Mortal Shell's beta had over 350,000 players

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And less than half that number of cat strokes?

(Image credit: Cold Symmetry)

Mortal Shell is a forthcoming Souls-like from Cold Symmetry, which opened its beta to the public due to popular demand. That beta is now over and the developers have shared some of the numbers, which is why we know that over five million people watched it being streamed on Twitch and YouTube, over 350,000 people played it, and the merchant's cat was stroked over 150,000 times.

James played through the couple of areas available in Mortal Shell's beta, and found a game that lived up to some of the best and worst of the genre, with excellent enemy designs but also a lot of repetition: "I clapped the first time a crypt guardian ripped two swords out of their torso to fight me, and louder when they cut their own head off and threw it at me before exploding in a cloud of toxic gas. Going down like that was rad, and I knew I didn't have a long trek back. But when I died for the fifth time to a crowd of ghouls and a guardian in the very next room, I started losing steam."

In the end he still came away "pretty damn excited" for the final, more polished game, which we're expecting later this year. You can read his full impressions and see 25 minutes of gameplay here.

Jody Macgregor
Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.