In Moroi, your nameless character starts out in a prison cell with no memory of where he is or what happened. You walk a few steps, and you find a giant talking machine called the Royal Meat Grinder. It wants to taste you, so you kindly enter its mouth. A few seconds later, it's burning, blood is coming out of its mouth, it's talking into another void, and it gives you the same item.
In another cell, there's a prisoner eating one of his own arms. You chat with him for a bit before lightning strikes him and kills him. You talk to another prisoner who looks like a pig, and his cryptic speech ends when his head explodes, revealing a scroll hidden inside what remains of his neck. You use this scroll to summon your first weapon, a sword, in another room.
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| Credit _Moroi |
These are the first minutes of Moroi, an indie game developed by studio Violet Saint and Romanian director Alexandro Stanescu. It surprised me with its ambiguous characters, strange but intuitive puzzles, and an art style inspired by Machinarium but with a medieval twist and Lynchian scenarios.
Once you get your first weapon and prepare to escape from prison, you get your first taste of combat. It's not very exciting: Moroi plays like a regular ARPG, in an isometric view, using a melee weapon with the left click and a gun with the right click.
The first wave of enemies you'll face are regular soldiers, with a larger soldier with more health and an AoE appearing from time to time, but nothing more. Combat works fine, and your attacks feel precise and heavy. Plus, you can roll to dodge your enemies and fill up a bar that provides you with healing orbs, which adds a little variation to the mix.
Now what impressed me the most was everything surrounding the combat. At one point, you enter a kitchen, and in one of its rooms is a talking duck. For some reason, the duck gives you all of its teeth as a reward, and so you add them to your sword to create a deadlier version of it. The sympathetic duck keeps talking to you, and you see blood coming out of its mouth in the dialogue boxes.
Yet perhaps my biggest complaint with the Moroi demo was this part of its presentation. And the menus don't look particularly good, with a font that doesn't suit the game's style. Its mesmerizing writing, inspired by authors like Franz Kafka, Douglas Adams, and Alan Moore, looks a little plain in those dialogue boxes, and that robs it of some of its impact.
Luckily the art style in the scenarios and character designs make up for these issues. A mysterious NPC will trap you in a room that looks inspired by the late David Lynch, with red curtains on the walls and a perfectly symmetrical patterned floor. And it's here that you face the longest waves of enemies, with a cute 'die' message appearing on a TV screen in the middle, and little coloured papers coming out of nowhere once you've completed the section.
That last part of the 30 minute demo sealed the deal for me. I don't want to spoil it too much, but you're taken to a completely different open area that looks like it's from a completely different game. So you can just wander around a beautiful garden with different flowers, controlling something that looks like a soft plush. So of course, it doesn't take long for this section to take a dark turn of events, and you might get a little upset before you're back to our starting character.
Moroi is coming to Steam itself on April 30. I can't wait to see what other nightmares the Violet Saints have in store.
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