Lysergic FPS Mohrta is a medieval western gothic blend of Morrowind and Doom

One piece of worldbuilding advice I’ve always found useful is to go at least one level deeper than the obvious. To wit: why have a lantern, asks FPS Mohrta, when you can have a horrible vulture-esque creature called a lantern beast that lives on your head to light up the dark for you? “Found a good’un,” I wrote in Slack shortly after playing Mohrta’s Steam demo. “It’s so rad and strange!”. Well, that’s the pitch, reader. It’s a “nonlinear FPS game blending action, exploration, and light dungeon crawling”. Very rad. Very strange. Nom nom.

It’s a world of stumpy, cowbell-wearing pet giraffes and ferocious avian nightmare bastards. These aren’t things I’m used to dealing with on daily basis, so I naturally sought something to ground myself. Luckily, you start with a very nice, comfortingly chunky pistol with an excellent alt fire that unloads a full clip at whatever you’re pointing at. Your sword also has an alt fire, as all good swords should. These use mana, which you can restore with a big sippy from your flask. And so you progress. Looking at things and going “oh yeah, that’s cool”, shooting very fast things that want you dead, and taking big sippies.

Between the vaguely futuristic modern and medieval bits, and the very strange horse your character rides, my mind naturally went straight to Wolfe’s Book Of The New Sun. This is likely more recency bias than anything else, but there’s definitely a sense of thick, somewhat pulpy history to the world, and I’m very curious to find out more about it. What’s interesting is how the lore blurb would fit equally well for a modern military shooter, albeit one with a few supernatural elements:

“A special military group known as “The Hayward” was formed to investigate and destroy the anomalies within The Strange. For years, the Hayward had done an admirable job of monitoring, handling, and reverse-engineering elements of the Great Strange into their work. Among these Hayward operatives is where your remains found new life.”

You’ll often hear people say “graphics don’t matter”, but rarely the same about features. I must then conclude that most people care about features. As such, here are Mohrta’s:

• Adventure through an atypical take on the FPS genre.
• Play through the game’s five enormous and differently-themed dimensions in any order you choose.
• Soak in the otherworldly atmosphere and lovingly-crafted level design.
• Fight though a myriad of highly-detailed environments that push the limits of GZDoom.
• Explore unusual settings, characters, and enemies fleshed out in beautiful signature Scumhead detail, featuring designs by Osiol.
• Acquire a huge roster of weapons, each with multiple functions and utility.
• Upgrade your weapons and gear, and choose a custom loadout that best suits your playstyle.
• Over 50 diverse enemies and 20 challenging boss fights to dodge, shoot, and strike through.
• Befriend a huge cast of strange and loveable NPCs, each with their own quests and storylines.

This one’s out sometime this year. It’s from Oisol and Scumhead, who did Franzen.