Moonscars Review

Sidescrolling platformers with soulslike and Metroidvania elements have become their own subgenre over the past decade, and Black Mermaid tried its hand at the formula with Moonscars. Beginning the game as an amnesiac broadsword-wielding fighter named Grey Irma, a series of simple tutorials start the player on their journey. Moonscars is not a game that holds anyone’s hand, delivering them straight into a sprawling map full of hard-to-reach platforms, secret rooms, and all kinds of unearthly, murderous monsters.

NPCs, item descriptions, and sometimes the geography and architecture all lend to telling the story, which involves a mysterious sculptor who discovered how to make living beings out of clay, although this seems to have backfired catastrophically. At first the character and exposition dump can be daunting, but by the time Moonscars finds its stride (which doesn’t take very long at all) it becomes welcoming to see a new NPC who might give Grey Irma a new ability, new task, or just some brief respite from the things with claws and glowing eyes. Most of the NPCs are distinct and interesting, and while a few typos appear in the text from time to time, the story being told is rich with symbolism and originality.

The platforming aspects can be frustrating when Grey Irma doesn’t seem to want to jump after the button was pressed too close to an edge, or can’t quite seem to reach a ledge that looks closer than ones she easily can. Sometimes the hit detection for ledges feels like it’s been manually set and isn’t being accurately portrayed by the actual sprite on-screen, but as a whole the platforming works and is seamlessly integrated into the world, giving players a good look at the gorgeous architecture and world geometry Black Mermaid has put together.

Each enemy has a handful of attacks at their disposal, and learning which animation corresponds to which attack is crucial to successful combat. Unfortunately, this falls apart when one enemy sprite overlaps another and the player literally can’t see what the enemy is about to do to react to it, or the muddy colour palette or small screen size obscure the specifics of the action.

The developers have done a good job spreading enemies out and not crowding too many places with the same enemy type, but there are instances where the combat feels too messy for a game that relies on pixel-perfect precision and visual cues. Flying enemies simply pass through floors, walls and spikes like they don’t exist, which feels unfair, but besides these criticisms, combat is usually reliable and based on player skill and the somewhat customisable stats and abilities they’ve given Grey Irma.

Moonscars is made in a pixel art style that is beautiful, but the gameplay often demands precise timing for platforming or combat (for example, delivering parries) that the graphics sometimes can’t keep up with. Besides the aforementioned sprite overlap making combat difficult, sometimes the drab, muted colour scheme, which does fit the story and world perfectly, makes it difficult to tell what something is supposed to actually be.

One region of the game world changes the visual style to stark silhouettes, which is lovely, but can make it difficult to see or navigate. Switch players will probably want to stick with docked mode, since it can be particularly difficult to keep up with the action at the level the game is zoomed to on the console’s built-in screen.

All of these flaws are few and far between, and they pale in comparison to how much fun combat and exploration are when everything works. Button mashing will get Grey Irma killed, and players will need to learn the mechanics and practice techniques to progress. This may sound like a lot, but while Moonscars has dozens of abilities and different underlying systems going on, they’re all simple enough to learn on their own, easy to master with just a little bit of time, and they work together to form a gameplay loop that feels complex but doesn’t get overwhelming.