Morbid Metal Preview – Forging a slick, stylish, shapeshifting roguelite

Morbid Metal is vicious. It’s ready to tear its steel-like teeth through the unwary player, soft fingers and pliable plastic controller at a loss to the visceral violence unfolding in front of them. Morbid Metal provided a gleaming, grinding antithesis to the candy-coloured RPGs found elsewhere at TGS, and as a statement of intent for developer Felix Schade, who started this project on his own, it’s a brutal barrage of expertly-tuned violence.

Morbid Metal is a roguelite. Structurally, that’s the zeitgeist, the norm, the expectation, of gaming in 2025, and it’s interesting to see how well it now fits into modern gaming and modern attention spans. What that means is that death is part of the plan, with your incremental improvements, your first stuttering steps, slowly becoming firmer, stronger and more assured as you grow, both in knowledge and skill.

It all feels like a natural fit here. Morbid Metal doles out its first death with gleeful abandon, and your initial robotic warrior barely lasts more than a few minutes. I like to think I’m pretty handy with a dodge button and a sword – I’ve lived and breathed games like Devil May Cry, Bayonetta and Nier Automata – but I still found myself wanting as I got used to the speed and ferocity of the enemies in the opening areas. Back to the start…

The movement is an immediate highlight, with a great sense of speed and certainty produced by the tight controls. That’s exemplified by the enjoyable platforming you take part in between each encounter, and I’m hoping that this forms a key part of the game’s progression. The central cog, though, is combat. Drawing on games like Bayonetta, a perfectly timed dodge will result in a brief counter-attack window. From there, you can take any angle you want and cause untold damage to any enemy brazen enough to be in range. It’s extremely satisfying to get the timing just right.

As you arrive in each area, you’re locked into a battleground arena, invisible walls setting in place the locale for some severe sword-based action. Completing that skirmish then gives you the choice of three potential upgrades, beefing up your abilities, and letting you tailor your loadout to your playstyle.

That’s made more complicated as you unlock the alternative forms of fighter. Flux, your initial warrior form, is slick and swift, recognisably familiar to fans of Dante and Bayonetta. Your second form, Ekka, slows things down, giving you a massive two-handed blade that eviscerates the defences of shield-bearing enemies and utterly changes up the way you play. More forms will be available through the full game, providing distinctive styles to blend together.

Not only can you shapeshift between different forms in the midst of battle and even a combo, the upgrade options can apply to individual moves for individual forms, making your decisions harder than ever to weigh up. Get the right upgrades, though, and you can really start to roll through the world, with inflated damage making short work of enemies. The choices get trickier as you find Devil’s Bargains, which can give both positive and negative effects, such as boosting the critical chance for both your attacks and those of your enemies, adding further risk and reward to your build.

The world of Morbid Metal looks absolutely fantastic. The metallic foes are all instantly identifiable, and their brutalist design makes them all the more satisfying to destroy. From there you move between the enticing natural decay of some areas through to the unbridled futurism of others, and I can’t wait to see where the journey through the game will take you as you delve ever deeper into Schade’s vision.

The demo built up to an encounter with a robotic monkey boss, Saru, leaping around the arena, unleashing energy pulses to try and dodge. It’s a fun encounter, dashing in and out to deal damage, targeting his fists for locational damage which can affect the attacks he later unleashes.

This is all complemented by a soundtrack that, on first impressions alone, is going to absolutely rip. You can check out the music video for Saru right now, composed by Blue Stahli, and it’s a heady mix of metalcore guitar work and thumping trance beats, which feel like the perfect fit for the fast-paced, adrenaline-pumping combat.

As we’ve recently seen with Lost Soul Aside, publishers are peeking into the world of solo devs and finding a rich vein of talent and creativity that’s been shorn of the wear and tear of large-scale commercial development. Borne from a university project, Schade subsequently spun Morbid Metal’s development team out into his own company, SCREEN JUICE, before aligning with Ubisoft, one of the biggest publishers in the world. You’d have to hope that we see more of this sort of thing.

With its stylish visuals and slick combat, Morbid Metal could join games like Hades and Risk of Rain as a go-to roguelite. It ties together the instinctive action gameplay of Devil May Cry and Bayonetta with a progression system that rewards commitment and study. I can’t wait to see more when the game arrives in Early Access.

If you’re interested in checking Morbid Metal out for yourself, you can download the demo via Steam right now, and sign up to a playtest that will feed the planned early access release