Chronicles of the Moorwakker by Jupp
Playtime: 7 hours 57 minutes
This made me want to talk about:
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A technically-accurate description of the premise I couldn’t get out of my head: socially ostracized young woman catches animal-based necromantic magic after falling into her basement with inadequate PPE
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To contextualize my playtime—this game is not that big in terms of the number of locations or amount of words. If I was invulnerable in combat I think I would have completed it in, maybe an hour? The playtime reflects a LOT of reloading and trying to “pass” the same combats.
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This is a combat-heavy RPG implemented via IF.
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I was a big fan of the setting, magic system, and general vibes. If my theory that the name is a riff on “moorwalker” is correct, it’s certainly appropriate because there’s a *lot* of moors to be walked. I really liked the dark “everything hurts but what hurts more” feeling of the magic system, and the protagonist’s “seems like she might be evil” vibe was refreshing.
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The art and sound effects were great and really increased the grippiness of combat. All the opponents and most NPCs had unique portraits, as did the animal spectres you summon. (And not sure if this was intentional, but it cracked me up that the cat, Tallamoor, who I definitely used to straight up murder plenty of people, had the appearance of a normal housecat.)
[love you, Tallamoor. Ok, actually I’m also a big fan of Krull and Immersturm. Or just all of the spectres.]
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The combat system is most of the meat of this piece, and I thought it was really well done. There was a steep learning curve at the beginning to figure out how the different attacks and abilities on offer interacted with my stats and the opponents’ stats. The game’s built in combat display has all of the information you will need—and very useful hover-over tooltips that will explain, say, every modifier—but it is a lot to pick up initially. (And I was a huge fan of the “forecast” section in the combat display, which really cut down on the need to remember a lot of numbers at the same time.)
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The individual combats were well balanced (and also pretty challenging on hard mode) to be barely achievable. I spent a lot of time tensely wandering around the map on my last 5 hp hoping I wasn’t going to encounter anything aggressive, and I had to try several times at a lot of the fights, but it was all fair and accomplishable with the right strategy. (Which, as evidenced, is an addictive combination for me!) The game really delivered the classic knife-edge moments of “wow I’m going to lose if I don’t roll at the high end of this range right now” and “wow, I’m going to die literally on my own turn if the roll for this self-inflicted penalty comes up anything except 2.”
Notable line:
My one fervent wish:
I thought the combat was really well done and well-balanced throughout. I wish that I had felt that the choice-based aspects of the game (what do you ask the character to do, how do you interact with or talk to NPCs) felt equally developed. There was definitely some of this, I just would have liked a bit more.
For example, there were stats tracking “love” “will” and “fate” that I think were tied to player decisions, but I never had a clear sense of what I was doing or not doing that affected those stats.
In general, the “fight everything” path through the game felt a lot more developed and like it was the intended path. (After the game foiled my attempts to not kill the first two people I came across, I certainly took the hint.) I see that there is an achievement suggesting you can avoid most fights—maybe I’m missing something, but the ways it seems to me you can avoid fighting is (i) not visiting some locations at all, thus avoiding the bandit / angry bear / that is at that location or (ii) maybe rarely (but not always) by surrendering or agreeing with what the person wants; and in aggregate this didn’t seem like it would be a particularly satisfying way to play (I guess I should have tried but It’s particularly hard for me to imagine how to avoid fighting anyone in the final confrontation.)
Overall, darkly-atmospheric RPG that may suck you in with well-balanced combat mechanics
Gameplay tips / typos
Others mentioned the game gates you out of some areas—that may be the case but I did also end up in one area (Oythe) and wished I hadn’t because I hadn’t done the prerequisites, so I maybe wouldn’t count on the game stopping you.
Gameplay:
Here’s a couple of general tips about how the gameplay works that I would have liked to know, but that I don’t think rise to the level of full spoilers.
- they’re not kidding about hard mode having limited save points—I think I found three altogether
- other than combat, the main form of puzzle is a “memory tests” on prior text from the game
- Speaking of combat:
- you generally will want to look at the opponents stats and modifiers, which you can see at the beginning, and then formulate a specific strategy in response. For example, if the enemy has a very high “defense” stat, you might design a strategy to use spectres that have “critical” attacks because those bypass “defense.”
- your “turn” is first, but normally the enemy still gets a turn even if you’ve dealt them fatal damage on your turn. Some attacks have a “fatal” modifier which means an enemy defeated by that attack will NOT get its turn after, which is very powerful
- you always have the option to increase how much damage you take to summon / sustain summoning. At first you’ll probably notice that sometimes you need to increase this or else the summoning won’t succeed. Keep in mind that you may also want to increase it at other times to make the summoned spectre’s abilities more powerful (i.e., you want to have fewer turns of more powerful abilities)
A few typos I saw:
- “Murder of Crows looses 9 Points of Vitality [Infection]” should be “loses”
- “mysterious und exotic?” should be “and”
- when fighting the snakes in the moor, “Vitality Loss: 5 Points <span style=”font-variant: small-caps;[-1]” probably not intended to discuss style