People are Mad This Game Is Free - Moonring Review

You can pick Moonring up here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/23...

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0:00 Unpacking Childhood
0:08 Game Prices
0:32 Moonring: The Review Beginith
1:28 Menus for Nam
1:40 Playing the game
2:00 Skill Pancake
2:50 Zesty Flavour of Discovery
3:10 Dungeon Diving
4:15 Let Me Show you the World
4:54 Mucking around in the Outro
5:09 Snort captured live on mic

------ Script ------

Moonring is like my dad, mysterious, unexpectedly brutal and refuses to hold my hand.

There's been much ado recently about the price bump games are going through at the moment. I sold a homeless guys kidney to get Tekken 7, It was a sacrifice I was happy to make. But you know even the best triple AAA will be a dollar on Steam Eventually, or Epic will beg you to use their store by giving it to you for free. At the end of the day the price of video games is like grindr, a race to the bottom.

But why wait, Some of the best games ever made have been free, spelunky, cave story, dwarf fortress, conning old people with crypto. Now we might have a new game entering that canon, Moonring.

Developed by Dene carter, the co-creator of Fable, moonring is a deep turn-based rpg with a hand crafted open world and procedurally generated dungeons. It's influences stretch back to Ultima, a series that has so much of its dna in your favourite games that it's been court ordered to pay child support.

When asked why he made the game free Carter responded,

"Life is hard, Covid sucked, everyone’s poor and stressed, I don’t need the $300 this would make me: I’d rather take the goodwill."

The steam reviews are all positive and many demand the right buy the game. Personally I respect his choice and will be paying him in what every intern gets paid at a mid sized business, minimal exposure.

The main screen at first blush looks like a mess but it's really just to scare off the weak willed just like Elden ring's stat sheets. Reading these stats makes me feel like I'm auditing a wizard for tax evasion. There’s an entire desert between each of these stats.

The game efficiently onramps you and sets you on your way with a general quest that is quickly forgotten, as is customary. I’d show you but this game has no save scumming. You need to live with your decisions, which is my primary design gripe with real life.

Moonring eschews leveling and exp grinding in favour of milestone goals. You don't get experience from doing the same thing over and over again. You get experience from experiencing things. This makes the moments of choosing your build feel monumental and precious, rather than a small reward for putting in the hours.

Milestones are associated to the gods. Hitting one of their milestones immediately gives you stat buffs in their respective domain and points to spend in their specific skill pancake. Looks it's not a skill tree alright they're all right there.

Dialogue can be done by typing to NPCs, which gives even the mere act of interacting the hint of unknown possibilities. Don't go expecting robust dialogue though. If you go off the beaten track with the conversation they'll respond the same way my friends do when talking about games exactly like this one.

Dungeons are the primary roguelite aspect of the game, once you delve you are locked in the dungeon till you find the end goal key. Failing the dungeon by accidentally going to heaven sends you to the entrance to try again. Re-entering re-rolls the layout so you can't trial and error your way to a perfect run.

Combat starts simple but you eventually gather yourself a decent kit of utilities. Since this game is levelless a lot of survival comes down to being smart with your kit, knowing how each enemy acts, and always being willing to just run away.

The game rewards offensiveness with skill recharging. Attacking is done by bumping into people and taking evasive maneuvers when they break through your poise. poise is like temporary hit points which recharge after a couple turns of not getting smacked around. This makes the turn based combat an actual dance of giving ground and doing damage.

The writing has a good sense of humour which contrasts with how foreboding the world is. but the lore itself is as mechanically involved in your life as it is text on an item. It’s a world that you’ll want to learn every part of.

The questing relies on you being of sound body and mind to be able to complete, which makes it completely unplayable by the average American President. So sometimes you'll fall out of the groove of following the clues to the next place, but that's fine because at this point this is a world I live in, hunting wildlife and just exploring arcane ruins.

And having a world you can chill out in for free is the best kind.