Moroi
Review
Oddball Oddity
by JamesWorcester
reviewed on PC
Enter the Bizarre
An absurdist nightmare-fuelled acid trip through the grimdark of Romanian fairytale folklore does little to effectively communicate how entirely bizarre the experience of Moroi is. When you wake up in a skyprison to find that your compatriots consist of a corpse that has chopped off and is devouring its own arm, a royal meat grinding machine that claims it has no morality and wants to eat you, and a giant headless shackled corpse that is being inflated and deflated by a metallic bellows, you know you're in for a pretty wild ride. With journal in hand, you complete some simple fetch quests for your fellow prisoners, deal with some large metal pipes with mouths that want to devour you (which will become quite the theme) and manage to call down a sword from a pentagram.
With three difficulties to choose from, you're quickly introduced to Moroi's combat, a fairly simple and somewhat satisfying offering consisting of primary and secondary attacks from both a melee and ranged weapon, and an augmentation slot to modify how your weapons perform. Along with a dodge roll and a Doom 2016 style execution system, you bash down the door and begin butchering guards before finding a minigun. Although loose and unrefined, the combat is serviceable enough, however the choice of camera angle massively obscures your ability to see any enemies or important environmental interactions below your character. At points throughout the game, this camera angle choice was truly crippling to my ability to perform well in combat and to solve puzzles that I could barely see.
Gorgeously Macabre
Moroi is absolutely dripping in delicious artistic design decisions, and the quality of some of the visuals and assets alone are worth the price of admission. Although the overall quality can be haphazard and inconsistent, the things that shine here shine bright. There is a moon that rivals the design of the moon from Majora's Mask, a living insect-like transportation system that reminds me of H.R. Giger, a terrific looking beast who's belly you must enter, and a jester making a marionette of a king's carcass. Part disturbing, part inspiration, part absurd; Moroi can be really striking in this regard. The worldbuilding can also be similarly compelling, as you are fed breadcrumbs about something called the Cosmic Engine, wonder who or what Moroi is, spend three hours being force fed Michelin star meals from a chef, and find yourself losing an arm and landing in soul processing.
Average Puzzles
Moroi's gameplay oscillates quite heavily between puzzle/exploration sections, that can last for anything up to thirty to forty minutes, and combat sections. The puzzles themselves vary heavily in quality and abstraction, with some being relatively straightforward, whilst others aren't so much puzzles but more about trying a lot of different combinations of things because there isn't enough prompting on what you're supposed to do. Throughout my experience, the worst case for this came from being stuck for an hour on what ended up being a relatively simple puzzle regarding turning levers according to crescent moons. The environment would light up the first two levers when they faced upwards, but never the last two, and I spent an extremely long time trying to figure that out before realising that the environmental lighting was unintentional and not relevant at all. I had a similar experience later, when trying to find a doll in four connected rooms, where there was absolutely no prompting on what needed to be done, so I had to use pure trial and error to go backwards and forwards through different doorways until I found the correct sequence that allowed me to progress. An obnoxious laser section near the end of the game was similarly frustrating.
Questionable Quality: A Fairytale Gone Wrong
Unfortunately, I consistently encountered many game-breaking issues during my time with Moroi. I've experienced fatal errors when loading save games, all background sound cutting out after loading a save and multiple occurrences of dialogue lockups that required me to force quit the game. Beyond the game-breaking issues, I feel that the overall quality of the story, writing and dialogue is very poor, and even though the game is deliberately bizarre, I don't feel that that excuses these issues. In addition, the ending felt very rushed and unexpected, and I found it extremely underwhelming to be back at the title screen without much of a conclusion at all.
Rough Around the Edges, But Unique
Moroi has some very rough edges, but despite that it has an extremely unique visual style and artistic design. If you have a dark sense of humour and enjoy the absurd and the macabre, I recommend it, just keep in mind that you may encounter several issues that may hinder your enjoyment of the game as they hindered mine
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6.5
fun score
Pros
Bizarre absurdist world, Art direction, Visual style
Cons
Game-breaking bugs, Camera angle, Story - writing & dialogue quality
