“Where do I…? I mean… What do I do here?”
“Not sure. We killed everything. There’s that guy, but he just keeps repeating the same nonsense.”
“Maybe we need to have the thingy. Remember, in the first run, we picked up that statue or orb or whatever.”
“I don’t remember.”
“Come to think of it, neither do I.”
Gaming is at its core a melancholic endeavour. Most of the games you play are going to be adequate, you finish them, you are satisfied for a while, and then you forget about them. (Unless you are writing game reviews as a hobby.) OK, so that’s my avatar, so we go in the dungeons, ye, oh, I picked up a nice weapon, now I do more damage, damn, we lost the level, now I’m sad, haha, we finished the game, now I’m happy. What was it called again?
However, every now and again, you pick up a game, that has something special. Enhanced storytelling, mysteries, secrets, something that really pulls you in. I’m talking about Eldritch Horror promising a story about finding a mysterious Ancient One, but in reality, you go to places and roll dice. This is Gloomhaven with the supposedly epic and deep story where the villain is kinda stupid and laughable and easy. This is Divinity Original Sin you just fall in love with because it is so deep when in reality it’s maybe simply just the best gameplay music ever. These hooks are almost always fake. But that’s fine. Fake is fine. That’s where the gamer comes in, with their imagination, and the collective storytelling strength of the group. Together, we can fill these holes gaping between gameplay and experience, and create something truly unique and memorable and epic.
And then very, very rarely, every few years, comes a game like Moon Hunters. A game that generously promises everything. That misty glimpse of innocence lost, of childhood dreams long gone, of something special. Suddenly, everything seems mysterious again. Maybe this will be the game that really, really does it? A game that finally gives you that intangible, indescribable high that you keep chasing?
The stakes for games like this are incredibly high, at least as far as I’m concerned. I’m far less forgiving, due to the constant buggering feeling of that imagined ideal state of the game, the “could have been”. Mind you, this promise that I feel like I was given by the game is incredibly one-sided, and mostly in my own head.
So, after this existential groundwork, let’s see if Moon Hunters delivers on the unpromised promise!
The game starts with an atmospheric intro, apparently, the moon has disappeared from the world, and your mission is to find it. Off you go. You pick a character from four different classes, with varying spells and attacks, and you have X days to find the moon. There is a world map with connected locations, you travel to these locations, and speak to NPCs and fight the monsters. During the night, you set up camp somewhere, and go on off-screen mini-missions like hunting or stargazing or cooking.
You do that for a couple of days, and you will probably fail in finding the moon. You watch a cutscene about how your actions changed the world, what your legacy is, how you will be remembered. You even get your own constellation in the main hub that is essentially the main menu of the game.
And then pick a new character and go again.
Thanks to your previous plays, the world is supposed to be changing, the only thing we noticed is that you carry over the food you discovered while cooking in the camp.
The game is very simple, there is no inventory, no weapons, the only thing you can upgrade is your three starting skills. You also have stat points like endurance and fate and stuff, they increase your hit points, mana, damage, etc.
The Good
As you could probably tell from the intro, saying that the game starts out great would be a serious understatement. We were as intrigued and hooked as ever. A completely unique world-building exercise, procedurally generated story-telling, where you are free to discover a land with unknown rules and history, where your actions will shape the future and live as legends? Yes. Yes, please.
The game has a quite interesting system where you get traits like “patient” or “vengeful” based on your actions, and then certain random elements depend on the personality you thus created.
Artwork is fine, pixel art style works very well with the setting. Music is a bit of a hit and miss, in the beginning, I found it great, but occasionally it becomes super annoying how the same two-second tune is repeated for hours.
The Bad
First, we thought that the worst area of the game is the combat, boring and repetitive, there is no strategy whatsoever. You know how a couple of great games do all sorts of tricks to make the instance when you hit an enemy really impactful with tiny sound effects and maybe frame rate changes and physics engine twinkling and controller vibration? Moon Hunters is the opposite of that, it feels very much like a minimal 2D engine detecting collisions and statically decreasing health until the square with the enemy sprite is dead. Levels are incredibly boring as well, with some terrible gameplay decisions.
However, as we continued playing, we realized that the combat is the least of the issues. Everything is charming the first time, ambient music and mysterious setting, sure, it would be a chore to make this not charming, but then you do it over and over again, and it becomes frustrating.
One example: during the night, you are at the camp, and you can decide what to do, you can keep watch, have a rest, cook something, stargaze, hunt, and they all increase different attributes, plus random events can happen where you choose your reaction. How wonderful, right, this is unique and fresh and everything can happen? It is wonderful for the first three nights. That is how long it takes for two players to try everything out. And then it becomes hollow. Or take the villages, there are like 20 people there, you click on them, and none of them actually says anything important. Whenever you go in a building, it is always cool and damp, as the text dutifully explains, and you do have to watch the text and press Enter every single time and you just want your wonderful adventure with the villagers to end as soon as possible so you can finally go out and start frantically clicking on ugly monsters. At least the monsters move!
After five days, there is a mandatory boss fight. The boss is very easy to beat, but it takes like ten minutes to do that. So on our first playthrough, we beat it, then we wanted to see what happens if we don’t (nothing good, that was not the secret way to progress, as in, losing against an easy boss on purpose), and then on the third, we made a promise that if we don’t make any meaningful progress towards finding that damned moon, we stop playing the game. And here we are.
The random traits like patient or brave or proud are funny at first but there is not much strategy. You either get them randomly or you don’t, and then you can either use them on another random event or you can’t.
Overall, the whole game seems like a classic mystery box setup. Intriguing at first sight, but there is not much actual content, there is no solution, and the mystery was created by your brain to begin with. It’s a choose your own adventure game where all the paths lead to something that’s boring and pointless.
The Co-Op
There is not much co-op in the game. You play on the same screen but you are basically on your own.
The Recommendation
Ehh, it’s difficult. Even now, writing this review, a few weeks after we played with the game, I’m listening to the soundtrack to refresh my memories, and I keep thinking: was it really that bad? It can’t possibly be. This is enchanting music if I ever heard one, looking at gameplay footage, it seems like stuff is happening…
But no. You know what? It was bad. It was a bad, empty experience, and the high hopes made it even worse. Not recommended.
Do play Full Mojo Rampage for funnier combat and more satisfying player powers, even though that game is not great either.
If you want a game that matches the ambient melancholic atmosphere, but it’s actually good… I’m not sure. Can’t recommend anything on that front, sadly. Not sure if such a game exists. But I will keep looking.
Info
| Release Year | 2016 |
| Genre | ARPG, RPG |
| Difficulty | Easy |
| Number of Players | 1 to 4 |
| Length | 1 hour for a run |
Rating
| Overall | Bad |
| Story | Bad |
| Co-Operation | Terrible |