Moon Hunters

The game is disappointing on almost every level. Very simplistic and the marketing as a "personality test" is weak and underdeveloped. Combat is also weak.
There are FAR better co-op games out there to play with a loved one. Pass this for something that will be enjoyable.

Moon Hunters seems to get a lot of shade for being a rogue-like game and having the story be as it is. I actually quite like the idea. It makes sense to have different runs while keeping the things you’ve unlocked previously, since you are reshaping your story with each run. That’s the fun part of folklore and old stories: details change with each telling. That’s the game’s whole gimmick and I think having this game be a rogue-like fits seamlessly with that idea.

The gameplay itself is nothing too groundbreaking. It’s a top down dungeon crawler where you earn money by slaying enemies and destroying environment set pieces while you move through the dungeons to find secrets and (boss) arenas. You cannot interact with certain things in the game unless you have a specific characteristic, which I think makes for an interesting twist. You can earn these characteristics by choosing different dialogue options when talking to NPCs or during the nightfall interactions. At nightfall, when you’re in your camp, you can choose to upgrade your stats by cooking, stargazing, hunting, or keeping watch. You can also choose to rest. This makes the game very appealing to me, since it’s not something I have encountered much before. Once morning hits, you choose a different dungeon to go to and then the cycle repeats. You repeat the dungeon fighting and nighttime camp interactions until your 5 days are over and then it’s boss time.

The boss is definitely easier the more players you have. If you play solo, this fight will definitely pose a bit of a challenge, but if you’re with 3 or 4 players you’ll defeat him pretty easily. Not the best boss fight ever made, but not the worst. Just not scaled optimally. Once your story is completed, you’ll be brought back to your gallery/constellation hall, where you’ll see a popup of what your character became after the story took place and any constellations you unlocked during your run.

Overall the game is very very pretty. I love the art style and the music, it’s definitely the game’s strong point. I personally really love the game, but I can see why it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. I’ll definitely play a lot more of this game because of the way the story works, but gameplay wise the fighting aspect might get a little tedious after a while. I definitely recommend playing this together with some friends for an even better time.

I'd go for a "soft" recommendation on this one. The game is fun, has nice music, looks good and has good atmosphere. The combat in diverse between all the characters and offers something for everyone. However, the roguelike grind to figure out how to deal with the boss in single-player is an exercise in tedium, while the battle ultimately feels too easy once you've got a good build.

Pretty good game, and really nice to play co-op. A big downside is that a lot of content (quests? stories?) feels unfinished and lacks closure. I would love to play a more finished version, or a sequel to this game. Balancing of playable characters is also not great, ranged characters are so much better than melee.

Artistically beautiful game with tight movement and gameplay with a somber theme across interactions with the characters and world. More depth and feeling with each run than any other roguelike I've played. Lots of events that aren't just combat like most others.

Solid roguelite experience. Controls are simple but there's lots of variety in characters to change things up. You get different stories based on where you travel, who you talk to, and how you react to various situations. Lots of cool art. Soundtrack is absolutely killer though, LOVE the soundtrack, by far my favorite part of the game.

fun and underrated

I never finished my first and single run with my friend but it was interesting, like I got it on sale for 1$

like if you think I'm gay

I'm not much of an enthusiast of roguelikes, frankly. The whole premise of always playing randomized levels and restarting anew after dying causes me some degree of annoyance. I like the idea of carving out significant feats in the simulation and obtaining enduring benefits — in other words, evolving my avatar and the world around him in a perennial fashion is important. Some of these games are quite unforgiving, while others offer ways to permanently upgrade playable characters for future runs. While Moon Hunters forces you to start each adventure from scratch, it is also structured in such a manner that its playthrough cycles weren't that frustrating to me. But is it worthy of your time? I'm kinda conflicted about it, so bear with me.

The framework here is quite simple. Every run is composed of 5 days, each one representing a level. In the first level, you get to visit one of the game's fixed towns, whereas the final boss is fought in the fifth. The three intermediary stages are all composed of randomized dungeons that take the form of forests, swamps, deserts, caves and mountains. All locations are represented on a worldmap that players get to visualize at the start of each day. The positions of each place and the paths connecting them are also randomized, so the sequence of levels is potentially varied. Moreover, a few unique areas containing specific NPCs can be explored if they show up on the map — they can be accessed before entering the dungeon instance that ends the day.

