Moonring

[h1]You Don't Always Get What You Pay For[/h1] Ok, I just purchased the DLC because I have no idea why this game is free. It has it's flaws, yes, but it's a good game and some honest work clearly went into it. Moonring plays like Tales of Maj'Eyal, Stoneshard and the such: enemies and the environment only act/react when you take an action. I love this mechanic, and I wish more games were based on it. There's a big world to explore, ruins, dungeons, many different enemies, bosses, and a bunch of lore entries to be read, plus a skill-tree to be unlocked. There's a decent amount of fun to be had here, and the developer was quite generous to make the game free. But Moonring has some flaws, or things that I'm not a fan of, that ultimately made me stop playing before I actually finished it. There are very few options of weapons and armor to be equipped in the game. If you want to play as an agile character, for instance, your best option is to wear leather armor, which can be purchased in the very first city you visit. There's nothing better in the entire game. There isn't even a valid second option, really. You get some agency over what [i]kind[/i] of weapon you'll use (though there are only 2 or 3 weapons of each type in the entire game), amulets you'll wear, and a few helms can also help shape a build. But that's it, that's all. There's a "hidden magic system" in the game, as mentioned in the "Features" here in the store page, but I couldn't figure out how that works. I unlocked the [i]first[/i] syllable to 3 different spells and... then what? That's all I got, and trying to Yell them along with some Dictionary words I found yielded no result. So, as far as [i]I[/i] am concerned, there's no magic system in the game at all. Skills are used by spending Energy, and you can only get Energy by hitting enemies. It doesn't regenerate on its own. There's one skill that can sacrifice 50% of your HP to give you Energy, and one scarce and fairly expensive item you can purchase (only in one town, I think) to recover some as well but, as a rule, you'll constantly struggle to use any of your skills due to a lack of Energy. 80-90% of the time, you'll be using your normal attack. Figuring out what you need to do, and where, requires talking to a bunch of NPCs and/or finding and reading books. Every relevant such entry gets written down in your Notes, which you can access whenever you want. But it's a mess -- it's a long list of items that you have no idea which ones matter and which ones don't. The world is fairly big, and traversing it becomes rather annoying after a while. There's a ship you can eventually sail around, and a fast-travel system that you may or may not realize exists (I only found out it was there like an hour before I decided to stop playing the game), but on land or asea, you'll run into enemies and be forced to fight rather often. And killing enemies doesn't yield XP (there's no experience in the game; you gain skill points by completing Gods' goals or by consuming a certain rare item), weapons, armor, or anything particularly interesting. The best you can get from them is some money. There's one legendary weapon of each kind in the game. But you can only get one of them, because there's only one key that opens any/all the legendary weapons' locations. (So don't expect to be able to use a legendary Rapier + legendary Shield, for instance. Also, if you pick the Wolf as your god, you'd better look up the legendary weapons online before going for the Axe.) The game autosaves [i]only[/i]. So if you mess something up hard -- like by grabbing the wrong legendary weapon -- there's no going back. [b]In short:[/b] This is a good game, but it would have been much better with more character-customization options, with more room to grow. Once you acquire all the items you want -- which are all purchased in towns, except for your chosen legendary weapon -- and get some 4 or 5 skills you'll actually use, there isn't much encouragement for you to keep playing. You can't grow any stronger than that, so you'll just keep doing the exact same thing over and over again until you collect the 5 Relics you are supposed to and then... do whatever comes after that, if anything does. And you are fully built before you even get the first Relic, or right after it. You can keep going to see where the story leads, but figuring out what to do is kind of a pain due to the messy Notes system, and you'll have absolutely no idea how to do some stuff because several "leads" in the game are very cryptic. Upon realizing I'd never become any stronger, having failed to figure out the "magic system" and other things I wanted to do, having recovered 2 Relics out of 5, I decided to stop playing. Still, I had a good time for 16 hours or so.