Moon Hunters is a game that gets your attention. I know, because I noticed it at a few different conventions and always stopped to check in on its progress . Kitfox Games ran a pretty tight indie ship and always had something new or interesting to show as they made steady progress in the run up to Moon Hunters release. I found myself incredibly hyped for the game thanks to it's great co-op action and fuzzy nostalgic style. Playing through the full release, though, and a few problems emerge that aren’t apparent in quick demo stages. Don’t make any mistake about it - Moon Hunters is a good game. But it’s not the great game I wanted.
The biggest problem facing Moon Hunters is that it plays best as a couch co-op experience, but has no way to really achieve that. The online matchmaking for the game is a work in progress, and there’s doesn’t seem to be a crowd there waiting. None of my attempts to find a co-op session worked out, but even solo I had enough fun to playthrough the game multiple times. This is good, because the strengths of Moon Hunters are found in how it handles replayability.
The story of Moon Hunters is fairly straightforward. Set in a world inspired by ancient Mesopotamia, players begin each game as one of four starter classes: Ritualist, Druid, Witch and Spellblade. Two hidden classes are also available to unlock, but in the interest of story spoilers I won’t divulge on who they are or where I found them. But their discovery, like much of the discoveries in the narrative of Moon Hunters , felt organic.
Soon players discover that the moon is missing. This is a big deal since the moon is basically a god, and if the god for your religion disappears it creates a dicey situation with your rival - the sun. After the moon goes missing players are always met by a Sun Cultist who delivers an ultimatum. In three days, you will die. King Mardok is a sun worshipper and wants all of the moon’s followers cleansed from his lands.
Your next three days are spent killing monsters in any number of region-themed procedurally generated maps. At the end of it, you face the king and, well, stuff happens. But the story resolves quickly. The average playthrough takes about an hour, but this isn’t a game that's only an hour long. It’s meant to be replayed by all the different classes, because little things change each time.
Finishing one playthrough turns your hero into a constellation that impacts future games. Sometimes this means new characters or regions. Characters also gain traits that can result in different outcomes for events, so even though the playthroughs are short there’s a constant sense of growth.
This concept of storytelling through layered mechanics doesn’t always work smoothly. For example, each level ends with camping. While camping, players choose between different activities like hunting, stargazing, resting or cooking. Each activity improves certain stats, but it’s not really evident what these stats affect.
And since the playthroughs are short it almost feels futile to even stress over which decision is best for the character. You get to the point where you’re just trial-and-error grinding through playthroughs to find different branches of the story. When they’re there, Moon Hunters feels different and fun. When they’re not, it feels cliched and tedious.
It’s a fine line and Moon Hunters generally walks it well, but it slips a bit too. The intro of the game is identical for each character, and when you do a back-to-back-to-back playthrough session you get very tired of the intro narrative and what feels like pointless exposition because it's the same story you’ve heard before. Things don’t get different quickly enough and when they finally do the fun’s almost over anyway.
But I applaud Kitfox for taking a risk and trying something different. Because the base game they built is fantastic and would’ve easily supported a cookie cutter rogue-lite endless dungeon format gussied up with a generic hero’s journey saga. The aesthetics are top notch, the soundtrack is great and combat genuinely feels different from character to character. One of the unlockable characters has a very unique playstyle that is unlike anything I’ve played in a game like this before.
The classes are not perfectly balanced, but I don’t think they should be. Balance would produce sameness, ultimately, so it's more about finding the classes that fit your style and sticking with those. And if you’re lucky enough to have a group of friends to play with to round out the party with the others, even better.
Overall, I like this game and would recommend Moon Hunters to anyone who enjoys esoteric indie projects. The mood is very chill and the pixel art is beautiful. It’s a nice world to inhabit. The gameplay nuts and bolts are as good as anything in the genre, and although the story and concept can misfire from time to time it doesn’t change the fact that it’s refreshing to play something a little different. Even if it is a little flawed.