Now, Moon Hunters has some RPG mechanics. Seven main characters give players some variation of gameplay with their particular attacks and abilities. Their strengths and weaknesses are measured by a simple stat system. You don't exactly level up in this game. Instead, individual stats can be improved through the completion of tasks in towns, dungeons and special areas. NPCs provide dialogue options that increase certain attributes depending on the player's choice. They also initiate subquests that require visiting different places and talking to other folks in subsequent days, with stat bonuses as rewards. Defeated enemies drop money, which can be exchanged at shops for additional passive upgrades. At the end of each day, characters are allowed to perform certain actions at a campsite, and these will spur random events and further stat boons. One of these activities is a rudimentary cooking minigame that utilises ingredients found during normal gameplay. Each one of the 100+ recipes gives a different number of points to your attributes.

Given the short length and the randomized nature of each run, I've always felt like I was running out of time to do things in my playthroughs. Failing sidequests was a common occurrence simply because the areas, points of interest and NPCs required to advance them would simply not appear to me in a timely manner. Traits, a secondary aspect of customization, are gained by a character when he or she interacts with NPCs and special landmarks. Although they do not modify combat in any way, possessing them is mandatory to unlock unique dialogue options and specific sidequest developments. Considering that I frequently missed the opportunity to acquire their necessary traits beforehand, my quests failed constantly, and this bothered me a lot. To make things worse, there's also this constellation in the game's menu hub that serves as a barrier of sorts. To unlock the stuff blocked by it, we need to fill it with the spirits of characters that complete the campaign. Each spot in this chart asks for a toon with a particular combination of traits. As you can imagine, getting every spot filled was a pain in the arse. To me, this is certainly the most disappointing system of the game due to its unreliability.

Isometric games are one of my favorite genres, but I wasn't very much impressed by Moon Hunters' features. Sure, you get to improve your character as you play, but most enemies are either dumb, easy to dispatch or unremarkable, with the exception of a bunch of lions and rhinos that do a lot of damage. Playable characters have few attacks and skills at their disposal and you can't really change their standard builds in a significant way. Exploring dungeons is also rather boring because they're usually bare an empty, only containing a few mundane buildings or altars and perhaps a lonely person, while also being quite large — this is a big problem, since most characters move slowly. The familiars you can find (if you get the traits to recruit them, that is) are of no consequence or real usefulness to the adventure. The campaign has just two or three straightforward minibosses, who sometimes don't even show up, and that last boss I mentioned earlier. This final guy is always the same, by the way, regardless of you actions during the run. The only other boss in the game is fought in an arena scenario that you can access with a character previously saved in the constellation.

Regarding NPCs, I found most of them to be rather uninteresting, despite their varied designs and tribal backgrounds. The only character that is properly voiced in the game is the main narrator, who spells her lines during major cutscenes. All other conversations are text based, and they do not convey much of their interlocutor's personality and motivations. It feels as if these NPCs only exist to reveal some tiny trivia about the game's lore and to offer enigmatic hints for secondary quests. Speaking of the story, I couldn't really grasp it, honestly, nor could I remember specific details. The manner by which facts are presented to the player is just too obscure and vague. You don't find books or manuscripts that flesh out the story, either — which is a shame, as I think there's potential for something nice here.

On the technical side, this game's art style is probably its strongest factor. I enjoyed the pixelated visuals of enemies, magical effects and environments, even if they ended up being repetitive. Animations are also nicely fluid. Special mention should be given to the painted portraits of most living beings that appear during conversations. The artists did a good job with them, especially when it comes to the usage of colors. As for the audio, I can't speak much of it. I didn't notice any glitches affecting the sound and everything produced a reasonable effect that you would expect hearing in a fantasy setting, but the soundtrack was barely noticeable. I don't remember listening to any exceptional tunes. However, I did verify glitches in a different department: multiplayer.

Moon Hunters was designed to support up to four players in a single run. I wasn't able to experience much of this mode because, unfortunately, the servers were plagued by a buggy code that caused constant crashes. From what I could understand, this issue was more frequent and severe when the party was composed of people from distant parts of the globe. Still, I didn't see much of a difference in terms of actual mechanics while playing with other folks. Teammates can revive eachother and enemies basically spawn with more hitpoints. That's it, nothing that substantially changes the loop.

