izigame.me

Like a lot of reviews say, it's not as good as the previous game but still recommend it, I think the same but won't recommend it. At least not at full price.
It's just a step down in so many ways, closer to the very average Minoria than the very excellent RutM.
The game is quite easy which isn't instantly a bad thing, but there's a confusing decision to have a harder mode with harder enemies and such, but lock it to only be permadeath. Why they didn't offer this difficulty level as a non permadeath mode as well is a bit baffling.
Combat is now very spammy instead of deliberate like in RutM. You can beat most bosses by just spamming attacks and heals, especially when you get a couple power ups. They've removed getting bonus items from taking no damage on bosses so there's really no incentive to not just face tank everything while spamming attacks. And honestly it might be a blessing that there aren't perfect bonuses, because the game is filled with very inconsistent and vague attacks. A lot of random flashing lights and obscured effects with vague hitboxes. Sometimes the flashing lights hurt you, sometimes they are warning you that an attack is coming, sometimes the attack it's warning you about has very odd timing after the warning. There's just a lot of instances where it's confusing what exactly an attack does. Further more, combat effects are insane. A flurry of more flashing lights and particle effects fill the screen, so much so that enemy sprites can completely be hidden behind all these effects meaning you can't even react to the enemy winding up for an attack. To put it in perspective, I'd easily play a mode in RutM where you die in one hit since everything feels fair and well telegraphed, I'd never play such a mode in Moonlit if one existed.
Onto controls, they can be fairly inconsistent. There's some real oddities with them and it's hard to make sense of exactly what you can and can't do. For example sometimes you can cancel out of attacks with a dodge, sometimes you can't, it's hard to tell why. Touching some bosses will levitate and push you upwards for some reason, meaning you cant dodge. And attacking bosses can push you forward for this to happen. Sometimes while attacking you'll I-frame through enemy attacks with no clear reason why that happens. You eventually get a sort of berserk mode that amps up your attacks and it can be very easy to lose control of what's happening on the screen in this mode. This berserk mode is enabled through down+attack which can feel a bit cumbersome mid combat, also mildly cumbersome during fights mana recharge items can bounce around which you pick up by pressing up mid combat.
Regarding the dodge roll I read some reviews here complaining that it feels like it has a weird delay, and I can honestly see what they mean by that but I don't think the cause is actually a delay to the input as for most of the game the dodge feels fine. I think the cause is certain attacks hit before the animation looks like it hits making it feel like your dodge was delayed, I noticed it very much with the big crab enemies. You might notice it with them and some other attacks within the game.
Bosses themselves can feel really shallow, some bosses straight up only have 2 or 3 attacks that they repeat in the same predictable order for the entire fight, this kind of makes up for the vagueness of some of the hitboxes. But ultimately is less fun than having more in-depth bosses that you can beat through reaction skill instead of pure memorisation (not that Moonlit requires either at a certain point due to how powerful you become)
Items/powers/attacks can feel a bit weird. You basically have two resources, mana and stamina. But there's too many things attached to them. Mana is used for healing, but can also be used with some Sigils (items you equip for effects) and until you get later in the game and find many mana upgrades these are quite hard to run since you'd rather use your mana for healing. Stamina is used for dodging, sprinting, bow attacks and the berserk mode, might sound like its a fun system of juggling your actions according to your stamina but it kind of just isn't that engaging. Your stamina bar is also a very small bar on the top left of the screen that's hard to track mid combat.
Graphics are very fantastic, although can be a bit busy and unclear in motion sometimes and the previously said combat effects dominate your screen.
I enjoyed the story quite a lot, I'm a long term Momodora fan who has played Momodora 1-4 many times, the story expands on the franchise in a nice way, references the older games respectfully. All round just a nice story.
Ultimately though, as a Momodora fan, sadly this game is disappointing. If you're a fan of the series in any capacity and haven't picked this up already, I'd say wait and buy it on a sale. This review might be negative but it's still probably worth playing once if you're into the series.
If you've never played a Momodora game before but are interested, pick up the previous game Momodora: Reverie Under The Moonlight instead. Then maybe come back to this. Momodora 1 and 2 are also small free games available on itch.io but Momodora: Reverie Under The Moonlight is a fantastic starting point.
All this might make it sound like a awfully bad game, when it isn't. It's just that there's a lot of better metroidvanias for the same price or cheaper from other developers, and even better from the same developer. This is why I think it would be best to wait for a sale if you absolutely want to play this.
Feels pretty shitty to write a review like this, you can see that the devs put a lot of effort and heart into this game, but I hope the dev can also use these reviews to rediscover what made the previous games better. Especially since a lot of positive reviews also mention that it's not as good as the previous title.