Moonscars

Every few months another studio decides that FromSoftware’s design language can be flattened into two dimensions, and every few months the result lands somewhere between homage and photocopy. Moonscars, released September 27, 2022 by the Serbian studio Black Mermaid and published by Balor Games, is one of the rare ones that earns the comparison instead of borrowing it. It is not a Hollow Knight clone with a stamina bar bolted on. It’s a nasty, gorgeous action-platformer with its own ideas about what death should cost you.

You play Grey Irma, a “clayborne” — a warrior sculpted from mud and bone by an artisan called the Sculptor, and sent hunting through a moon-drowned world of witches, plague and betrayal to find out what, exactly, she is. That premise sounds like standard grimdark boilerplate on paper. In practice, it’s a load-bearing mechanic: if you’re made of clay, dying and being remade isn’t a game-over screen. It’s Tuesday.

Market position is the interesting part. Moonscars launched into the most crowded corridor in indie gaming — the post-Hollow Knight, post-Dead Cells 2D action space, where the floor for pixel art is already absurdly high and everyone’s combat is “weighty.” Black Mermaid’s play was to lean harder into the souls-like half of the souls-metroidvania hyphen than almost anyone else. Combat is deliberate and punishing. Bosses hit like trucks. The story is told in fragments and shrugs. That specialization is exactly what makes it a mixed proposition: the players it’s built for will likely love it, and everyone else will likely bounce off the second region and never come back.

Both reactions are legitimate. That’s the honest headline here.

• Stamina-Free Souls Combat: No stamina meter. Attacks, dodges and parries flow without a green bar governing your patience, which shifts the skill ceiling from resource management to pure timing and spacing. The parry is the centerpiece — tight, readable, and specifically tuned to punish greed.
• The Moonhunger System: Dying doesn’t just cost you your Bloodstained Bone glyphs (the accrued currency you use to permanently upgrade Irma). It also feeds Moonhunger, a corruption meter that makes every enemy in the world stronger until you cleanse it. Death compounds. That is the whole game in one sentence.
• Ichor and Witchery: Kills harvest ichor, which fuels a spell system called Witchery alongside throwable specialty weapons. It’s a resource loop that rewards aggression instead of turtling — a deliberate counterweight to the punishment economy.
• Nonlinear Hand-Painted Regions: Interlocking areas with hidden shortcuts, optional bosses and multiple endings, plus a New Game+ style loop and 34 achievements for players who want to run it back.

The Gameplay Loop

Strip Moonscars down and you find one decision repeated a few hundred times: bank or push.

Every enemy you kill and every secret you pry out of a wall adds to your Bloodstained Bone glyph count. Those glyphs are your permanent progression — the difference between Irma who dies to a mid-tier plague knight and Irma who deletes one. But glyphs only convert into upgrades when you commit them at a shrine. Die before you commit, and they burn. Worse, they don’t just vanish into a corpse you can sprint back and recover, Dark Souls-style. They’re gone, and Moonhunger ticks up, and the enemy that killed you is now measurably harder than it was ninety seconds ago.

This is the design’s masterstroke, and it’s worth being precise about why. Most souls-likes punish death with a flat tax — you lose your souls, you walk back, you try again with identical odds. Moonscars punishes death with compounding interest. A bad run doesn’t reset you to neutral; it digs a hole. The correct response to three deaths in a row is often to retreat, cleanse the meter, and re-approach from a position of strength — which is an uncommon thing for an action game to teach. The game is asking you to manage tilt. It is a mechanical implementation of “walk away from the table.”

On paper, it produces the kind of tension the genre rarely manages. The design puts you at a shrine with a fat stack of glyphs, looking down a corridor at an unexplored door, forced into an actual argument with yourself.

Combat

The stamina-free swordplay is the other thing Black Mermaid got right. Removing the stamina bar is a bigger deal than it sounds. In most 2D souls-likes, the failure state is running out of green — you whiff three swings, your bar empties, and you eat a hit you saw coming and couldn’t answer. Moonscars removes that layer entirely and replaces it with commitment. Attacks have real recovery frames. Dodges have real windows. If you get hit, it’s because you read the fight wrong, not because you mismanaged an abstraction.

The parry is where the game earns its reputation. It’s tight — unforgiving on the front end, extremely generous on the payoff — and it’s tuned specifically to catch the player who wants one more hit. Greed is the enemy. Once that lesson lands, the boss fights transform from walls into conversations. The encounter design is confident, legible, and mean in a way that feels authored rather than accidental.

