Torturous games these days are generally big hits. I think Dead Cells started the most recent trend of platform-action games that are incredibly difficult to conquer, but at the same time add charm to the process of slowly driving yourself bonkers. One of the strongest parts of Dead Cells is its backend structure which makes the constant dabble in dangers worth the journey.
Following the path that Dead Cells paved, developer Black Mermaid throws their hat in the ring with their haunting goth platform-action adventure Metroidvania (did I get all the genres?) Moonscars. The backend structure is strong and compelling, as is the story built around the difficult gameplay, but it stumbles in some areas.
Let’s dig right into it.
Story
You are a highly respected soldier that falls with your counterparts in the heat of battle. Instead of fading away into the ether and celebrating an afterlife with your fellow comrades, you end up brought back to ‘life’ thanks to a god named the Sculptor. His intentions are for you to rid the world of the very beings that disposed of you. Armed with powerful equipment, stunning/dangerous magic, and a keen sense of revenge, you get back to the ground taking care of business.
The story is a beautiful wrapper for this entire experience. It’s haunting and sad, and it has a Crow-like feel to the entire ‘coming back to life’ aspect. Everything about the land, the beings living within, and even the gods are dreary and depressing. Sounds like a whole bunch of fun, right? Well, it works well. The atmosphere and aesthetics put together some weird motivation to see the story through. You want to rid the world of all these horrible beings and get some sort of closure for your main character. The mixture of good writing, creepy visuals, and sounds that bring that out together one helluva an adventure you can get behind. What’s truly remarkable about all of this is that it cloaks the difficulty of the game enough to make you forget that you’re getting your ass constantly handed to you and that the odds are almost always against you.
Speaking of those odds and difficulties…
Oddly Difficulty
Moonscars isn’t for the easily frustrated player. The game is shrouded in Dark Souls intentions, where you will meet impossible odds consistently and must strategically plan the best ways to get through them. You get that message loud and clear from the first level of the game, where you discover that you have platform after platform of enemies with the only relief in sight being a giant mirror that acts as a checkpoint and a place where you can upgrade your character. We’ll get to the latter in a bit, but how the gameplay is structured is really having you hop up and down on platforms, dispose of enemies, and do your best not to die in the process.
To help you not die, the game allows you to build up a points meter in the bottom left of your screen. As you kill enemy after enemy, the meter allows you to do two things – heal and unleash a special move. Because both options use the same meter, you must decide on what is best for your main character. If you choose to heal, you can do so at your disposal, which means you can partly heal and use the rest of the meter for a special move. That works some of the time, but I can tell you from my own experience that you will do more healing than pulling off a powerful move. In a way, it works, and it does bring some sense of comfort to the difficult gameplay. Knowing that my efforts will help heal my character motivates me to continue to fight rather than avoid. Sometimes it is best to avoid, and that option is given to you also, but you’ll be ready to fight more times than not.
Now, if you choose to go the special move route, you had best aim correctly and truly. The one thing I found out quickly about the special move is that it is fast and doesn’t work as well when a player is panic-pushing a button. When it hits, wow, does it hit. You can get rid of beings (multiple depending on range) quickly with this option. When it misses, you have basically screwed yourself and will die more than likely because you won’t be able to heal. It can be a juggling act and sometimes a tough decision on what the best course of action is when using this meter. Again, that all comes back to strategizing your moves, even when it’s a decision on meter usage.
Outside of building that meter and making tough choices, there is also a part of the game where you collect white dust that equals out to XP you can spend to improve your stats at the previously mentioned checkpoint mirrors. The dust allows you to unlock new skills and build up the backend tree of the game so that you can get more powerful as you progress. It’s a common theme in these types of games and it makes sense in how it is used to ease the difficulty. The one caveat about collecting this is that if you die, you lose the XP until you can get back to the place where you died. If you die twice without recovering the XP…yep…it’s gone. It is a high-stakes game of ‘should I or shouldn’t I’ when traversing the broken land in Moonscars. This aspect of the game is probably the most infuriating of the gameplay design not because of the risk of losing, but because the XP you gain takes such a long time to build up before you can unlock a skill. It’s a balancing act of risk that is such an uphill battle that it can get quite maddening at times. For example, I built 2400 XP at one point in the game but was cheaply killed and my XP was left at the spot of death for retrieving. The spot was in a bad place because when you die, the enemies reset. Getting back to my XP took me through quite a bit of claustrophobic fights with multiple baddies. When I finally reached my death point, I died right before retrieval, which set me back to zero on the XP collection total. I had to collect at least 3000 to unlock the next skill for my character and it felt like a terrible back and forth before I could achieve this. It took at least almost an hour to get to that next unlockable. Is that bad? Well, for me I didn’t like it because I felt early on it should build up that difficulty slowly and try to even the pace of collection and spending without much grief on the gamer’s end. It simply throws you right into the fire. Having said all of that, I know that the Eric Layman’s and Ben Sheene’s of the world would adore something like this, as they enjoy getting tortured in games, but for someone like me, I just didn’t think this worked as quickly and easily as it needed to work.