After all this criticism, you must be asking why I'm vouching for the game. Well, I believe this is one of those titles that warrant the creation of a "neutral" recommendation tag on Steam. Regardless of its flaws, Moon Hunters manages to be a simplistic action-adventure title that actually works reasonably well, considering the scope of the project. It isn't meant to be a deep, engrossing RPG — it's not supposed to tell a grandiose tale nor display an expansive world —, and that's OK if the systems in place provide a concise, but smooth experience. Therefore, I think that most roguelike fans might enjoy at least a few playthroughs.

Good game, bad roguelike. As a game, it's fun, beautiful (not just in looks but also in atmosphere and story), mysterious and memorable. As a roguelike, it's severely lacking content and replayability. It's really sad that the developers decided to pursue a way of permadeath because it doesn't suit the game at all. At least coop is fun...

I like it. The world feels intricately designed but not overly explained.

Don't let my meager hours fool you, this game EASILY has hundreds of hours of content with loads of different interactions, fights, and a TON of lore. Wait till it goes on sale and then snag it, even better with friends.

I love this game! I've gotten three of my siblings interested in it, and I'm about to get a fourth. It's a choose-your-own-adventure with beautiful graphics and character design, amazing storytelling, and super fun combat!! I usually get bored of games after a few months but I've kept coming back to this game. I know it's not food but I could only describe this game as moreish. I cannot recommend this game enough!!!!

this is truly one of the games of all time

10/10 would recommend

Bought this to play with my gf. Defeat the boss. We both agreed that this game is terrible.

It seems to be broken. I haven't been able to launch it in a while.

i like it

Moons haunted

A really beautifully illustrated game with a somewhat compelling narrative.
The combat get's a little stale after a couple of hours, but it's nice to play regardless.

It's also really special with friends.

Good music, interesting lore/story system, good combat and its got local co-op. Reminds me of the Mana series, particularly Legend of Mana. Certain character builds are easier than others, but perfect balance is for squares.

This game is a great game and it seems all the recent negative reviews dont understand the point of the game or have played the game long enough to unlock more of the story, characters and events that can happen. Played this on Playstation and missed playing it so rebought it on Steam. This game is about storytelling old myths and how they would change little by little each time the legend was told. Each play through you habe a chance to unlock more events, story, features and playable characters. I thought i had unlocked most of this game on the Playstation only to be surpised with events i never ran in to before and even unlocking a character i never knew existed. its a great fun and fast game to play with friends or youself and its meant to be fast and dont be surprised if you get the basic ending a lot, all the other endings you need to work to uncover .

This game had so much potential but DO NOT BUY. I played coop and even that did not save this game. We it beat our first try and laughed because "that was it?". We gave it another shot with different characters on a second run and it didn't really justify the time spent playing.

I imagine even the devs would say this game is unfinished. The playable characters pixel art designs and combat style variations are great concepts, that's about it.

Enemy variation is very lacking and the AI is TERRIBLE. Really, most of the time it's unresponsive until you walk into them. This includes attacking from range. Most of the time even while you are damaging them, they won't react.

The random level design layouts (I assume they are random) are really bad. There isn't a lot of looping or keeping it tight for quicker travel. 9 times out of 10 you will find yourself walking down a long path with very few enemies scattered down it to reach a dead end with nothing. Then you have to run all the way back just to do that 2 more times in each scenario.

The random events based on decision making are kind of shallow. There's one with a crazy old man that was kind of funny, but they seem meaningless other than some occasionally minor stat gain.

Overall, feels unfinished, good, but shallow concepts, tediously boring with little difficulty.

Does not start. Furthermore there are no solutions for that problem.

Very repetitive, not much to do, not many heroes, not many spells, only One final boss and one mini boss, gets boring quickly

It just feels incomplete. Maybe the passion was lost halfway in the making of the game, and it was just pushed out as it is. Not enough enemy variation? Too many playable characters and none of them are deep enough? End is also unrewarding, especially if you achieve it trough dialogue. Runs are very short too!

I've seen other reviews on here, and the thing I realise is people are complaining about the game because of the single player. This game was absolutely made to play MULTIPLAYER! It is a very fun multiplayer experience.

I played online coop and the repeating game play is fun because each play through you unlock new characters, new story endings, collecting the recipes and constellations is really fun too when you play with friends. You also get to try different skills each gameplay- even if you do play as the same character, and you get to explore more of the world each time too. I could see this game getting frustrating or boring when playing single player. But that's why I say it shines as a multiplayer experience with friends on voice chat :)

It was such a good fcking game, we enjoyed it very much. It gives you are vibe that's hard to compare to other games.

