Moss: The Forgotten Relic

Going to keep this review pretty casual. I'd recommend this game, but with a few caveats. It's a very beautiful, well-optimized action-adventure game that never crashed on me. Not even once. It has a nice soundtrack and the gameplay isn't too shabby. Took me 11.9 hours to do 44 out of 46 achievements and beat the game. I skipped the last two achievements because I just don't care enough to try for them. You could do worse with your money, but here come the caveats. - The fixed camera angles aren't always the best. They can make it hard to judge distances for jumps and often favor form over function. At issue is that Moss: The Forgotten Relic began its life as a VR-only game. It came out in two parts (Moss: Book 1 was 4.5 hours or so. Moss: Book 2 was about 6.5 hours. The DLC for Moss: Book 1 was about 30 minutes) and the central gimmick was that you were floating above the game, looking down from a bird's eye view upon the action. If you didn't like your camera angle, you just moved your head to adjust your view. Very cute and novel, but you can't really do that on this version, which was retrofitted to run on standard displays. So you're at the mercy of pre-determined camera angles that can only do so much. It can get very tiresome and frustrating after a while. - The game has a few minor controller issues. There are 14 buttons on a standard controller, game developers. Please use them. There is no need for the hammer trap spell to use the same button as the "Reader Interact" button. Also, switching between weapons can get finnicky. Sometimes pressing the left direction button would pull out Quill's chakram with no fuss. Sometimes it would do nothing and I'd have to press it twice, at which point I had a 50/50 chance between Quill pulling out her chakram and Quill pulling out her chakram only to then immediately put it away. Felt oddly broken. - Some visual clues for collectibles once you're down to the last few would be lovely. Looking for the last two magic dusts in a sprawling level just sucks. Oh, and bonus fun... they're often not even in the actual level. They're in the next level, in a hidden relic room. It was SO much fun finding that out the hard way after running through a level twice-over, scouring every corner and nook for NOTHING. Hur de hur. - Personal taste: some aspects of this game have aged poorly for me. A central conceit is that the player is an ethereal "READER" who floats above the scene and helps the main character Quill on her quest. Everything in the game is framed as a story being told from a book, and Quill won't survive the tale without the Reader's help. So the left stick moves Quill and the right stick moves a glowing blue orb, which is the Reader's influence. As a Reader, you can break things, grab platforms to move them around, hold onto enemies to stun them while Quill winds up her weapon, and so on. Fine... ... but man, being a Reader is tedious. Every character refers to you as a "they/them," which I have zero patience for anymore. "THEY are my friend. I am so grateful for THEM. THEY and I are going to save my uncle!" I'm an "it," sweets. A singular creepy, ghostly it with a Noh mask for a face. Keep your gender studies to yourself and let's just do this thing. But no, Quill can't do that! She's just too fun and QUIRKY, y'all. Every twenty minutes or so she asks for a high-five, at which point she starts doing autistic dances like she's filming a Tik Tok brain-rot video. Joys upon joys. Then she'll chat with you about her feelings while doing sign language, which... why? I know that the septum-pierced committees that helped make this game probably felt that including sign language would make deaf people feel seen and represented, but there is no indication in the story that the Reader can't hear and Quill can speak perfectly fine. There is no need whatsoever for the sign language. It's just tacky. ___________________ Not a lot of caveats, right? Sure, but near the end... man were they getting to me. I was tired of fighting the camera perspectives and very weary of Quill's excesses as a character. I know they wanted me to find her charming, but I got to the point of periodically checking the magic dust / forgotten tome page counters to see how close I was getting to the final boss. I was grateful when the game ended and I probably won't be playing it ever again, but still. I had my fun and it was worth the price of admission. Again, I'd recommend it. Just not wholeheartedly.