Steam is drowning in thousands of lazy, low-effort 2D platformers, and "Moonlit" is yet another one. I'm not kidding, there's over 17,000 platformers on Steam, almost all of them are garbage, amateur kitbashes. This is not one of the good ones.
This is a basic GameMaker Studio kitbash, a few stock-looking pixelcrap sprites dumped onto the basic GameMaker Studio platformer template and rushed quickly into cheap nasty game bundles by Eduardo Machado. I think at some point they were genuinely trying to make some kind of game here without the necessary skills or qualifications to do professional game development.
This pixelcrap platformer has you control a woman with a gun, but not just any woman, you can turn into a werewolf with short range attacks instead of the gun. What happens to the gun when you turn into a werewolf? Nobody knows. Anyway gameplay is just brawling/shooting and light, poorly done platforming. There's nothing really new or interesting here, and the quality is abysmal.
In the modern era of high quality bleeding edge PC gaming, these kinds of flat, lazy, lackluster platformers just don't cut it. Platforming is a dead genre for a reason. Even though this is "free", it failed to attract any interest for gamers here on Steam Direct for obvious reasons.
DIG Games have a known history of trying to scam people into paying them money for someone else's work, through this account or through closely linked/alt accounts. One example of DIG Games doing this is [url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/1022040]Candy Mandy[/url], which is really the "[url=https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/templates/systems/match-3-jelly-garden-kit-43260]Match 3 Jelly Garden Kit[/url]" asset, written by the actual developers, Candy Smith.
The game is very very short and can be finished in just an hour. Developers have at least some responsibility to provide enough content to make a game last more than a couple of hours if they're serious about providing something of value to gamers, especially when they're charging money. There's less content here than some free game demos.
Taking this shovelware seriously as if it was a genuine attempt to make a game, it doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
This looks a lot like it was designed for consoles, but released on Steam instead by mistake. While this is on PC, it has all the hallmarks and deficiencies of a console game, from the clunkier than needed control scheme to the less than cutting edge graphics. There's 10's of thousands of PC games on Steam, and PC gamers deserve only the best. This might not appeal to many gamers due to the lack of PC-centric design. It's unclear why this never made it to the video game console appliances it seems to have been designed for.
A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result.
There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.
Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the GameMaker Studio construction kit/toolset. This is a very poor quality toolset favoured by amateur developers as it's cheap and requires little in the way of development skill, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities. Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine. GameMaker Studio is most commonly used to make retro pixel shovelware and cash grabs.
A strong argument can be made that construction kits like GameMaker Studio should never be used to make games for profit, as the "developer", DIG Games has done here. These construction kits are intended to teach people some of the basic principles of game development, and to make small demos to pass around with friends. They're not intended to replace to actual work of real, professional game developers. So it's inappropriate when amateurs try to use these for profit, without any actual, real game development effort taking place. This doesn't result in products that have any real meaningful value for gamers.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was [b]only 2 players[/b]. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 130 million gamers on Steam and well over 140,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
Let's talk about price and the value this represents for us gamers. Should you buy this game? Is it among the best the Steam catalogue has to offer?
Moonlit has the laughable, eye-watering price of around $4 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the unethical nature of the developer.
[quote][b][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/b]
Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.[/quote]
