everyone is still preparing another Soul-like? yeah, we thought the same. However, the Black Mermaid’s Moonscars have made headlines since they were first announced due to their highly detailed pixel art style. It’s a deliciously dark 2D slasher with Metroidvania elements that reminds me a bit of Motion Twin’s dazzling Dead Cells, albeit with extremely harsh environments that house meticulously animated combat . But how does this lovely murder actually go?
Well, it’s a bit of a dodgy all told, a charming marriage of good presentation and punchy combat. We’re putting the brakes on scoring the way we wanted it to, so let’s hope the Black Mermaid can patch this issue as soon as possible. Because, if you can fix those issues, you’re looking at a very sleek and stylish action game that looks great and is packed with very clever gameplay wrinkles. That bloody sleeve.
In Moonscars, you assume the role of the Clayborne warrior Gray Irma. Gray Irma is a seemingly unstoppable force of nature on a very violent mission to find a mysterious figure known only as the Sculptor. A band of warrior comrades. The action here is set in a dark world where flesh and clay intertwine, giving its inhabitants the power to form and move bodies, possess enemies, and continually resurrect from the dead. This is useful when creating Soulslike.
Yes, let’s be honest, the story here is almost complete bobbin. We weren’t entirely sure what half of the cryptic dialogue between characters meant as we blazed a gruesome path through the campaign, but it packs some interesting ideas in there. It’s no worse than the enigmatic Gaff that is Dark Souls itself, and the whole thing does a perfectly useful job in providing a grim canvas suitable for painting a picture that’s actually quite bloody.
As with other games in this now overabundant genre, after you die, you are revived in a never-ending cycle of death, resting in a bonfire (or mirror) to level up or fast travel elsewhere. , hang out. Around the game’s Nexus-style Mold Workshop hub area. When you die, you lose all the souls (bone powder) you currently collect from enemies. This means that to retrieve them, you have to return to where you last died, and the different areas you traverse lend themselves to a maze-like maze. Full of twists and turns, shortcuts and secrets before facing a nail-biting boss that will test your combat skills and patience to the absolute limit. So all soul-like boxes ticked.
However, if you find yourself beginning to doze off reading the details of these rather well-worn gameplay mechanics, Moonscars adds a lot of excitement to the mix with a few new additions, so you’ll want to shake things up a bit. You might think Brilliantly terrifying combat that looks and feels great thanks to gameplay and the most detailed pixel art you’ve ever seen. Seriously, there’s amazing detail in every little move and action here, as Gray Irma breathes warm breath into the cold night air, stomping through different levels, chopping and hacking through a menagerie of weird and wonderful ghouls. As a result, it’s extremely satisfying to tackle the kind of bloody combat that’s very hard to stop coming back for one more shot.
As you frantically run through enemy-infested areas, the game’s wonderfully bleak, orchestral soundtrack whisks you through the darkness. Every time he kills an enemy, his Spite gauge fills up. Filling the gauge to the top opens a menu where he can choose from three randomly selected Spite-based boons. You may want him to regenerate health 15% faster, or you may want to increase his attack power. bite Or slightly reduce the cost of using magic. These boons are stackable, and you can keep stacking them until you perish and lose more. It’s a system that, once again, reminds me a bit of Dead Cells (this isn’t a roguelike), and a lot more about how you flesh out your character’s build each time you try to reach the next mirror her save. It gives you agency. Point battles and boss battles.
Core combat differs from the norm in other ways as well. No Estus flasks here. Instead, there’s an Ichor gauge above the health bar that refills as you deal damage, and you can hold down the left shoulder button to drain it and refill your lives again when needed. What stands out is the fact that magical attacks also use his Ichor. So either restore health or use giant spikes, explosive ground pounds, chain boulders, magic bursts, projectile spikes, and much more. These magic attacks he can equip two at a time, each with their own benefits depending on the type of battle he’s confusing.
Another nice thing is the lack of stamina bars. This makes combat very fast-paced, allowing you to dash, parry, and devour beasts. This is what you really need to do if you want to keep that his Ichor gauge. Refillable and ready to use. It’s all pretty great, complemented by surprisingly decent platforming, excellent level design throughout the board, and a nice selection of well-placed enemies to make each new area a gauntlet as tough and interesting as it gets. It has been.
Moonscars’ unlockable skill tree is also pretty vast, giving you plenty of opportunities to build very different versions of Gray Yirma in later playthroughs. Dodge attacks, increase attack power, and increase resistance to projectiles. You can equip three of these amulets at once, so there’s still plenty of opportunity here to play around with your build and adjust your approach to the challenges you’re currently trying to overcome.
In addition to all this, Gray Irma also has a selection of special weapons that can be deployed with the “X” button. With giant slash wheels, spears, hammers, and more, each of these offers different boons and perks. She can only possess one special weapon at a time, and cannot hold it. Each time you unlock a new mirror, return to the hub area of the game. There, the NPC she meets will chat a little and sell trinkets. Fight your own doppelganger who will use all of your weapons, tricks and skills to try and defeat you. After defeating her, you can choose a new special weapon. All of these automatically level up as you progress through the game. It’s a very cool but slightly controversial mechanic and probably not something we personally cared about, but these doppelganger showdowns can certainly be difficult, and doing it so often makes it uncomfortable Some people become
Admittedly, the game’s toughness is ultimately its biggest drawback. To punish the already tough fights a bit more, the developers added a mechanic that changes the state of the world each time you die. This means that the enemy becomes very noticeably stronger, the problem with this is that he has to pay 1 for Ichor Gland every time he reverses the blood moon and resets the world to normal. every time you die There are sections of the game, in particular he had one very tough boss fight and was struggling to find more Ichor Glands. Stick without launching the controller into the air.
We eventually got over this hump and the game settled into a better rhythm after that, but this spike in difficulty was a pain point and could have been addressed with a little tweaking. With no degree mode or accessibility tweaks available, you’ll have to die, so to speak, to see this through to the end.
However, those difficulty issues aside, Moonscars overall offers atmospheric locations, excellent enemy designs, and some terrifying boss battles (a bloody duel with a floating haunted baby, someone ?), and combat-filled, ultra-stylish and challenging action. Exquisite animation with a punch. It’s a tough old-fashioned game that you’ll want to play through just to see what horrors await you next. It also improves noticeably as you progress, and the enemy variety and level design is much more as you progress and start linking areas together to get a better sense of how carefully everything is connected and built. It will be satisfying.
And then we arrive at the score. Here, we would have given Moonscars a more generous number, even though some hard issues and game-breaking launch bugs were recently resolved. In the case of , it’s perfectly fine when running around and engaging small groups of enemies, but starts to get noticeably worse when multiple enemies are on screen or when a big boss fight occurs.
In short, the game I otherwise enjoyed so much loses its luster as the frame rate starts to choke the flow of the battle. Naturally, your mileage will vary on this. To be clear, it doesn’t break the game.
