Mortol

Mortol has a lot of interesting things about it’s backstory, so bear with me. We’ll start with the concept.

Benedikt Chun came up with the original concept of this game, but is notably absent in its credits, except for graphics. There are few hints as to why. Mortol 2’s description, and a hidden code that changes the way the game plays, explains that Chun’s original vision for the game was that you had to sacrifice your characters to continue, which the game still has, but you couldn’t gain back lives. I imagine the others played the prototype, or even talked him out of it really early, cause that shit is pretty rough and unfun (as you can tell from the code), and he kind of sat out development because of it.

The credits also show something else important. We’ve got another new worker at LX Systems! The first person other than Chun, Smolski, or Thorson who was brought on for actual game development reasons. Credited for graphics and level design, he’d go on to do basically every single possible job position at the company in his long, long tenure there. He is the protagonist of our story, in fact. His name is Gregory Milk.

Gregory Milk’s most important contribution to our story is that he literally made UFO 50. In the contexts of the world, he made the program UFO 50, which was found years later by Mossmouth, and ported to PCs. His hands are all up in it, and while I WANT to call him a hero, he’s also an unreliable narrator. I’ll talk about that much, much later. But suffice to say, Milkdud is my man, and in my opinion a force of good in the company.

Mortol

Anyways, his first game he ever worked on, what was it?

An ancient evil has re-awakened and is laying waste to your country. How many men must lay down their lives to save Mortolia?

Mortol is a platformer. Kind of. One of the more traditional videogames in the company’s early catalogue, it of course has a weird twist that takes it in a different direction, the one that Chun original came up with. What if you had a game where, in order to progress further, you had to literally sacrifice people to get there? At the start, you have 20 men, and they each have three actions they can do, alongside running and jumping. Depending on what direction you press the D-pad as you press A, your character with either 1) Explode 2) Turn into a block or 3) fly directly forward and imbed your skull into any wall in front of you.

As you platform around, you’ll run into obstacles. Blocks you gotta blow up, enemies you gotta platform around, walls you gotta make a ladder of men with their skulls in the wall to proceed. Y’know, normal stuff. If you solve puzzles in the levels, like using a ritual explosion in juuust the right way, you can set up for picking up some of the lives that are scattered around each level. As your men give their lives for Mortolia, more will parachute out of the ship, which moves along as you make progress.

Mortol

This game is certainly fun, and it’s pretty rewarding to retry a level and try to get through with as few deaths as you can. It’s like a puzzle, trying to figure out how to get all the life pickups, and get around obstacles with the fewest deaths. As I first played it I was a bity frustrated by the package, but after I beat it and went back to re-learn every stage and improve them, it got more and more fun. It was never BAD, but it did grow on me a little bit.

The music is also really nice, but unfortunately the last two levels completely remove the music. I guess for ambiance and vibes, but I’d prefer the music.

8/10

It’s worth noting that a lot of people REALLY like Mortol, so I’m a bit worried that people will be upset at my score. Remember that an 8/10 is still very good, people lol