Moon Hunters is a neat story-focused roguelike action RPG where you investigate the mysterious disappearance of the moon, potentially with three of your friends, by battling monsters, buying upgrades and making decisions by talking to NPCs and increasing certain traits that allow you different actions later on. The core of the game is fairly short - I could finish most runs in an hour - but I kinda wish it could’ve went by quicker. The good bits were really everything related to NPC interactions - and the upgrades and RPG mechanics were quite nice as well - but the battle and exploration of the world was a bit tedious (and made up the bulk of the game, so it kinda became a problem after a while).
Each game loop plays more or less the same, you start in a land of stars and constellations where you pick up your character - it serves as the multiplayer hobby as well - then you get thrown into the world in a more or less different locale with different characters based on the origin you took. After some story beats, the moon disappears, and it’s your job to find out why. You trek across a world map, visiting certain locales, during the four days you have before you get attacked by the Sun Cult. Each tile on the map has some specific characteristics - biome type, if merchants are present, if it’s a town - but besides the presence of certain NPCs or items, I didn’t find much difference in picking one map against another.
While in those map, you explore for money, merchants, zones to explore and enemies to fight until you get to the exit. The minimap kinda helps - but not enough to allow you to see the whole map - and it’s a bit of a trudge sometimes to get from point A to point B while making sure to explore and not miss anything. The maps are a little too big and it’s kinda easy to get lost. In order to fight monsters you have three moves, one basic attack, one movement attack and one different attack that drains your energy. One character could throw black holes, another had a beam, another created ice tornadoes, stuff like that. These abilities can be upgraded with various bonuses you get along the way, but they aren’t born equal. I could damage certain monsters - the shielded plants - with specific skills while other characters could almost do nothing against the same enemies, part of myself even wondered if it was a bug.
Between maps, you choose an action to increase your stats, my favorite one was cooking, of course, and I really loved the little cooking system they had in place. I assume that the multiple options are given as such because you could play with three other players, but that’s fine, the fun of combining different ingredients and seeing how it turned out outclassed the known stat boosts you’d get from the other actions. Each stat is clearly defined and you more-or-less know what to do to improve them, and you get traits - like ‘charming’ or ‘brave’ - by performing certain actions or picking dialogue choices, which then allow you to get to different maps or avoid certain fights altogether, steering the story in slightly different directions. That was one of my favorite parts of the game.
Ultimately, I played with 7 characters then stopped. The story side of the game was intriguing and the way your characters would use their traits was pretty cool, but the fighting itself wasn’t my favorite. Moon Hunters is still pretty interesting with a great sense of style, music and voice acting, and I bet it’d be a blast played with more people. On my last run, a NPC asked me if I could fight the ‘last boss’ with a hand behind my back, and I agreed to do it with BOTH my arms tied, so my stats got thrown to 0 and I lost terribly against the huge lava monster, served me right!
