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Moon Hunters Review

By Omar (@siegarettes)

• Moon Hunters
  
• Developer- Kitfox Games
  
• Publisher- Kitfox Games
  
• PC (Steam, itch.io)
  

There’s something comforting about the construction of myth. A sense of adventure that feels at once larger than life, incredulous even, but at the same time often intimate and familiar. That’s the feeling that Moon Hunters attempts to capture. Each hour long session is designed to produce a unique story for you and your friends.

In practice, this plays out in a way that recalls Damian Sommer and Emily Carroll’s The Yawhg. There’s a reliable structure to the events of the story: the initial calamity, the initial days of exploration and the final march towards an inevitable terminus. There’s a few ways the story can end, though it will prove difficult to deduce the alternate paths to those endings. Instead the focus is on the actions you take on the way to that end. The story is split into days. In the mornings, you choose an area to explore and fight through. In the evening, you’ll make camp and pick from a host of activities that will grant bonuses to your character’s abilities.

Interrupting these activities is are a series of opportunities and events. These provide choices that can confer bonuses, but more importantly, define traits that characterize your avatar. They’re opportunities to play a role, to make decisions about how you want to define your current story. Do you take pity on a wild beast? Do you approach situations with logic, or let your faith lead you?. These are the heart of Moon Hunters, the place where the game feels most at home with its larger storytelling desires. It’s a shame then that most of the core orbits around the combat.

Each morning will bring you into a new area, and each of these will inevitably draw you into a new series of fights with the local wildlife. The creatures feel appropriate to the world, providing beautifully illustrated splashes of danger, but never feel like living parts of the environment.The combat, likewise, feels serviceable, though not exceptional . At its foundation Moon Hunters is an Action RPG, but one tuned for short play sessions. Each character represents a particular class designed to work in tandem with another and you’ll slowly improve their abilities over the course of the session. It leaves an interesting space for characterization via statistical growth but often the stat based approach plays out counter-intuitively. Sessions are never long enough for these improvements to alter your character significantly, and progress is reset between sessions. So combat eventually leads into a routine of drawing an enemy’s attention, slowing or disabling it, then laying on damage. It’s an MMO-like loop, one that’s felt in the weight, or lack thereof, the combat.

It feels like a missed opportunity. Not because the combat is out and out bad, but because it’s divorced from what makes Moon Hunters feel resonant. The atmosphere, the short bits of prose that describe the world, the way it characterizes your party: these are the standout moments of the game. Combat is almost incidental to the experience; the thing that fills the space between those moments. When the days in Moon Hunters came to a close and I found myself at camp with my partner. I cooked meals while she headed out to hunt for provisions. We danced alongside witches, and confronted wild animals.  These were the moments that absorbed me into the fiction. Those moments culminate after the final battle, where the conclusion is wrought and the stories of your exploits are written. Maybe you wander the land in search of knowledge, become known as a great warrior, or simply prepare the best meals anyone has ever eaten. This is where Moon Hunters is at its best, where it returns a feeling of a story told around a campfire, created in collaboration with companions. That is, ultimately, what Moon Hunters is: a collaborator in your story, a maker of personal myths.