Morsels is a… uhhh… well it’s a 2D roguelike action game, but also it’s sort of everything. The core mechanic of the game is that you’re picking up cards which represent a type of “Morsel”, which is a Weird Little Guy. They all have different basic attacks – short range projectile, long-range projectile, explosive projectile, laser beam, turning into a rock and plowing through enemies, etc – and your face buttons (or the right stick) aim what direction you’re shooting from. Each level is an arena full of other equally weird little guys who want to kill you (naturally) but it also has just endless diversions. Sometimes you’re just running around killing people, then you’re warping into Frogger, then you’re fighting a mini-boss, then you’re zooming through an auto-scroller, then you’re collecting a weird little ape guy, then you’re beating up a cheeseburger, then a boss turns into a giant block of tofu. It’s a little much.

In between levels is equally nuts, you’re not getting your standard roguelike fare of “here’s three cards pick one”, you get some sort of random encounter with one of several Large Weird Guys, some of them give you power-ups, some of them give you conditional power-ups, some of them just yoink one of your Morsel buddies, some of them shunt you off into an Atari game. No way to predict what of these you’re going to get, no way to even understand what half of them are going to be until you play them… which leads to one of my two main criticisms of this game.

Morsels is incredibly player-hostile. Mystery in games is great. Minimal explanation in games can be wonderful. I loved Blue Prince and Tunic, those games are mysterious, but this is outright player-hostile. The tutorial tells you how to shoot and dash and sorta shows you that cheese is important, but that’s it! All other mechanics in the game you just have to figure out. And like, basic stuff like “what do these morsels do?” and “can this kind of attack hurt myself?” and “what the hell are tickets for?” and “what do you mean I explode if I get too much XP?” are left for you to fumble around with and learn through failure. Even incredibly fundamental mechanics like “how do I switch between morsels?” or “what does this daisy do?” are completely unexplained. Some people – Binding of Isaac-enjoyers, perhaps – might be into this, but it’s not my jam. It’s way too chaotic and hostile for my tastes.

My other problem is that it plays like absolute hot garbage on the Switch 2. I guess this is sort of my problem for picking the “wrong” platform to play on, but it’s also an objectively serious problem. The game can’t maintain a stable framerate on Switch 2, sometimes it can’t even maintain a stable framerate on simple loading screens. It’s erratic, sometimes it’s fine, sometimes it chugs hard, sometimes it’s in benign locations like load screens, sometimes it chugs immediately upon dropping you into a level and you die immediately before you get a chance to do anything. Sometimes it chugs at obvious points when there’s a jillion sprites and effects on screen, sometimes it hitches just whenever. Oh, and it’s exactly the same performance handheld or docked. Maybe they’ll patch this, maybe they won’t, but I’ll probably never know because it’s bad enough that I’ve given up and moved on to other games. This doesn’t seem to be a problem on other platforms, but it’s a massive problem for me, so I’m complaining about it.

If you like games with this level of player hostility, maybe you’ll enjoy Morsels. If you play it on a non-Nintendo platform maybe it’ll play well enough for you to overlook the player hostility. I couldn’t, because I had to deal with both these issues. Not Recommended.