Set the moonhunters.exe to Windows 7 compatibility mode. Otherwise the game may not start.

Beat the game in around an hour. This game is approaching 9 years old, and it's age shows (compared to newer, similar games). Overall it was a nice experience, but meh game. I have little interest in doing a second run. Doesn't feel like much will change and it is not challenging once you figure out how to play. Music is really nice. Same with the dialog portraits. Story is interesting but shallow. End game was completely unexpected and a let down. Thought it was gonna be a multi-run puzzle-narrative-story.

Since I bought the game on sale ($1.50 USD) and got over an hour of playtime, it was worth it. But overall, thumbs down for being MEH.

I will leave a positive review on this game, but I will note that there is some room for improvement.

The music is great. It is atmospheric, ethereal, and enjoyable even just as music by itself. I mean that.

The graphics are basically pixel art, and not bad...for pixel art. Personally, I think pixel art is overused, but that's a matter of personal taste. Sometimes, you cannot really distinguish what that pixel art is supposed to be representing. Is it a bush or a turtle? Is that a rock or a monster? Is my character wearing a mask or does he have a plant for a head?

The maps do have some variety, but it seems to be mostly just a variety in color and the kinds of monsters that you may encounter. Each playthrough you will get to choose basically a handful of level to get through. This is done at the completion of each level. For multiple players, you sort of "vote" on which map to go to next.

Each character type that you play as (or "class") has a different set of potential attacks and style of attack. This gives the game some more replay value, and there are unlockable characters, skins, abilities, etc. So replay with friends is encouraged.

Most of the game is not particularly difficult, but there is a learning curve for each character. The most challenging part is the final boss, which is far more challenging than anything you will encounter in the rest of the game.

However, not all of the game is pure "hack and slash." There are NPCs that have dialogues and interactions that grant small perks and bonuses throughout the game at different locations. Which ones appear are different each playthrough.

I wish I could recommend this game this game, as the concept is great on paper, but due to the vast number of problems in the execution; I can't.

First of all, the game refused to start after downloading multiple time and reinstalling drivers. I had to nose dive into a bunch of forums on how to fix this until I found one where they mentioned going into the steam.exe file and turning on compatibility mode. Ridiculous considering I have never had to do this for any other game (I've played games much older than this one without issues).

After finally being able to play the game, I was faced with a pathetic battle system and mechanics that got old after 15 minutes. I beat the first play through with no issues. The final boss is a joke and the amount of back tracing is outrageous. The amount of activities that you aren't able to perform in the world due to not being a specific build is incredibly tedious and feels more like a punishment rather than a reward. I get that the whole point of the game is to repeated over and over as you slowly build a history of heroes, but the whole experience is not fun.

The world is very empty, not a lot happens, abilities are basic, you can't customize character with equipment, the story is a shitty mix of world cultures, the game glitches, the monsters are boring, the final boss is too easy, the intro was very abrupt and not immersive at all, etc. The whole experience feels half-assed and I usually a very forgiving player when it comes to indie games.

On top of all of these issues, it's very clear the developers gave up somewhere along the way and refused to fix issues. Don't buy this game. It's not worth it solo and it's not worth it co-op. Cheap but a waste of time.

Pretty boring game, repetitive and incomprehensible story.

The atmosphere/vibe is spot on. Relaxing.

The game feels repetitive, controls are kinda stiff and the music/ sound gets annoying with the short loop it has. Was okay at the beginning but it started to drag. A recommendation if you want something really simple to play with a person but not for me if you want something challenging other than the cotnrols.

this is a really fun game

Absolute gem of a game. A story told through iteration over iteration of game play and choices. Music that manages to pull on your emotions and draw you into this broken world. I keep coming back to this game, and still discover something new every time I play.

<3

if you like pixelated game, this game is for you. you can choose one of each character and each character has unique story and dialogue. very gudd cozy game

:)

If you like roguelites and playing with friends, this is the game. I played this with my girlfriend from start to finish, and while she wasn't particularly great at it, it was an incredible experience. I highly suggest getting this game.

Great game

Absolutely gorgeous soundtrack. Fun but challenging, relaxing, beautiful stories, worlds to explore, mysteries to discover, surprises and twists... My partner and I have both adored playing this together. I highly recommend playing it.