So picture this: You wake up in an unearthly prison full of robots that hunger for human flesh, pig-faced men prone to exploding and revealing their necks are full of parchment that contain incantations, wizards that seem to hate you, and flushable toilets. Mondays, am I right?
Welcome to the Madness: What is Moroi?
Moroi is a grimdark fairytale action RPG that does fit all those descriptors but also doesn’t. It’s weird in an Eastern European way where what I wrote above is actually a straightforward description of the first section of the game (or at least the demo build). You are trying to escape from this prison where everyone else seems to know what’s going on and, oh, yes, most everyone is a horrible monstrosity. Some of them are helpful but a lot of them are trying to kill you.
The action-RPG part is also a misnomer: There’s some very satisfactory top down isometric RPG combat in the vein of Hotline Miami, with a wonderful sword weapon (upgradable if you rescue a duck and use his teeth to enhance your sword power, of course) and a gatling gun that is only prone to overheating as a downside. And the combat is gory and pleasantly floaty, easy to pick up but still rewarding when you pull off a sick fatality or combat roll out of the way of an…exploding skull, something that looks like a lizard with the face of some ominous pliers, that sort of thing.
Story? Progression? Who Needs Them?
So like I said, there’s elements of an action-RPG: there’s combat, there’s a story, and so forth, but this isn’t so much “an action-RPG” in the sense that you’re like “Oh, I can’t wait to get to level 23 and unlock Flamewall”. It’s more “There’s an action wrapper around exploring this deeply weird story”, which I am not attempting to explain because I don’t think I could and I don’t think enough drugs exist to explain what’s happening in the demo.
And also because, look, look at the screenshots. You’re not going to play this for satisfying combat. You’re going to play it because it’s weird Eastern European-feeling dark fantasy Hotline Miami. If that resonates, then the demo, at least, provides the hallucinatory “the creators either have schizophrenia or should be checked for it” experience the screenshots and videos promise.
Should You Play Moroi?
The publisher is Good Shepherd Entertainment (Hard West, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, Hard Reset) and the developer is Violet Saint. They’re Swiss, not Eastern European, but Switzerland is also a weird place. I’ve been there, actually, and my defining memory of visiting Zurich is walking out of the airport and seeing an ad for a brothel, because prostitution is legal there. So you’re definitely going to encounter some deep weirdness.
If you’re worried about action combat or, I don’t know, progression, there’s Path of Exile 2. If you want to explore dark European fairy tales and have no idea what’s going on and have some fun with weird combat and a hallucinatory “I am either on too many or not enough drugs for this”, Moroi is…interesting.