Witchery and throwables round it out. Ichor harvested from kills funds spells, which means the game’s economy actively pushes you toward engagement rather than avoidance. That’s a coherent design philosophy: fight more, get more, spend it fighting. It works.

Where It Falls Apart: Navigation

And then there’s the map.

Moonscars’ map is the single worst piece of design in the package, and it damages everything around it. The world is nonlinear — interlocking regions, layered shortcuts, verticality — which is exactly the structure that demands a legible map. What you get instead is a diagram that’s difficult to parse, thin on landmarks, and frequently unhelpful about which of the four exits from a room you haven’t taken yet.

The downstream cost is severe. Confusion turns into backtracking. Backtracking through a world where enemies respawn aggressively turns into tedium. And tedium in a game where every death compounds turns into resentment. The combat system built to feel tense and deliberate on the way in becomes a toll booth on the way back out. This isn’t a nitpick — it’s the flaw most likely to drive players away, and the primary reason this is a mixed verdict rather than a strong recommendation.

Black Mermaid did respond. Post-launch patches added map markers, difficulty options, and a raft of balance and quality-of-life fixes. Credit where it’s earned: the studio shipped real repairs rather than a changelog of typo corrections. But patched-in markers are a bandage on a structural problem. The underlying level topology still doesn’t communicate itself, and no amount of pin-dropping fully solves a world that was laid out without a clear mental model for the player to build.

The Story Problem

The narrative is cryptic to the point of opacity. That’s a stylistic choice with an obvious lineage, and there’s no objection to it in principle — environmental storytelling and withheld context are legitimate tools. But Dark Souls earned its ambiguity by making the world itself readable even when the plot wasn’t. Moonscars asks you to piece together Irma, the Sculptor, and the clayborne through sparse dialogue and item text while you’re already fighting a losing battle with the map. Two layers of confusion stacked on each other don’t produce mystery. They produce disengagement — and given the multiple endings on offer, that’s a real content loss, not just a vibe complaint.

This is where Moonscars is close to untouchable. The hand-painted pixel art is exceptional — not “good for an indie,” but top-tier for the medium. The palette is committed: bone-white moonlight, wet blacks, arterial reds, backdrops that read as painted rather than tiled. Irma’s animation set has real weight; the sword arcs land with a follow-through that sells impact before the hit-stop even registers.

Sound design matches. The audio has the low, wet, unpleasant quality the setting demands, and the combat feedback is built crisp enough to fight partly by ear once the tells are internalized.

The UI is the weak link, and it’s the same story as the map: atmospheric styling wins over information clarity. Menus are handsome and occasionally hard to read at a glance. On the technical side, the launch period drew scattered reports of performance hitches and imprecise platforming — the platforming complaint being the more damning of the two, because a game this demanding about frame-perfect parries can’t afford a jump that feels approximate. The patch cycle addressed a good deal of it. It didn’t erase all of it.

Steam / PC is the definitive version. Mouse and keyboard is a non-starter here — plug in a controller, full stop — but PC offers an uncapped framerate for the tight parry windows, and it’s the platform where the patch cadence has been most visible. It’s also where the community lives: the guides, maps and boss breakdowns Steam players have built are, frankly, the map the game should have shipped with. That’s a backhanded compliment, but it’s a practical one.

Nintendo Switch is a more complicated recommendation. The good news: this is a pick-up-and-die-repeatedly structure that suits handheld sessions perfectly, and the art style — dense, high-contrast pixel work — is exactly the kind that survives a smaller display. The bad news is the same as everywhere else, only worse. A hard-to-read map is meaningfully harder to read on a 6.2-inch screen. Fine UI text and cramped area diagrams do not scale down gracefully, and the platform’s horsepower ceiling makes launch-era performance complaints more relevant here than on a modern PC. Play docked if you’re serious about the bosses. Play handheld if you’re serious about exploring, and keep a browser open.

Moonscars is a specialist’s game that keeps getting mistaken for a generalist’s game. Get past the navigation, learn the parry, and internalize that Moonhunger is a warning system rather than a punishment, and there’s one of the sharpest 2D combat systems anyone has shipped this decade — wrapped in art that most studios with ten times the budget can’t match.

But the front door is jammed. A world this nonlinear needed a map this game never built, and the patches that followed treated the symptom rather than the disease. The result is a game that asks for a real investment before it gives anything back — and one where a meaningful chunk of players will decide, entirely reasonably, that they don’t owe it that patience.

Black Mermaid made something with genuine conviction here, and conviction is rarer than polish. But conviction alone doesn’t earn a recommendation for most people. Know what you’re signing up for: Moonscars will kill you a hundred times, and roughly forty of those deaths will be because you didn’t know where you were going.