Inch game.
Moonscars, a side-scrolling action game similar to Black Mermaid’s Souls, is one of the most difficult games I’ve encountered during my long tenure at this humble website. Extremely difficult Moonscars requires perfection to progress. This is a game of contradictions: a somewhat bland and beautiful game, impressive combat that feels limiting, a system that not only encourages engagement but punishes participation in them. Moonscars is aimed at a subset of combat platform fans Not my favorite because it feels like it was created, but others might accept it.
Moonscars tells the story of Gray Irma, a warrior woman looking for a mysterious sculptor. The story can be difficult to parse at times, but Irma will slowly unravel the story as she finds the various NPCs who tell her story. It’s also not the game’s most pressing problem.
Instead, it’s survival.
The world of Moonscars is a haunting hellscape of blacks and grays with orange and red contrasts. The environments, and the variety of enemies that populate them, are both captivating to watch and confusing given the understated palette and ambiguous character designs. It’s understandable given her artificial nature, but I found myself longing for a stronger character design. presents a particular challenge. You can compare it to the challenging combat of Hollow Knight. Even the smallest enemies can really screw you up if you’re not careful.
Thankfully, Irma has some tricks. In addition to her large broadsword, Irma has invincible dashes, spells, parries, and the ability to auto-heal. Combat can get tough quickly, especially when facing multiple enemies at once, and parrying is key to survival. attack timing is different. Any attack that leads to a red flash can be parried, but once the flash goes off you have to wait for the right time to parry.
Thankfully, successful parries auto-hit, often pushing the opponent backwards. New enemy types appear on a regular basis, so you can always learn on the go. When Irma defeats a monster, she gains “Ichor,” which is Moonscars’ way of saying “MP.” Irma consumes MP for magic attacks and automatic recovery. Enemies drop “Bone Powder”. This is Moonscars’ way of saying “experience points”, which can also be found in the environment. Bone powder is used to purchase certain items in the workshop (home base) area and to learn new magical attacks (“Witchery”).
But Moonscars is similar to Souls, and all that is implied. Death is frequent, dropping everything where it fell, but Irma will revive at the last save point hit. In many cases, the long trek back to Lost Bone’s powder comes with the risk of dying along the way and losing everything he’s gained. Death probably comes with a more detrimental price. Makes the game harder.
At any time, you can satisfy the Moon with a very rare pick-up, ‘Glands’, and lower the difficulty from ‘FFS’ to ‘Almost Manageable’. Fewer hits are required to kill an enemy, and it doesn’t hurt Irma as much. However, it also drops less bonemeal. When the sculptor opens the window, he closes the door. However, death resets the moon’s temperament, and since glands are so rare (and can be used for other purposes), filling the moon is rarely a good idea. It might come in handy in boss fights, but if you’re defeated by a boss, the sacrifice is wasted.
This is the first big problem I have with Moonscars. It is always recommended to lower the difficulty if necessary, but since Glands is a rare commodity and death (which is unavoidable) resets the difficulty to “this looks cruel”, Not really.
Every time Gray Irma stumbles upon a save point, she must travel to an area where mortal bodies are held, a workshop, to activate it, where she can talk to NPCs and buy or sell items. However, this is my second big issue with Moonscars. Activating the savepoint clones Irma’s enemies (for whatever reason) and attacks them as soon as Irma returns to the world.
These fights are always absolute hell. Clone Her Irma Gray has access to all of Her Irma’s attacks and recovery abilities, and Moon is probably not satiated, which makes her very difficult to defeat. She hits much harder than Gray Yilma, moving forward during her attacks, often crossing Gray Yilma’s character her sprite and past the parry direction, but still doing damage on the other side, so she attacks are very difficult to parry. Magical attacks are only effective if Clone Her Irma does not evade. You can ignore Clone Her Irma, but Gray will lose her Irma’s secondary weapon because Clone Her Irma stole it for some reason when her Irma went through the mirror. increase.
It’s a shame, because secondary weapons are often very useful in combat. Not only are they more powerful than Irma’s default broadsword, they all have different debuff effects.
Punishing a player just for creating a checkpoint is unacceptable.
Another combat ability I’d like to mention is Spite. After defeating too many monsters in a row, you are given the option to select the “Spite” reward. This enhances Irma in some way, such as reducing MP cost, increasing healing ability, or changing her critical hits. She can have up to 5 of her Spite buffs at once, which is a huge advantage in combat. However, as with using mirrors, dying puts them all aside.
Irma finds various items throughout the environment, including MP and health upgrades and amulets. He can equip three at a time, with additional benefits. She also occasionally finds piles of bonemeal here and there. Learning new magic attacks is a costly proposition. Mooncars has a huge tree of skills, but the cost of learning new attacks and upgraded versions of learned attacks grows exponentially, so new magic attacks cannot be learned at a constant pace. .
We said Moonscars is an inch game, which means you’re fighting for every inch of progress. Personally, this game presented too many challenges for my enjoyment. It might be a different story if the difficulty didn’t increase with each death, or if you were able to activate checkpoints later without having to fight the clones, but do the inevitable (die, save) I don’t like being punished. Did you find Hollow Knight and Blasphemous too easy? If so, Moonscars might give you the challenge you crave. For the rest of us? Limited usefulness.
