new enemy in Morsels and have no idea what it’s going to do.
Your abilities as player aren’t quite as brain-bending as all that, though we’re a long way from the class archetypes in conventional fantasy roguelites. In brief, you’re a mouse clambering up through layers of procedural dungeon, after being eaten and excreted by the Cosmic Cat. The titular Morsels are hot-swappable characters with bizarre abilities.
Hogsel is a chomping snake that steadily consumes itself. Shromsel buds into clones, steered with the same controls – a private army obtained at the cost of slower movement. You’ll level Morsels up and endow them with various modifiers as you push through each small labyrinth, searching for the exit ladder.
Along the way, you’ll get into at least one utterly chaotic, multiple room, pinball machine fight with assorted furballs, fatbergs and faeries. The game’s physics are often your worst enemy, but the critters are just as prone to being caught out by richochets and accidentally triggered explosions, and the result is a winning “ecology” of knock-on effects. If you weary of the map’s volatility, there are puzzle chambers you can duck into that reference a bunch of old games, from Frogger to Snakes & Ladders.
Look back, I think you’ll be less jolted by Morsels if you’ve played The Binding Of Isaac, but I think Morsels stands apart by way of its dumpyard premise, its sheer visual imagination, and its strange loveliness. The world might be a cesspit, but it is also a sloppy embrace, a raucous gutful of secrets that plays like a disreputable cousin of Animal Well.