Moroi Review: Does Artistry Shine Through Flawed Gameplay?

Today, we enter the Cosmic Engine, a place where reality becomes warped and twisted, where demonic ducks can talk, and heads randomly explode. If Alfred Hitchcock had ever made a video game, it might look something like today’s topic of discussion: Moroi, a bizarre hack-and-slash meets puzzle game from indie developer Violet Saint. But is Moroi a surreal and satisfying gaming experience, or did it drive me completely mad? Let’s find out in our full review!

If it wasn’t obvious from my intro, Moroi is a surreal indie gaming experience that won’t be for everyone. Its mix of combat and puzzles certainly paints the canvas for what a video game is, but its offbeat humor, nonsensical script, and unusual art style are far from what would be considered “the norm.” And hey, that’s great—we love indies for taking creative risks—but in the case of Moroi, it fails to nail down many of the fundamentals of its gameplay that would make it fun to play, mainly with its ho-hum combat engine, poor puzzle design, and various bugs that might have players running for the hills before reaching its conclusion around the 6- to 8-hour mark.

Moroi opens inside a prison-like structure, where players take control of a character suffering from amnesia who is trying to figure out how he ended up inside a living nightmare. Expect to interact with a bloated, disfigured, pig-like creature straight out of a Nine Inch Nails video, a faceless man whose view is obscured by a rather awkward camera angle (a common occurrence throughout gameplay and not always a creative choice), and a talking meat grinder that wants to eat you—all within the first five minutes. It sets a fascinating tone, and admittedly, I was initially quite curious to see how things were going to play out.

But soon you learn what Moroi the video game is, an entirely separate entity from Moroi the wannabe arthouse film. These two concepts go together like cats and cucumbers, leading to an often all-too-dysfunctional experience. In Moroi, your main goal is to escape the tower-like structure you’ve been confined to. This involves a good deal of running around from point A to point B, completing random fetch quests for characters, occasionally slashing and blasting down foes with a few different weapons and guns, cracking some very poorly designed puzzles, and taking down equally underwhelming bosses.

On paper, it’s a neat idea. The game’s top-down perspective conjured memories of the PS1 classic Loaded. Heck, the atmosphere and some of the set pieces you’ll encounter are downright awesome. If only the game were competently written and fun to play. Moroi’s menu design is honestly decent, you have a journal that keeps track of where you are and what you should be doing next that works effectively enough. Unfortunately, most of what you will be doing just isn’t all that interesting.

Most tasks involve busting down doors with your hammer, delivering odd items like bones to a wizard or salt to an old woman, or hooking a missing valve into its slot. Exploration is tedious, uneventful, and downright boring at times. Moroi tries to spice things up a bit with a few combat encounters, but here it doesn’t fare much better. Most enemies are easily dispatched by swinging your weapon wildly, often offering little in the way of resistance. However, if for whatever reason things get too tough, there are three difficulty options that can be toggled at any time throughout gameplay.

The real challenge comes from Moroi’s awkward control scheme, which the developer recommends using a mouse-and-keyboard configuration for. So, if you aren’t great with a mouse-and-keyboard setup like me, you’re doomed to clunky, irritating movement and attacks, particularly when trying to aim a gun to hit a specific target. The game is certainly playable on a controller, but not advisable if you can help it. Enemies aren’t particularly smart, but sometimes come at you in endless waves, which is most annoying during the few boss encounters that are present.

And on the topic of bosses, Moroi’s assortment of baddies just isn’t very enjoyable to take down. Defeating a wizard boss halfway through the game involves running around an arena, slapping schlong-shaped worms before inevitably having to beat the wizard’s clones and deal damage directly to him. It’s slow, tedious, and not challenging at all, as plenty of health is scattered across the room, so you’ll never feel any sense of accomplishment. The only real challenge comes from the game’s poor optimization, as Moroi features no shortage of framerate drops that frustrated me to no end.

One might be able to forgive a ho-hum combat engine and tiring exploration, but Moroi’s puzzle design may be the biggest offender of all. These puzzles aren’t tough; they are simply as meandering as everything else in the game and can be brute-forced through without much thought and a bit of patience. There are creative concepts, certainly, such as having to regurgitate blood, but the design—well, I am not sure how to say this nicely—is half-assed. The clues given don’t always feel like clues, and I never once had a single "aha!" moment throughout.

And so, in an effort not to beat up on Moroi too much, I will say that its greatest strength is in the creativity of its world and setting. The characters you meet are truly interesting to look at, and even elicited a chuckle out of me from time to time, though admittedly, some of those laughs came from the shocking amount of grammatical errors in the script. It’s artistic to a fault, however, as making sense of the game’s narrative is about as easy as explaining a David Lynch movie to your parents.

But that said, the visual design and artistry of the game should be commended. Many of the environments evoke a gloomy, moody atmosphere, and for what it’s worth, the sound design is solid, with evocative, dread-inducing synths and orchestration sporadically littered about. The truth of the matter is, there are talented people that worked on the art of Moroi. I applaud them, and I also feel bad that its one-of-a-kind backdrop is ultimately squandered on a game that isn’t enjoyable to play. The game does offer different outcomes and endings, but considering getting through a single playthrough can be a bit of a struggle, it’s tough to imagine gamers going back for more. Overall, it feels like the developers of Moroi succeeded in crafting an intriguing world but fell short in delivering a compelling gameplay experience. I’m confident a flurry of patches that will attempt to piece together the broken shards of Moroi are imminent, but I fear that the core gameplay loop may be too broken to stick multiple band-aids on.

MEDIOCRE