Indie Game Club Issue 9: Moonring

Welcome back to Indie Game Club! This week, I am here discussing my thoughts after trying Moonring by Fluttermind. A retro-inspired RPG with inspiration from 80s computer games, complete with bump interaction and type-to-talk functionality. It's a beautiful game, and if you want to check it out, you can play it for free on Steam!

Now this is where I would announce next month's game so that you could follow along with the series; however, this is the final free indie game that we will be sharing with you in the club. It's been a pleasure hosting the club, and even though you won't see the banner anymore, you can still find a ton of great games made by independent developers by checking back on all of the other great articles published here at SUPERJUMP.

So, without further ado, here's Moonring.

I was not a gamer when Ultima IV was released; I wasn’t even a person yet. Moonring is the lens through which someone like me can peer backwards with the rose tint of those who look fondly on the era of bump interaction and note-taking. The neon glow of interspersed pixels creates an RPG world of incredible depth and magnitude that I felt as if a TRON digitizer could send me into its lands. 

The pixel artistry in Moonring is what will suck most people into its world. Seemingly doing so much more with the constraints of only a few pixels has been done a thousand different ways, and yet Dene Carter uses modern effects to achieve a loving ode to its inspiration.

This game, with its titanic overworld, can seem really overwhelming for the first few hours you spend there. Even though the game tries its absolute best to avoid note-taking, until I had familiarized myself with the main quest and its major players, I spent a long time organizing notes in the integrated automatic note taker. In some ways, I would’ve preferred to take my own notes. Using the automatic note taker feels similar to using somebody else's cheat sheet on a test, whereas it was more likely that if I had written it myself, I may not have even had to use the notes later.

My experience with retro role-playing games begins with some early NES JRPGs, and I haven’t tried to play any older PC RPGs, so I don’t have many games to compare with Moonring's gameplay. That said, I was really impressed with the dungeon hopping (yes, that is what I’m calling it now) as your pixel hero jumps from one tile to the next. Even just being able to crouch into traps to disarm them or kite enemies as your shields recharge becomes an interesting positional dance that you do with all of the dangers lurking in the dark and damp places. I was not able to make it far enough in the handful of hours that I spent with the game to achieve any special or interesting powers, but my time with the fundamentals of combat was more entertaining than I had anticipated.

The story of Moonring sucks you right into the action as your character discovers that they are what people call “dreamless”. Typically, a person is devoted to one god in their pantheon by being granted dreams by their patron. You have remained neutral in this, which makes you a candidate to become Archon should you collect the relic associated with each god as a pilgrimage. You have also come by a trinket from a secret group that knows a dark and terrible secret about this world, should you seek them out. On top of the main quest, you can go on a bevy of side quests into optional dungeons for fame and fortune.

Moonring is a beast to get started on, much like last month's game. I’m glad that I could break into such a title, though, and this free little game will be living on my Steam Deck for a while as a strong contender for rainy day entertainment. This game is given out for free; however, the donation option Moonring DX lets you give the developer $5.00 USD for his work, and he has earned it here easily. This free indie game is an incredible passion project and with the console release on the horizon, I hope that more people are given access to this awesome gem.