5 reviews
The Dark Queen of Mortholme
You are the Dark Queen—the most powerful being of your entire universe. Your lair is breached by an aspiring hero—a pitiful thing, easily crushed. Except they keep coming back. A 20 minute anti-game about an unconventional relationship and the capacity for change.
Details
- Released
- December 5, 2024
- Developer
- Mosu
- Genres
- Role-playing (RPG) · Indie
- Publisher
- Monster Theater
- Platforms
- PC
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The Dark Queen of Mortholme Reviews
Professional reviews from gaming critics
If you are reading this, I am going to assume you play games in some capacity. And if that is the case, you have probably experienced a familiar kind of dread: dying to the same boss again and again. We have all been there—spending hours grinding for better gear, memorizing attack patterns, and hoping that this time will finally be the one we win. All of that effort just to chip away at the enemy that refuses to fall.
Developer Mosu describes The Dark Queen of Mortholme as an anti-game more than an actual game, and with the experience lasting approximately 20 minutes you’d have to agree. In The Dark Queen of Mortholme you are are the titular character, the final boss of a game confined to your throne room, but your peace is threatened when the hero of the game appears to end your reign.
The Dark Queen of Mortholme is a game unlike any other I’ve played. It has a great story and a loop system that kept me coming back until I got to the end.
Sounds good, right? And I love it, honestly. It made me feel like fighting. But god, if anything could convince you that, really, there are no new stories, then what better than a game that presents itself as subversion, and ends up in exactly the same place as everything else.
This story is more interesting than just playing the bad gal. The hero seems to understand that they are in a game, or at least some kind of loop. They know they are destined to win. The Dark Queen must learn this, and whether she accepts her fate is up to you. Her foe is questing on the hero’s journey offscreen, like some classical Greek demigod, assured of their victory. But the locus of character development returns to the throne room when I realise the Dark Queen is the one who must cha...