REVIEW : Moonscars (PC)

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REVIEW : Moonscars (PC)

REVIEW : Moonscars (PC)

Irma has to continually surpass herself. As she traverses what remains of her realm (a mournful expanse of pierced, torn, torn to pieces), she is forced to look into her eyes and fight with her own shadow to assert her identity and to reach the truth. Moonscars is an evocative work, which knows how to create an atmosphere and exploit it to the full, but it is also an inherently cruel video game, which forces the player to come to terms with the fact that the brutality that tore that realm apart does not discounts, not even to the protagonists of the story.

REVIEW : Moonscars (PC)

This is a solid debut for the Black Mermaid development studio, joined by Humble Games for distribution. Moonscars is a two-dimensional metroidvania that draws some of its key mechanics from the souls like genre and is characterized by a very refined graphic style and merciless gameplay just enough. It is already available, since last September 27, on PC (via Steam), Xbox One and Series X / S, PlayStation 4 and 5 and Nintendo Switch.

A scary painting

The scenarios of Moonscars come from afar, from the oil paintings of the masters of the Dutch school, which influenced the artistic direction of the project from the very first sketches. The pixels cleverly arranged on the screen (especially in the backgrounds) come to life thanks to the mixing of colours and the skilful use of dark tones mixed with the vigour of red and green, which materialize a gloomy and desolate world in front of the player’s eyes, which preserves and almost flaunts a shadow of the past splendour.

REVIEW : Moonscars (PC)

Unfortunately, you get used to all this. It doesn’t help that much of the adventure takes place in a unique, interconnected environment: a ruined castle. After the first few hours, the elements surrounding the protagonist seem to repeat themselves, letting the player become all too familiar with the succession of blood, gloomy sculptures and blackish bricks. Even common enemies and bosses, with a few lucky exceptions, play a role without assuming an identity: there is the simple soldier, the flying spellcaster, and the heavy unit with the shield. They don’t represent anything but a stereotype.

Her confusion, while the dialogues of characters who have much more knowledge of the cause of her than what happened and what is happening to follow one another, is also ours. It is the explicit desire of the developers to ensure that the Moonscars adventure leads the player to questions and to always look for new answers, earning them with sword strokes, but for the gears of this machine to start turning, a lot of push is needed. , especially during the early hours. The dialogues are fascinating and very often of good intensity (attention, they are not localized in Italian!), But it happens to wonder why, in this drifting kingdom, everyone feels the irrepressible desire to speak in riddles.

REVIEW : Moonscars (PC)

Despite this, the game brings up some interesting reflections. Above all, the definition of identity and what makes up the ego of an individual. Are these sentient copies, artificially created by arcane means, just creatures to be exploited or destroyed without remorse? Or by existing and acting, building a past and a present, do they gain a reason for being? Moonscars raises the question several times when you get closer to the heart of its story and its characters; in these situations, the game manages to express the best of itself in terms of narration.

On the razor’s edge

The path of the grey Irma is not only dotted with encounters with peaceful non-player characters but above all with hosts of enemies. Exploration and action go hand in hand, as the player will rarely be faced with empty spaces, without even an opponent to haunt them. There is a progression both in the characteristics and abilities of the protagonist, and in those of the creatures she faces, but in principle from the beginning to the end of the game you can afford to take two, maximum of three hits before going to the mat.

The most challenging moments are the ones that define Moonscars, which, especially in its opening lines, can be a very treacherous game. Boss battles are confrontations with a very small margin of the error despite Irma’s ability to heal rather quickly; in fact, they require good agility skills to dodge incoming blows and then be ready for the counterattack. However, these comparisons are not very frequent; most of the time, to keep the adrenaline high, there are arenas in which you find yourself facing (and annihilating) hosts of “minor” enemies to unlock the road that allows you to advance.

A fight against oneself

As for Irma, there is a small inconvenience related to the checkpoints, which can be used to return to the central HUB (where most of the NPCs able to sell accessories to upgrade the protagonist are also located). When using checkpoints to move to the base, there is a chance that Irma will leave behind some kind of sentient envelope willing to do anything to assert her right to exist. She’s also willing to kill the player’s alter ego, of course; you must therefore prepare for a confrontation with a creature of your own, capable of using sorcery and special lethal attacks.

These fights always take place in front of checkpoints and, as a result, the risks remain rather limited. Yet, it is a significant design choice, able both to give weight to the decision to return to the HUB and to add further arguments to the reflection on identity referred to a few paragraphs ago. It doesn’t matter whether these fights are lethal or not (and they certainly should never be taken lightly); what is relevant is the idea that Irma is forced to see and review, amid the myriad of brutally killed enemies, even her own lifeless body.

The technical side of Moonscars would have needed a few more cleaning touches, which we hope will arrive soon. In the PC version I have always found freezes of several seconds during the first combat sequence of each game session; Furthermore, entering and exiting menus causes momentary conflicts between motion inputs and actions, making it necessary to return to a neutral situation for a moment before starting to press something again.

REVIEW : Moonscars (PC)

It happened to me more than once that I had to repeat some of the fightings in the closed areas because, having also killed the last enemy, the system did not recognize the victory and did not reopen the way to continue (fortunately there is the possibility of returning to the last visited checkpoint). Also, I wasn’t able to get to the end of the game because, at the end of the fight with one of the last bosses, I launched the last decisive blow just as Irma was knocked down in her turn. Enemy defeated, no footage; the result? Road to continue blocked. The developers have promptly let us know that they are working to fix this critical bug, but unfortunately, we have to point out that, as things stand, you can run into such a situation.

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review-moonscars-pcThe one told by Moonscars is an adventure which, in its best moments, strongly manifests all its charm. The decadent aesthetics of its environments, from the horrors to the ruins represented on the backgrounds, mixes with a story that has interesting ideas but that does not always manage to tell them engagingly. The combat system is simple but well thought out and the resources to manage and the techniques to be exploited are few, even if they balance very well with each other thanks to the high damage of the enemies, which always forces them to recalculate the strategy to be implemented. Unfortunately, the technical side still has some problems, some of which are not secondary, which we hope will be solved as soon as possible.

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