You can pet the cat in the Mortal Shell beta, which is now online

The ostensibly Soulsy Mortal Shell beta is now playable on the Epic Games Store, and yes, you can pet the cat in Mortal Shell.

The open beta announcement was made by developers Cold Symmetry via the official Mortal Shell Twitter page, which you can check out below.

"We have some amazing news," the post reads. "The Mortal Shell PC Beta is now open for everyone."

"We expected demand but nothing like this," it continues. "We really didn’t want so many people to feel left out. We're delighted to open the beta for everyone on PC, starting now." Until this point, keys had been randomly distributed to people looking to play the game. Due to increased demand, though, the devs decided to completely open the beta.

You can play the Mortal Shell beta on the Epic Games Store now. Also, most importantly, it has been confirmed that you can pet the cat in Mortal Shell. You can also pet the cat in Cyberpunk 2077, and you can pet the fox in Ghost of Tsushima. It is becoming increasingly important to have pettable animals in games.

If you haven't been keeping up with Mortal Shell, be sure to check out our impressions after going hands-on with it. We concluded that it's the right kind of Soulslike, and that "the demo hits all the right notes ... Mortal Shell is going to be among the best of the subgenre, and one for Souls fans to watch."

You can check out the official Mortal Shell trailer here, and watch some gameplay from our hands-on session in the video embedded below. If you're an avid Souls fan and have decided you'd like to take it for a spin yourself, head on over to the Mortal Shell beta page on the Epic Games Store and give it a whirl.