The popularization of the soulslike genre has reflected greatly on community building from the player base, from the primordial “Demon’s Souls”, the now classic “Dark Souls” franchise games, and FromSoftware’s other titles like “Bloodborne”, “Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice”, and the most recent phenomenon, “Elden Ring”.

This also impacted the streams and how people started consuming similar content from these types of games, always being interested in similar ones with soulslike elements and especially if well constructed or as mysterious in story as the universes FromSoftware helped build.

And now we have “The Moon Hell“.

The Moon Hell is harder than other soulslike games

“The Moon Hell” is an indie that drinks heavily from the worldbuilding, gameplay, and soulslike structure, and its essence raises a challenge even more than existing games of the genre. Being able to lock the camera on another enemy? No way!

Despite trying to sell itself as a soulslike game that is harder than the average soulslike game, all the difficulty of the genre comes from extremely poorly polished combat and the lack of healing items around the map.

The best and the not so best

The highlight of the game is its ambiance and exploration, which is more interesting than any combat with any enemy, which is unfair precisely because the game is forced to be harder than average. Even the most common enemies give you attacks that can take half or more than half of your life, which makes the game experience unfair from the start.

The game’s difficulty curve is not progressively fair and well-adapted, and even though the idea of the game is to be so, I find it to be a serious game design problem when you build a game on top of an artificial and empty difficulty, while other soulslikes can be naturally difficult without needing to appeal to the empty and artificial difficulty in its gameplay.

Despite the errors, this game could be attractive in stream for the curiosity of the public by the genre and to know a new game of a known genre, but can sicken and just annoy both the streamer and the public for the reasons mentioned above.

In terms of performance, the game requires very high specifications for what it presents and, although it ran well on my computer because of the settings I have, may not perform the same on all computers. At least, it seems to have a minimal range of options and graphical and resolution settings to help with the possible problems the game may present in terms of performance.

The game also complicates itself by not letting the player use a gamepad for gameplay, being mandatory the use of mouse and keyboard.

The Moon Hell

PC (2023)

Performance

Streamability

Audience Engagement

Replayability

Summary

The Moon Hell is a game that catches attention for its exceptional and visually lush setting, scenery, and graphics, as well as trying to ride the wave of the soulslike genre. The game fails in trying to be a harder experience in a genre already known for difficulty, as it does so in an artificial way and disguises a sufferably simple battle mechanic to a way of calling artificial difficulty a higher challenge for “soulslike fans”. I have no problem with challenge, but inserting artificial difficulty elements and trying to sell it to the public as a positive thing, mainly through the flaws and limitation of the game itself, is something that bothers me a bit about this title.

2.3

Ludovicoluka

I have 25 years, I produce content to internet for 4 years and I like retro games, indies and I’m an enthusiast for new launches. I have as my favorite games Donkey Kong Country 2, Super Mario World, Hollow Knight and Red Dead Redemption II, per example. I like to experiment everything and the more, the better, but I never get sick of my comfort games!