I visited my brother yesterday, and we played a bunch of games. One of the games was Morkredd, a co-op game. Each player has a character and you have to work together to guide a giant light orb through corridors and terrains. You must be cautious because shadows kill you.
We played for half an hour and had fun, but we were also approaching it as research because we want our next game to be a co-op game. Nowadays, anytime we play co-op games, we pay attention to what works or what doesn’t, what makes a co-op game fun, what makes us keep playing.
Morkredd has some problems, like any game. For example, there’s really only minimal story. I know some people would consider it a plus, but I like games that have some plot, not just a string of puzzles to solve. If Morkredd was a single player game, I wouldn’t want to play it, but co-op makes everything more amusing. I remember that when I played Celeste, I was dying too often — every few seconds — and so I got fed up quickly and never went back to the game. But in a co-op game you have much more patience for dying, particularly if it’s dying in an absurd way. In Morkredd, you die when you step into shadows, even each other’s shadows. And we were constantly walking into each other shadows. It was actually ridiculous how often we were dying because we kept forgetting. However, we didn’t tire of it, we just kept trying again and again.
I checked Morkredd stats and unfortunately it looks like the game didn’t sell well. Actually, it sold poorly, and it’s sad because the game definitely has potential. It was released 8 months ago but has just 20 reviews on Steam. You can roughly estimate how many copies a game has sold by multiplying the number of reviews by 55. It won’t work for some games, but it works for most, as a general estimate. If you multiply 20 by 55, you get 1100. That means Morkredd sold around 1100 copies. That’s too bad. I don’t know how long the game was in development but it looks polished and is about 3 hours long. It’s devastating when you work on something for months, or maybe years, and then it gets completely ignored. I hope the studio survives this and makes more co-op games.
The best puzzle so far was when we had to row a boat, each of us controlling one oar. If you want to play Morkredd, make sure to play with a friend.
