Moss: The Forgotten Relic

Very nice game. I always wanted to play it, but I don’t have a VR headset, and even if I wanted to play this and – still – want to play “Gorn” 1 & 2, I wasn’t getting a VR for two games… What’s nice is that this is a faithful and quite smartly adapted flatscreen rendition of the original title, you still get a lot of the references, story beats, and even character recognitions to the player as if you were experiencing the title in VR, but it’s all happening through your flatscreen TV. They adapted the cursor you used for controlling objects in the environment to the mouse and the joystick in your gamepad, and it works quite beautifully; picture “Super Mario Galaxy” where you use the cursor to interact with the world around you, but instead of a Wiimote, you’re using a mouse and a joystick. It works quite well! The perspective is mainly a combination of a fixated isometric view; it works well for the most part… I believe the original VR game used this, but I’m finding it a bit annoying when it comes to platforming. There are platforming sections were failing means an instant death (although each room takes like a minute to complete, puzzle or combat wise, and there are checkpoints, so it’s not that big a deal), but still! I wish we had more control over our characters movement. She’s a mouse for Christ’s sake; she should be able to jump higher! Generally, the controls are quite good and tight, very responsive and simple. My only real gripe with the controls here is that there’s no rebinding of any kind, not for the controller (beyond Steam input), not for the freaking mouse and keyboard. This is very annoying, and I’ve noticed a recent trend where more and more games are lacking keyboard and mouse rebinding support, I don’t like this, but in this particular game, it isn’t that much of an issue for me personally for two reasons: 1. The game is very simple when it comes to its controls. Left mouse to interact, attack, WASD to move around, right mouse to interact with objects around the world using the cursor, space to jump. Simple! 2. The binds, like I’ve mentioned in the last point, are quite good if you’re accustomed to conventional keyboard & mouse binds. There’s nothing weird or funky about it, you can ever attack/interact using the “E” key as well. So that’s pretty good! The game is told as a fairly tale, and I find this approach works quite well here because it’s done in a prudent, contained way, in other cases I’ve seen this used to ad nauseum where the narrator won’t shut up; here that isn’t the case, thank God! I like this approach, the music, visuals, and performance have all been quite good. I experienced a crash in the demo, but that hasn’t been the case here in the full release. The main problems I have with the game really, are related to the lack of options and settings. I want to see my keyboard and mouse layouts, if you don’t let me change the binds, at least give me a menu for me to see the full binds of the game. There are also not that many graphic settings. Vsync, resolution options, depth of field, and that’s that. The game also lacks settings to customize the cursor, I wish I could change the size of the cursor or even make it a simple dot, as it is, I find it to be a bit intrusive at times when I’m playing, because it’s this huge blue cursor with a persistent particle dot inside it. It’s not that annoying… but I do wish there were settings to customize it, maybe even change its color? Even then though, I really like the game. It’s not that challenging at all, so you might be put off by that and the slow-linear nature of the levels, but I’m personally finding it, purely as a story driven experience, to be a remarkable game. Kudos to the team!