Moon Hunters

I'm not much of an enthusiast of roguelikes, frankly. The whole premise of always playing randomized levels and restarting anew after dying causes me some degree of annoyance. I like the idea of carving out significant feats in the simulation and obtaining enduring benefits — in other words, evolving my avatar and the world around him in a perennial fashion is important. Some of these games are quite unforgiving, while others offer ways to permanently upgrade playable characters for future runs. While Moon Hunters forces you to start each adventure from scratch, it is also structured in such a manner that its playthrough cycles weren't that frustrating to me. But is it worthy of your time? I'm kinda conflicted about it, so bear with me.
The framework here is quite simple. Every run is composed of 5 days, each one representing a level. In the first level, you get to visit one of the game's fixed towns, whereas the final boss is fought in the fifth. The three intermediary stages are all composed of randomized dungeons that take the form of forests, swamps, deserts, caves and mountains. All locations are represented on a worldmap that players get to visualize at the start of each day. The positions of each place and the paths connecting them are also randomized, so the sequence of levels is potentially varied. Moreover, a few unique areas containing specific NPCs can be explored if they show up on the map — they can be accessed before entering the dungeon instance that ends the day.
Now, Moon Hunters has some RPG mechanics. Seven main characters give players some variation of gameplay with their particular attacks and abilities. Their strengths and weaknesses are measured by a simple stat system. You don't exactly level up in this game. Instead, individual stats can be improved through the completion of tasks in towns, dungeons and special areas. NPCs provide dialogue options that increase certain attributes depending on the player's choice. They also initiate subquests that require visiting different places and talking to other folks in subsequent days, with stat bonuses as rewards. Defeated enemies drop money, which can be exchanged at shops for additional passive upgrades. At the end of each day, characters are allowed to perform certain actions at a campsite, and these will spur random events and further stat boons. One of these activities is a rudimentary cooking minigame that utilises ingredients found during normal gameplay. Each one of the 100+ recipes gives a different number of points to your attributes.
Given the short length and the randomized nature of each run, I've always felt like I was running out of time to do things in my playthroughs. Failing sidequests was a common occurrence simply because the areas, points of interest and NPCs required to advance them would simply not appear to me in a timely manner. Traits, a secondary aspect of customization, are gained by a character when he or she interacts with NPCs and special landmarks. Although they do not modify combat in any way, possessing them is mandatory to unlock unique dialogue options and specific sidequest developments. Considering that I frequently missed the opportunity to acquire their necessary traits beforehand, my quests failed constantly, and this bothered me a lot. To make things worse, there's also this constellation in the game's menu hub that serves as a barrier of sorts. To unlock the stuff blocked by it, we need to fill it with the spirits of characters that complete the campaign. Each spot in this chart asks for a toon with a particular combination of traits. As you can imagine, getting every spot filled was a pain in the arse. To me, this is certainly the most disappointing system of the game due to its unreliability.
Isometric games are one of my favorite genres, but I wasn't very much impressed by Moon Hunters' features. Sure, you get to improve your character as you play, but most enemies are either dumb, easy to dispatch or unremarkable, with the exception of a bunch of lions and rhinos that do a lot of damage. Playable characters have few attacks and skills at their disposal and you can't really change their standard builds in a significant way. Exploring dungeons is also rather boring because they're usually bare and empty, only containing a few mundane buildings or altars and perhaps a lonely person, while also being quite large — this is a big problem, since most characters move slowly. The familiars you can find (if you get the traits to recruit them, that is) are of no consequence or real usefulness to the adventure. The campaign has just two or three straightforward minibosses, who sometimes don't even show up, and that last boss I mentioned earlier. This final guy is always the same, by the way, regardless of your actions during the run. The only other boss in the game is fought in an arena scenario that you can access with a character previously saved in the constellation.
Regarding NPCs, I found most of them to be rather uninteresting, despite their varied designs and tribal backgrounds. The only character that is properly voiced in the game is the main narrator, who spells her lines during major cutscenes. All other conversations are text based, and they do not convey much of their interlocutor's personality and motivations. It feels as if these NPCs only exist to reveal some tiny trivia about the game's lore and to offer enigmatic hints for secondary quests. Speaking of the story, I couldn't really grasp it, honestly, nor could I remember specific details. The manner by which facts are presented to the player is just too obscure and vague. You don't find books or manuscripts that flesh out the story, either — which is a shame, as I think there's potential for something nice here.
On the technical side, this game's art style is probably its strongest factor. I enjoyed the pixelated visuals of enemies, magical effects and environments, even if they ended up being repetitive. Animations are also nicely fluid. Special mention should be given to the painted portraits of most living beings that appear during conversations. The artists did a good job with them, especially when it comes to the usage of colors. As for the audio, I can't speak much of it. I didn't notice any glitches affecting the sound and everything produced a reasonable effect that you would expect hearing in a fantasy setting, but the soundtrack was barely noticeable. I don't remember listening to any exceptional tunes. However, I did verify glitches in a different department: multiplayer.
Moon Hunters was designed to support up to four players in a single run. I wasn't able to experience much of this mode because, unfortunately, the servers were plagued by a buggy code that caused constant crashes. From what I could understand, this issue was more frequent and severe when the party was composed of people from distant parts of the globe. Still, I didn't see much of a difference in terms of actual mechanics while playing with other folks. Teammates can revive each other and enemies basically spawn with more hitpoints. That's it, nothing that substantially changes the loop.
After all this criticism, you must be asking why I'm vouching for the game. Well, I believe this is one of those titles that warrant the creation of a "neutral" recommendation tag on Steam. Regardless of its flaws, Moon Hunters manages to be a simplistic action-adventure title that actually works reasonably well, considering the scope of the project. It isn't meant to be a deep, engrossing RPG — it's not supposed to tell a grandiose tale nor display an expansive world —, and that's OK if the systems in place provide a concise, but smooth experience. Therefore, I think that most roguelike fans might enjoy at least a few playthroughs.

