Moonscars
Moonscars is
Unworthy but done by 3 people instead of one: The game reminded me a lot of
Unworthy, but everything is done a little better, with a bigger scope and improved result. It's a 2D soulsvania with heavy emphasis on combat a high difficulty.
The artstyle is amazing, using pixel art in a way that makes it look like a painting, using dull colors to provide a somber atmosphere with very well used highlights of red here and there in important elements. It meshes incredibly well with gameplay, using blue and red FX for the enemy tells so it's always easy to know what's happening in the middle of a brawl with several enemies. The animations and composition are SUPERB, I mean just look at this:
Music plays a secondary role by providing an ambient layer and coming to the front in boss fights. There are some neat tricks like the music dying rising in volume as you approach the peak of the castle, but overall it's just there in a subtle way.
Combat is amazing: Very deliberate and relying a lot on parries. I guess you could do without them, but I found it much harder to beat, or just survive to, certain enemies by dashing. You can attack, use a special weapon, a charged attack, magic, dash, block, parry, jump and air dash. The whole combat is balanced so all these elements require the others: Attacking refills your special meter, which you can use for magic or to heal. The special weapons are very slow to come out, so you can cancel the start up with a dash and have the attack come out directly after the dash (the game makes a special point of this). Combat uses this moveset to the fullest with the enemy design: Some require magic to make them vulnerable to your attacks, others use attacks that can't be blocked nor parried, other use ranged attacks or fly to stay out of your weapons' range.. .And the level design adds the missing piece, with environmental hazards on walls, ceilings and floors that deal massive damage, but that you can use to your favour if you manage to position the enemies in the right place, which is achieved by a combination of dashing, parries and specially the charged attack, that is amazing to push enemies into a spiked wall and impale them. There will be times where you will do some cool stuff, like using a wall to jump over a charging enemy, air dashing to kill a flying one and then landing with a stomp attack to kill another, just recovering on time to parry the charging enemy again, or dash through it so that it crashes into a spiked wall. Unfortunately, the enemy variety is a bit lacking: It won't be too long until you've seen all enemy types and after that the game will just reuse them time and time again. Even the simplest enemies in the starting areas stay relevant and can kill you if you mess up. The parry windows are expertly tuned, being easy to consistently land parries on all enemies once you learn their timings, but being very easy to miss if you screw your concentration, which the game tries to cause by mixing different enemy types constantly. Still, enemy variety remains a weak point, I think each biome should have introduced a couple of new enemy types to keep things fresh and keep o expanding the combat posibbilities.
There are only a handful of bosses and I found most of them somewhat easy thanks to how easy you can refill your magic meter and heal in the middle of the fight. When you die repeatedly, "moonhunger" will be afflicted and all enemies will become much harder. I think I spent most of the game in this state (you can lift it at save points) and I can only remember one late-game boss which gave me so much trouble that I had to lift moonhunger to beat it, it was a huge difficulty spike in an already hard game.
Level design is pure souls, with a reduced number of savepoints reused with shortcuts. The game causes a lot of dread by forcing you to keep going further and further before unlocking a new shortcut, constantly causing a lot of tension and the corresponding relief when you finally unlock a shortcut. There are often small shortcuts you can unlock along the way, or special combat encounters you only need to clear once, so even if you die before reaching a savepoint you're always making progress. There are no Estus Flasks here, you rely on your magic meter to heal, so it's really easy to recover from a dire situation and find yourself with full HP and magic, which always encourages you to keep pushing forward. A weak spot is how similar all biomes are: The same enemy cast is used in all of them and the areas do very little to differentiate form each other. There is one area that uses big cog wheels to move around as a main mechanic, making you switch their direction to unlock the way forward, but apart of that the rest of the areas fall into a blur as they're mostly a castle-like setting with the same enemies over and over. Even in the "cog level" the cogs are sparse and one-off things and the moment-to-moment gameplay remains the same as in the other levels. It doesn't help either that your moveset remains unchanged for most of the game: You can unlock new magic spells and special weapons, but they're always available since the beginning of the game. The only real upgrades to your basic moveset (air dash and super dash) come either very early or very late in the game, and the special dash is very situational and can't be used properly in combat encounters. I think it should have taken a page from
Unworthy, with how it introduced a new exclusive level mechanic, player weapon and related enemies in every area.
