Children of Morta requires too much grinding, making progression feel like a chore. The short duration of individual dungeon runs prevent any real sense of satisfaction. The story clips are unskippable and boring.

Writing an early review for this game feels a little strange. On one hand, I love a lot of the ideas they have. These types of games are great, and the flavor they've added to it is wonderful.
But at the same time the execution is lacking :/

Optimisation feels bad. Sometimes it gives me a whole lot of frames, while other times (in the same room, with no changes to the environment) it gives me half as many. It often looks like the frames come in bursts, so even though 40fps is not bad, it looks worse cause there's stutters in them. (running this on an NVIDIA GPU that's dealt with bigger games just fine).

Sometimes enemy archers shoot through walls (that I just saw my arrows on the same exact trajectory -to hit that enemy- bounce off of).

There's several categories of items you can pick up, but it's a challenge to keep track of what it means for something to be 'category a item', especially because clicking the 'tooltips' button only mentions "this is category a item' without actually telling you what that means, so now I need to look that up somewhere.

This one run I picked the wrong character, so I immediately went back to the house to repick that, which prompted another cutscene, cause the game assumed I did an entire new run, which meant I'd seen like 3 cutscenes in a row, while only having played two small dungeons.

Even early on in the story as I am at this point there were a couple things of dialogue that felt kinda weird, about the mother's relationship to the illness of a child in the story. Having gone through something similar with my mom, and having talked about that extensively with her; the framing was weird and uncomfortable.

I'm aware this genre of game requires you 'die' a lot, and redo dungeons before you actually finish them. But especially at the start there's a couple times it feels like they're just waiting for you to die so they can progress the story, which makes dying feel forced. "We made it so you can't win this level so you die and we can show you this cutscene" type of thing. I don't mind doing something multiple times. But it being a premeditated choice to have me die in order to progress the story is not something I as a player want to be made aware of.

I'm not sure why, but the gameplay gave me the impression the game doesn't know what pace it wants to work at. It's like it wants to fit the genre, but also wants to adhere to a style that won't allow for the same types of movement or pacing. And it keeps me from enjoying it the way it deserves to be.

I know most of these are minor things, and by all means, this game could very well be something for you. There is a lot to love. But all of it added up made it so that for me, personally, I quickly became uninterested in playing on.

Good game.