Children of Morta

Authors: Ben <benk@tilde.team>

Dated: 2020-11-24

Lately I got into the game Children of Morta which I puchased at a discount so I could play it together with my wife. The game runs on Linux and support local co-op, which is the sort of thing that works for us.

I was rather surprised to see that the game's art features ancient writing and magical symbols that resemble Middle Persian and/or Avestan (also in some places Old Persian, which uses cuneiform writing). Also the game's story and themes seem to reflect some elements of Iranian myth and legends, so I was trying to figure out what was going on here when I hit on the fact that the game's developer, Dead Mage, is Iranian. Well, that solves the mystery. They developed the game together with 11 bit, a Polish studio. Very nice!

Honestly the game is quite good as a work of art and is very fun as well. We had a good time playing it so far, and it seems like it may be her first Rogue-like game. After dying and restarting for like the 20th time, she was like, "This game is so interesting!" lol.

I continue to impressed by how well games are supporting Linux these days, even with gamepad support. I thought controller input would be a pain in the ass to configure, but so far I've played several games with my generic Chinese gamepads and haven't had to configure anything; everything is automatic. Even the force-feedback works, and I didn't even know they had that when I bought them. (Perhaps not the best force-feedback, but I'll take it.)