Personal views aside, Moonscars is a challenge, and it doesn’t beat around the bush about its intentions. It knows it wants to put you constantly at odds with success and it does a helluva job of creating that gameplay for you. You will not find this journey easy, even if you’re used to this type of gameplay. You will consistently find yourself relieved to reach checkpoints and quickly spend your XP before you lose it if you have enough. Whether you enjoy that type of gameplay design or not will determine whether you enjoy Moonscars or not. For me, I enjoyed the torture a little bit, if not solely to see where the creepy story went and how I could build up my character. The rewards for surviving are nice, so it’s worth the squeeze from the difficult gameplay.
Beyond gameplay flow and structure, some of the more wonderful parts of the game are the bosses and enemies. At the beginning of the game, you will find a lot of repeats with minor enemies but by the third or fourth mirror you unlock in the game, the enemies will start springing up in new forms and with new abilities and difficulties. The gradual difficulty arc with enemies is surprisingly good and not at all disruptive. I thoroughly enjoyed what enemies were thrown at me and how the developers just let loose with their creative sides. All the enemies were terrifying and beautiful. That said, don’t get this mixed up with the number of enemies thrown at you. That is where the difficulty really builds.
Continuing with enemies, I must give Black Mermaid huge props for truly putting their creativity to work and bringing some terrifying characters that offer up even more terrifying gameplay AI. Some of the mid-bosses and main bosses are something out of a Lovecraftian nightmare. You’ll find they are uniquely designed and just pure eye candy for this world built by Black Mermaid. The bosses are one of the best parts of this experience and a good reason to keep pushing forward in the game. As someone who absolutely hates a Dark Souls structure (sans Elden Ring), I found myself compelled to keep pushing forward just to see the next boss.
As for other odds and ends, the gameplay feels big and bulky. There are tiny details that make the gameplay more than just a pure action game. There is an aspect of collection and purchasing of wearable goods that allow you to build up more of your character. For example, you can wear multiple amulets that come with attributes to improve your character’s stats. You can also build up weapon attributes using XP. Anytime you can get a leg up in this game against enemies, that’s a good time. This option doesn’t do a lot because that would shift the gameplay difficulty and the very core/charm of the title, but it’s there as an option.
Another aspect of the gameplay that is worth mentioning is the mechanics. The attack methods are properly tiered in Moonscars’ design, where you can do hack/slash with a press of a button, hold for a more powerful move, and pull off special attacks with the triggers. It’s simple and it works. What doesn’t work well is the accuracy of the parry. To be quite blunt, I didn’t care for the parrying at all. It wasn’t accurate, it was risky to try and pull off, and at the end of the day avoiding enemies was easier than trying to block them. It needs to be a bit more reactive and flexible. I know that would go against the entire difficulty structure of the game, but it just isn’t worth using because of the success/fail rate.
Related to the success/failure of the character, the level design in the game is tricky as hell. You have multi-tiered levels, disappearing platforms at times, spiked walls and floors, and a variety of ways for you to die. All of it is lovely and designed with a lot of thought. You can use all these things to strategize on how to dispose of enemies quickly. For example, you can lure an enemy over a disappearing platform and wait for them to fall on spikes and die. Using the level design as another way to attack enemies while avoiding damage works very well here. It offers alternate solutions when you’re traversing dangers.
Before we move on, there should be big kudos given to Black Mermaid for making the levels a bit tricky and puzzle-like. You will have locked doors that have switches to them or levels where enemies exist in an area that isn’t immediately accessible. You must figure out how to get to wherever you need to go, which offers another layer of fun to the action-platformer. To make it even more intriguing of an adventure, there isn’t a HUD for you to work with as you try to figure these things out. There is nothing more annoying than putting a HUD of a level onscreen as you try to work your way through things. This game was meant to be difficult, and it achieves that beautifully by putting the player in the dark about where they are going and how they can get there.
Anyway, the complaints about mechanics and the lack of balance with gaining/losing/using XP in the game don’t outweigh the creativity and good gameplay overall. While Moonscars can be infuriating at times because of these reasons, as well as purposeful ones at times, the entire whole works more than it doesn’t.
On that note, let’s wrap this up.
Conclusion
Black Mermaid’s Moonscars is a tough game that has a thick amount of creativity in both story and presence. Not all its pieces work perfectly, but enough work to warrant a hard look at this title.