I've seen other reviews on here, and the thing I realise is people are complaining about the game because of the single player. This game was absolutely made to play MULTIPLAYER! It is a very fun multiplayer experience.
I played online coop and the repeating game play is fun because each play through you unlock new characters, new story endings, collecting the recipes and constellations is really fun too when you play with friends. You also get to try different skills each gameplay- even if you do play as the same character, and you get to explore more of the world each time too. I could see this game getting frustrating or boring when playing single player. But that's why I say it shines as a multiplayer experience with friends on voice chat :)

If you like roguelites and playing with friends, this is the game. I played this with my girlfriend from start to finish, and while she wasn't particularly great at it, it was an incredible experience. I highly suggest getting this game.

This game is a great game and it seems all the recent negative reviews dont understand the point of the game or have played the game long enough to unlock more of the story, characters and events that can happen. Played this on Playstation and missed playing it so rebought it on Steam. This game is about storytelling old myths and how they would change little by little each time the legend was told. Each play through you habe a chance to unlock more events, story, features and playable characters. I thought i had unlocked most of this game on the Playstation only to be surpised with events i never ran in to before and even unlocking a character i never knew existed. its a great fun and fast game to play with friends or youself and its meant to be fast and dont be surprised if you get the basic ending a lot, all the other endings you need to work to uncover .

Pretty art and music, each play-through is about an hour or so, so it's worked well as a collaborative game to play with friends/family who don't want to commit to much. The combat and story is simple but I think the simplicity is pleasant, and after a while my main goal was to see all the silly interactions you could have with animals and whatnot. This is probably the most charming little game I've played, and I definitely interpreted the story as something more meaningful overtime :)

Game itself is pretty dope the moon and all soundtrack is great and gameplay is chill but it's a kind of a holiday fling you have, once you're done with it you'll probably never pick it up again. Mad lots of fun tho

Good game, bad roguelike. As a game, it's fun, beautiful (not just in looks but also in atmosphere and story), mysterious and memorable. As a roguelike, it's severely lacking content and replayability. It's really sad that the developers decided to pursue a way of permadeath because it doesn't suit the game at all. At least coop is fun...