Platform: PC
Genre: Action, Adventure, Puzzle, Dark Fantasy, Top Down, 

Top-down action-adventure odyssey Moroi is what happens when you combine Romanian folklore with heavy metal, dark fantasy mixed with a David Lynch Fever Dream, and janky controls.

You play as a bearded amnesiac who has to find his way out of the nightmarish landscape he’s in. He starts in a prison cell where he’s given his first adventure game-style puzzle: he has to feed a nearby machine with food to get the item needed to convince the nearby mage to forfeit his goods; the fetch quest eventually ends with you getting a sword that breaks down the door nearby, in which you get waylaid by the prison guards.

You then end up getting through a garden where you control a puppet who has to feed its limbs to nearby talking trees (who get more and more bitter the longer you talk to them), then go through another series of walkways and dungeons that get progressively more metallic and hellish. You also end up with different melee and ranged weapons ranging from chainguns to laser beams shooting out of a sentient puppet’s head. It defies logic and sense, with all of it making sense in the game’s climax (sort of) after less than 8 hours.

What really grips you in Moroi’s indie efforts is that its oddity and mystique does not let up. It just gets gory, weird, spooky, deranged, and all of the above while keeping you enticed so you find out what’s at the end of the literal alien centipede orifice tunnel. You’ll be getting a ton of imagery and creepy-yet-alluring visuals you won’t be forgetting anytime soon.

Fiddling In The Dark

Unfortunately, you have to go through the game’s wonky combat controls. Your protagonist plays like a top-down action hero (think the top-down stages in Contra III) and you aim with your mouse button like you would in analog-heavy shooters like Geometry Wars. Your melee attacks come with light and heavy flavours, and you can execute enemies and steal more health when you fill up your meter. Your ranged attacks are equally powerful, but require cooldown time if you fire it too long.

The awkward parts come in when you try executing your attacks. They don’t reach as far as they should, and sometimes they land without you coming in close contact with them. It’s inconsistent, though not to a hugely frustrating degree where you keep on dying. Rather, the game throws you a bone and decides you need to progress further so it just lets you score free critical hits without explaining why.

Boss fights can also get cryptic; while their weaknesses and patterns can be figured out eventually, there is really no clear indicator to push you in the right direction should you feel lost. Also, all important text prompts and info from fighting to puzzles appear once; there’s no record of them stored in-game so if you missed it once, too bad. This, and other minor user interface and control issues, all add up to make your experience in Moroi a mixed one.

Moroi is quite a jank-fest, where even some puzzles don’t end up getting solved despite getting the solution down pat, forcing a restart. Thankfully the checkpoints are generous enough that it’s just a mild irritance. Moroi is rough, sure, but its mysterious air surrounding its dark fantasy story is intriguing enough to make you endure its faults, because there really isn’t anything quite like its flavour.

That said, if your tolerance towards Eurojank isn’t high enough, I don’t blame you for skipping it entirely.

Final Score: 60/100

Review code provided by publishers.