There is a bit of clunkyness in the normal movement, specially because there is a bit of cooldown after every dash by design so you can't spam dashes in combat (that's why parrying is a better option, trying to dash through everything will get you killed most times). There are also some glitches specially when going through moving platforms, or when trying to climb some walls. Also, you can climb to some platforms that look waaaay out of reach by pressing up and there is no coyote time at all. In fact, the platform borders end sooner than you expect, so it's very easy to fall down when you're trying to jump form the border of a platform, something which is required some times through the game. The special dash takes some time to come out, a bit to react to a jump input and a lot to stop, so it's a bit unwieldy and completely useless in combat. At least it's an option to quickly backtrack through empty horizontal corridors, which is something I think all Metroidvanias MUST provide: It's really frustrating to just sit down and watch your character slowly walking through the same corridor for the 10th time. At times, the game reminded me of
Dead Cells and I was repeating a lot of the same inputs: Downward stomps to fall through holes quickly, followed by dashes and air dashes to traverse horizontally...but it reminded me of
Dead Cells because in that game movement is incredibly fluid, but in
Moonscars there's this constant clunkyness which makes it a bit rough.
Also, there were a couple of instances where the fps went down HARD. It's not something usual and I'd say it was restricted to a couple specific encounters, but there was one which caused the worst dips I've ever seen, and I've been gaming since before the NES era, when game-slowdown was sometimes a mechanic you used when there were too many bullets on screen for example. In one encounter, the game froze for a full second repeatedly: It was the first time I've really felt like I was watching a slideshow. I had to cheese that encounter badly to be able to get through, as it seemed to be caused by having several of one enemy type on screen at the same time. It's a bit weird as I think this same enemy combination is also present in other parts of the game without showing any problems at all, so there must be something else. Still, just some isolated episodes so nothing too bad.
The story is cryptic like in all soul-likes, using the trope of the "amnesiac" protagonist, but in this case it's easy to understand the better part of it (you will probably still need a wiki to get all the details, though). There are a couple of VERY cool twists in the story, this is probably one of the souls-like stories I've enjoyed the most. The game has some side quests that, in the style of souls, are very obtuse and can lock you out of some for a playthrough or force to chose between 2. I've never liked this staple of the Souls games, I prefer if I can just go back and complete everything I miss in a single playthrough, rather than having to fully replay the game again to complete a missable sidequest....sometimes you even end up missing stuff that you don't even know is there, or you forget to do a step in a quest and, bad luck, you need to start a new game from the start. In any way, the story as a whole was well told and it's a rare instance where a souls-game gets a good balance between keeping the mistery and giving you enough information to follow along the story. This balance is what allows the game to pull these couple of plot-twists which, again, were very cool.
At the same time, some of the basic mechanics are incredibly convoluted: Well, they're not too complex once you understand them, but the game does everything on it's hand to make them much harder to get with the way it presents them. Clay rites, moonhunger, pendants, items, special weapons and their buffs, spite buffs...there are a lot of original mechanics that could've been presented in a much better way to grasp. This is the part of souls-likes that I dislike, how game design is often impacted negatively because being cryptic and mysterious and putting the lore before everything is a priority for these types of games. You will get them as you play, or ignore them for most of the game like I did and by the time you want to get into them they may have run out of real usefulness.
Overall, I enjoyed the game A LOT. I was tempted to start a new playthrough right away, but in the end it was missing some little details for me to jump the gun and I already have a couple of games in my list. Highly recommended if you like challenging games with great artstyle and hard combat.
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