Children of Morta

Most roguelites treat their narrative as a light wrapper around the actual point of the game — the runs. Children of Morta inverts that emphasis more than almost anything else in the genre: a constant, warm narrator's voice threads through every dungeon crawl, tying each individual run back to the ongoing story of the Bergsons, a family of seven heroes fighting to hold back a spreading Corruption beneath their mountain home. Developed by Dead Mage and published by 11 bit studios, it launched on Windows on 3 September 2019, with console versions following that October and November, to a genuinely favorable critical reception — Metacritic settled at 80-82 across platforms, with GameSpot's 80/100 typical of the consensus. Seven years on, Steam agrees: Very Positive, 88.4% of 23,064 reviews.

What the game gets right, according to nearly everyone

Pull any sample of reviews for Children of Morta — positive or negative, launch week or this month — and one thing shows up almost without exception: the art. In a 100-review negative sample checked for this piece, more than a third reference the pixel art or animation directly, and essentially all of those references are unqualified praise, even inside reviews that go on to recommend against buying the game. "Beautiful pixel art, bland story," reads one; "such wasted potential, contains little to nothing except for the good art," reads another, more damning one. That's an unusual pattern worth naming directly: this is a game whose visual presentation has essentially no detractors in its own community, seven years and tens of thousands of reviews in.

The narrator device and family story draw similarly strong, if slightly more divided, praise. Several reviewers specifically credit the constant narration and the vignettes that play out at the family home between runs — quiet character moments, sibling relationships, a sense of consequence to what happens in the dungeons below — with giving the game real emotional stakes that most roguelites don't reach for. It's not universal: a meaningful minority find the same narration "tiresome" or find themselves skipping dialogue on repeat runs, which is a fair, structural tension in games that narrate every single attempt the same way a run-based genre demands you repeat often. But where it lands, reviewers describe it landing genuinely well.

Where the complaints concentrate, and how consistent they are

Set against that, the actual gameplay draws a specific, recurring complaint that shows up with striking regularity across the entire seven-year review history rather than clustering around any one patch or period: combat that starts fine and wears thin. "Repeat, repeat, repeat. Really, really, really boring," reads one blunt 2026 review. "The combat is the same for every character, same one note, same sounds over and over," reads another, from a player with over a thousand minutes logged before reaching that conclusion — again, not someone bouncing off in the first hour, but someone who gave the systems real time before deciding they didn't hold up. One particularly detailed review frames the issue structurally rather than as a vague complaint: "CoM tries to be Darkest Dungeon, Hades, Bastion and Diablo 2 all at the same time and ends up failing or missing the mark at all of them" — a fair description of a game reaching for several genre touchstones' strengths without fully landing any single one of them.

Grinding is the second recurring theme, showing up in roughly one in six negative reviews checked, usually describing late-game side content and upgrade-material farming as outlasting the story's own pacing — a common tension in roguelites that pair narrative pacing against systems built for dozens of repeat runs, and one Children of Morta doesn't fully resolve according to this portion of its audience.

Co-op is the game's most specific, least-resolved weak point

If there's one area where Children of Morta draws sharper, more technical complaints rather than matters of taste, it's co-op. Reports across the entire review window — not concentrated in any particular period — describe connection failures, difficulty poorly balanced for two players, and general instability that several reviewers explicitly contrast with a much better solo experience. "It's impossible to actually connect to each other's games," reads one; "co-op is a half-assed piece of crap if you're lucky enough to get it to work in the first place," reads another, more blunt one. This is worth flagging clearly for anyone specifically buying the game to play with a partner, since the store page markets co-op prominently and the actual review data suggests it's been the least reliable part of the package for years rather than a launch-week rough patch that smoothed out.

A smaller but specific and pointed complaint concerns the "No Secrets" completionist achievement, which one detailed late-2025 review describes as "horrifically designed" and still unfixed "after all these years." The global achievement data is consistent with that account: NoMoreSecrets sits at just 5.4% completion, a genuinely steep drop from the 85.9% earned by the game's opening achievement — steeper than the game's other high-difficulty achievements, several of which sit in the 5-8% range together, which makes it hard to say definitively whether this specific achievement is uniquely bugged or simply the hardest full-completion target in the game, but the pattern in the data doesn't contradict the reviewer's account.

Verdict

Children of Morta is a genuinely lovely piece of craft wrapped around a combat system that both critics and players have, with real consistency, found thinner than everything around it. The art is close to complaint-free across thousands of reviews spanning seven years — a rare thing for any game to achieve — and the narrator-driven family story gives the genre an emotional register few of its peers attempt. Where it comes up short, according to an unusually stable body of review evidence, is in the actual moment-to-moment fighting wearing thin past the early hours, in a grind that several reviewers say outlasts the story's own pace, and specifically in a co-op mode that's drawn technical complaints steadily since launch rather than growing more reliable with age. None of that erases what the game does well — it's still Very Positive for good reason — but it's a genre entry best approached for its presentation and story first, with combat depth and co-op reliability as the two places to keep expectations realistic.

7 out of 10. One of the best-looking, best-narrated games in its genre, let down by combat that both critics in 2019 and players today describe the same way: pleasant, but not deep enough to carry a roguelite's repetition on its own.