Moonscars has great art design ... but that's not enough
Is exceptional art design enough to carry a game? That’s the question I asked myself over and over again while playing through Moonscars, an incredibly pretty 2d soulslike that is wonderful to look at but unfortunately doesn’t have much going on under the hood.
You are Grey Irma, part of a group of warrior simulacra called the pristine. This group was created by the Sculptor to help stop a rampaging army of clay automatons gone mad. Now, I did try to follow the story – promise! – but whereas games like Dark Souls and Blasphemous manage to walk a fine line between discovery and mystery, I never fully understood quite what was going on, even after ten hours of cryptic dialogue referencing vessels, kilns, moulding, and moon priestesses. But hey, at least there’s a cat that follows you through the game and who you can give milk to, so that’s pretty cool.
The different levels are undeniably beautiful. Moonscars uses a limited colour palate of reds, blacks, and greys, though somehow this works in its favour, creating a deliciously gothic atmosphere that never got old even as I neared the endgame. The gameplay is a more standard affair, with your typical parry and dodge. There’s no choice of class, armour, or weapon, the only thing you have any say over is your sub-weapon, and even there the harpoon is so much stronger than all the others I never really saw a reason to change it. Furthermore, you don’t really level up in the game, at least not in a traditional sense. Health and ichor are upgraded by finding power-ups in the world, and your hard-earned bone powder used to unlock new powerful spells (called witchery) and amulets, much like in Hollow Knight.
What’s strange is that some of these amulets are ridiculously overpowered, including the “Statue” amulet that lowers your movement speed but massively raises defence. This trade-off carried me through most of the game, You see, in Moonscars, both your spells and healing charges are governed by an ichor bar, and this fills up as you damage and parry enemies, meaning that as long as I was dealing out more damage than I was receiving, I was never in any trouble as I always had enough ichor to heal. Add in a couple more amulets that give you ichor when you get hit and when you parry, and you’ll become pretty much invincible.
There are two novel things Moonscars tries to do, neither of which really work. The first is a “Moonhunger” system that increases the difficulty of the game when you die. The second is the introduction of doppelgangers that spawn when you activate certain mirrors (Moonscars’s bonfire equivalent) and steal your temporary buffs and subweapon. I always found these mechanics to be more of a chore than anything else, especially towards the end of the game when your doppelganger copies your enormous health pool but is still fairly dumb, leading to a drawn-out battle of attrition.
The parry system is pretty much useless during exploration as you’ll often be attacked by five or six enemies at the same time, and from both sides (or three sides if you count the flying nuisances), leaving me to rely on the aforementioned harpoon that traverses the entire screen, and tanking damage knowing I could heal afterwards. The boss battles were way more fun, one-on-one slugfests with a good variety of mechanics, including the use of mirrors that tied everything together thematically rather well.
As the final credits rolled, however, I was still asking myself the same question. Is the art design enough to carry the game? And I think, unfortunately, the answer is no. I liked Moonscars enough to play all the way through to the end, but the story was too opaque to keep me interested, and the combat too lacklustre to elicit that pulse-pounding sensation all good soulslikes should create.
Unless you are an unabashed pixel-art 2d soulsvania aficionado I wouldn’t recommend Moonscars, and I’ll be placing it just below Steelrising on the D-Tier.