I ended up playing this game with my best friend, and had a decent enough time to start, it was fun making choices with a friend, and being able to make group choices and choices of your own. I really enjoyed that aspect, but it felt like the game never really delivered on its promises.

For how many times the game wants you to play it, I expected the narrative to vary in some real way, but it felt like you were simply working to change the final outcome. I wish there were more 'bad' endings, in your attempts to change it, but it never really felt like you have real control over how the game turns out, which is disappointing. The skill checks were fun, but they don't flesh it out enough to make it rewarding.

My other problem came down to the characters and the combat. I feel like the balance in the game was all over the place, with some characters being WAY stronger than others, and all the characters I wanted to play were significantly weaker than the one my friend was playing. The combat and feel of characters was not great, with you being consistently locked in place when attacking. The button inputs also just felt very unresponsive at times, which was disappointing. I wanted to play the bard really bad, but she just felt so weak and janky to play.

It was fun at first, but the lack of balance and meaningful storytelling made it fall short.

Kitfox Games' Moon Hunters just isn't up to par, both for it's time and today. There are surely good things to say about the game's grandiose pixel art aesthetic, which is right in line with indie darlings like Hyper Light Drifter and Dead Cells. There's some nice music, a well-constructed world that calls to mind both Sumerian and Mesopotamian mythology, and well-done environmental storytelling. Overall, it is an otherwise serviceable roguelite held by back by shallow combat and confusing narrative mechanics.

Pre-2016, the standout roguelites were games like The Binding of Isaac, Enter the Gungeon, Crypt of the Necrodancer, Relic Hunter Zero, and Nuclear Throne. While these games are quite distinct from Hunters mechanically, which pulls its combat from Diablo rather than something like Mystery Dungeon, they offered more emergent gameplay loops. In this game, there is a very basic skill tree and that is it. Beyond vapid stat upgrades with no appreciable effect on the gameplay loop or its difficulty, nothing changes for your character. Every fight boils down to just stunlocking enemies in place and spamming the primary attack until they are dead. The pace of combat is glacial, even at "normal" difficulty. It appears the developers made every single enemy a damage sponge because the game would be too easy otherwise.

Moon Hunters is moreso narrative-focused, with dialogue choices directly affecting the run (and having permanent effects on all future runs.) Kitfox's Tanya X. Short aimed to leverage the procedural generation to craft personal narratives, but the implementation is flawed at best. While I can appreciate the choices unlocking future characters or opening up the game world, it becomes very confusing when it starts to influence your player character.

Sometimes you will randomly be given a new trait ie. "Brave," "Vengeful,": etc. and this is straightforward enough, but its not immediately apparent how this affects anything. As it turns out, this will only affect subsequent dialogue choices and interactions, which is the core to the "replayability" of Moon Hunters. Each run would have the player approaching situations differently, thus unlocking new story routes. This is a strong point in the game's favor, but the problem is you would have to trudge through multiple runs of the same mind-numbing combat sequences to find that out. The game undercuts itself, as the story could get better, but the combat itself will never change.

Some mention must also be given to the game's poor implementation of co-operative multiplayer. Firstly, playing as a group breaks the combat loop and makes it even more tedious than it already is. Given that each character only gets three skills, and 4 small upgrades to each of those skills, it only takes around 15 minutes to find a combo that will trivialize every encounter (including all the bosses.) The narrative sections are also underwhelming in co-op; as for some reason each character can select an option, but this has zero bearing on the actual choice. The person who initiates the dialogue will always choose the outcome, and thus change the game state. The only agency the second player in this scenario gets is the potential of a new personality trait.

The potential was obviously there for a game like this, and in a scant few years titles like Children of Morta and Hades would find the sweet spot between narrative and gameplay that Moon Hunters failed to capture. Unfortunately, this only hurts any case you could make to give it time. As a complete experience, the game is unable to justify repeat playthroughs outside of a strong interest in its lore and worldbuilding. There could be a world out there to explore and love, if you are willing to sit there spamming left click all the way to end.

Really wanted to love this game because the art is gorgeous and the combat is well designed but it just feels unfinished. Like you can see all the pieces on the board and it seems like they're gonna come together but then they just kinda... don't.

My main complaint is that exploring the areas and encountering the NPCs is really fun, but you are just not given enough time in a single run to do more than a few AND you have to deal with them being randomly generated, so every run results is just a graveyard of abandoned storylines. It's frustrating because I WANT to see all the special events and interactions the game teases but they're constantly denied to me.

Also the load times are atrocious.

I'll still play it from time to time because it can be satisfying to just knock out a run, but don't expect the world.

A roguelike, pixelated game that you can run solo or with friends. I played solo, so my review will only reflect on playing solo.

This game requires you to play through multiple times. You have three days to explore and build stats while you're preparing to fight the sun cult. You can unlock events, characters, costumes, and new locations for future runs. The pixel and watercolor illustrations look fantastic for the whimsical, spiritual adventure. The music and sound effects are great. I really love the main song of the game. It fun playing through and getting new events.

The biggest downfall was combat. Again, I was playing solo and not every class is equal. You will struggle playing a couple of the classes solo. But the combat is sluggish; the AI is either dumb (will stand still so you can easily shoot it) or OP (will shove you in a corner to three shot you). The maps are too large. You will run into many dead ends and it will feel like you're wasting time.

The game could use more polishing for combat and tighten the maps. Otherwise fun experience. Maybe more fun with friends.

It promises procedural storytelling, with a different myth and outcome each play session. But if it's too good to be true, it usually is. The attribute system is unique (awarding you points in categories such as 'Cunning'), but the randomness of the stages and the unbalanced characters quickly lead to boredom. The treatment of villages as one-time stops, rather than as permanent home bases, unmoors the proceedings – it ruins the potential of community-building that's evident in other short cycle games such as Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask.