Mortal Shell has a fun little feature that lets you pick up lutes in the game and bang out some music. There are two lutes you’ll find in Mortal Shell, the Simple Lute and the Impervious Lute, and both are playable.
I’ve already covered all the details of the Simple Lute in a previous article, so I won’t repeat that here. Besides, the Impervious Lute is where the fun really begins. The Impervious Lute looks cooler than the Simple Lute, and it has a better song catalogue as well.
If you want to know where to find the Impervious Lute, I’ve posted a guide on Lightgun Galaxy (with an included video).
In my own head-canon, your character would max out Familiarity with the Simple Lute first, so by the time you start playing the Impervious Lute, you’ll be ready to knock out some real bangers. (You don’t have to play the lutes in this order, but I feel like the game wants you to.)
Like the Simple Lute, there are ten steps in the learning process, as in you’ll have to play it ten times to max out your Familiarity with it. Unlike the Simple Lute, however, the Impervious lute has a fresh song for every step along the way (with the exception of the final step — steps nine and ten are the same song).
Once you max out your Familiarity with the Impervious Lute, you’ll unlock the flavor text below:
Impervious Lute
Lute is life.
It must have taken a while to have gotten this good.
“An unbreakable lute.”
“The Arch Engineer had this instrument commissioned because he kept breaking his strings. Unbeknownst to him, the entire instrument was crafted from obsidianite and is completely unbreakable.”
So what does the Impervious Lute do besides looking and sounding cool? Like the Simple Lute, it lets you aggro enemies from a distance. That’s really all there is to it. Still, it’s impressive how much work the small team at Cold Symmetry put into this simple feature.
There are some great songs in the Impervious Lute’s repertoire (including the Brigand Life/end credits song). Here’s a video of all ten songs on the Impervious Lute in Mortal Shell.