Indie Game of the Week 438: Moonlight Pulse

It's Exploraction Time once again on IGotW and this was one I was very excited to check out, because it comes to us courtesy of Seafloor Games: the creators of Vision Soft Reset, a visually rudimentary exploraction game with a killer gimmick. In that game, you were capable of time-travel (or really a type of precognition) with an elaborate timeline system full of nodes that you could hop between to suit your goals, acquiring upgrades (that were lost when you reverted time, due to causality being a whole thing) and information (that would stick with you, since you retained all your memories between timelines). Their follow-up Moonlight Pulse isn't quite as groundbreaking but, typically for this developer, it's certainly not short on cool ideas and an original premise.

Moonlight Pulse has you control a team of "Curative Agents": people whose job it is to protect their home from hostile parasitic invaders. Their home happens to be a colossal space turtle named Aorasque, not too dissimilar to Great A'Tuin of the Discworld novels, with every region of the game situated somewhere within its innards. That means that regions tend to represent places like the heart, the brain, the stomach, or a circulatory blood system that capably doubles as a fast travel feature. The parasites flooding this titan have a sinister united purpose in mind that the player digs up as they continue to explore, with new team memberss joining the fray at various points of the story until you have a full complement of four. Each character naturally has their own combat style and traversal abilities, so you'll be switching between them often enough (fortunately, you can do this on the fly rather than look around for, say, a tag barrel). A game-wide consideration is Aorasque's health, shown as a percentage at the bottom right of the screen which slowly decreases over time but jumps up whenever you wipe out a significant parasite, and that overall vitality eventually becomes a factor in the final boss fight.

In most respects, beneath the wild premise and gooey level design there's a pretty standard exploraction structure at Moonlight Pulse's core. Areas of the game are inaccessible until you have the right upgrade (or character) and there's a hub of sorts where you can receive hints for where to go next. This game's not one to hold your hand though: in many cases you have to keep exploring to find the route you're meant to follow, with the usual handy indicators flashing in unexplored parts of the map present only on a few occasions. I did get a little lost for a while due to some ambiguity with the map—it failed to show that a certain blood vessel entry point actually went anywhere, so I thought for the longest time that it was a terminus rather than a branch station—but otherwise the game's small enough geographically that you'll typically have some vague idea of where to head towards next. Having multiple characters alleviates the concerns of health, as does a finite "rescue" system where any critically hurt ally will be automatically switched in order to save them (the death of anyone on your team is a game over), but this also means the game can justify having enemy attacks that hurt a lot: some foes can two-shot you, even after some health upgrades, and if you aren't careful in boss fights you might have to sideline your best fighters (or the best ones to use with the current boss patterns) after taking a few blows. Enemies do drop health but not as regularly as you'd prefer; booking it back to the nearest checkpoint or hoping one is on the horizon is usually your best bet.

As for your team, you initially have a wolverine (all the characters are various types of anthros) called Silex who is capable of fast melee attacks, a dash, and eventually the ability to wall-jump. You're soon joined by Laguna, a blue fox that uses weak water-based ranged attacks that can eventually be charged up to produce bubbles that trap enemies for a while, and later by Charlotte (a goat/sheep that uses a whip that can act as a grappling hook) and Clyde (a mole that rides around in a custom mech equipped with a flamethrower and a zipline that creates temporary platforms). Having multiple characters around helps with survival and traversal capability alike, though like most games in this genre it's only after you've found a few of their upgrades that they (and the platforming) really start to shine. I also enjoyed the banter between them during certain rest stops and the way they each had unique dialogue with the NPCs you can talk to depending on who was active, like the Curative director Kristie or Silex's grizzled mentor Victor. There's a few other appreciated affectations tossed in here and there such as an in-game bestiary that, once filled out, can reward you some upgrades and the ever-welcome tool that points out collectibles you missed in areas you've already been through—with no marker system for its map, it's easy to lose track of those items you had to leave behind because you lacked the means to reach them.

Moonlight Pulse isn't quite the revelation that Vision Soft Reset may have been but it's still a competent exploraction game with a middling presentation enhanced a great deal by the distinctiveness of its worldbuilding and level design. The combat's pretty good too, with four different flavors to suit your preferences, and the challenge level is just about high enough that I'd usually get taken out by each boss at least once before I got their patterns down and knew what to avoid and when to strike; the final boss in particular has some real nasty traps for you, as does a certain ice-based villain at the top of the game's highest peak. There's some memorable sequences that'll stick with me, like a brief sojourn to another spaceborne entity like Aorasque that had long ago succumbed to the parasites and become an eerie, decaying tomb of a world, and honestly I'm just excited to find another one of these games with something novel to present, given the sheer volume of them that I consume. Though they've yet to reach all-timer status, Seafloor Games is evidently a developer to watch out for in the future if they're able to keep serving these curveballs.

Rating: 4 out of 5.