Moroi Review – Dismemberment, Meat Grinders, and Metaphysical Mayhem

Sometimes, games defy the tendency to put them into a reviewable rubric. How do I compare an ostensible action-RPG (kinda) where you dismember yourself to satisfy angry trees and advance the story with, say, a Diablo game? I previewed Moroi, and the full game didn’t exactly make things any clearer than the preview. So let me give you a fairly straightforward account of the first little bit of the game, and you can figure out if it’s the sort of thing you’d want to play, because it’s a certain kind of weird.

Moroi
Developer: Violent Saint
Price: $14.99
Platform: PC (reviewed)
MonsterVine was supplied with a Steam code for review

Into the Meat Grinder: Moroi’s Absurd Opening Hours

First, I was coming off a bad cold and had a couple of hours before bed when I decided to give the full version a spin because I firmly believe in making good decisions. Aside from fatigue and the influence of Nyquil, the hallucinatory nature of the next few paragraphs is the nature of the game, not your humble scribe.

I awoke in a strange prison with rain pattering down on the cobblestones as some kind of glowing-eyed dwarf creature. After running around a bit, I jumped into the Royal Meat Grinder, a hulking and talkative machine with no morality. Sadly, it spit me out, but it seemed pretty friendly, so I went to find it a snack.

Next, I encountered an odd wizard who was kind of a jerk, but he seemed like he’d be more useful if I got him some bone dust. In searching for the wizard’s bone dust, I ran into a friendly old lady with no eyes stirring a cauldron full of some kind of substance that was the green of nuclear waste. She asked me for some salt.

I wandered around the prison a bit more before talking to a gentleman who was devouring his own body as an act of performance art. He was struck by lightning and killed before he could finish devouring himself, but he did leave his hand behind, which proved useful for feeding the Meat Grinder.

Around that point, I started getting ominous hallucinations and/or flashbacks of some kind, but I got distracted when I encountered a large rat in a wheel, but the gearing system was missing a lever (turns out prisons aren’t terribly organized).

The Meat Grinding robot ate the hand, which gave me some bone dust, which I took back to the wizard, who gave me some salt and told me his name was Edgar before promptly disappearing. I gave the salt to the old lady, whereupon a slimy limb emerged from the cauldron of goo and dragged her into it. It was unfortunate, but her spoon was left behind.

Using the spoon on the machinery by the rat activated the prison’s bell system, which awakened the steampunk mechanical rat, who started running on his(?) wheel. This ultimately allowed me to use a machine beside the giant breathing mouthtubes and open all the cell doors.

I still needed a weapon to open the door leading out of the prison area, so I circled the cells again and found a few secrets, like a spell glyph carved into the floor of one of the cells. Another cell held half a pig man, chained up in one of the cells. My porcine friend made cryptic utterances before his head exploded, revealing a parchment in the stump of his neck that provided the incantation to activate the spell circle, which gave me a sword after a weirdly demonic interaction. I was, finally, free of that portion of the prison.

To be clear, that’s a fairly straightforward description of the first chunk of the game–what passes for the tutorial–so while I can talk about the kind of floaty movement or how combat works, I’m going to say upfront, you know, if you bought the “head exploding pig man with a spell incantation in his neck” ticket, you’re probably taking the ride.

The top-down perspective is kind of floaty in a Hotline Miami style, but also the style of a dream, and it’s hard to tell what’s style and what’s jank. Combat is floaty and can feel like a dance when it just clicks. Generally, you have a melee weapon like a sword or a mace and a ranged weapon like a chain gun or a rocket launcher, and you tend to encounter rooms full of enemies to inflict carnage upon.

But on the other hand, there is, sigh, an awful lot of dodge rolling and a lot of high-lethality AOEs, so while it is fun to hit a good fatality, you can also get animation locked and schwacked by a high-damage AOE during said fatality. I know the Souls-style games have convinced every game designer that the scene in Galaxy Quest where Tim Allen aggressively rolls around a planetary surface is peak game design, but I remain unconvinced. Combat encounters felt less like mastery of the system, or skill, or gearing up, or getting good, and more about luck. Sometimes you combat roll into a corner and get plastered with ranged attacks. Sometimes you get stuck on terrain. Sometimes it all works, and you win, and you’re not sure why. Sometimes you lose a fight ten times because you didn’t realize there was a button on the other side of the room you needed to press, and happened to figure it out while you were rolling around.

Exploration and weird puzzles, and storytelling are the rest of the game outside of combat, and, again, it comes down to…how much do you enjoy the flavor of weird I chronicled in the open? How much do you like wandering around exploring, say, talking to skeletons and solving cryptic puzzles while unsettling ambient music plays, like Brian Eno is having a bad trip?

Because the solution to the puzzles isn’t always apparent. The solutions to anything aren’t always apparent. Such as, say, doors. Sometimes, you can go through doors. Sometimes, you can go through them but need a key, indicated with a key icon. Sometimes, you can break them down with weapons. Sometimes there’s a red/green lighting scheme. Sometimes there’s a button you need to push to open the door. Sometimes, there’s a puzzle or NPC you need to talk to to be able to go through the door, but you may not know that now. Sometimes you just push at the door and flail at the door with your weapon, and nothing happens. Who knows why? It’s the kind of game where I ran into a crash bug at a dialogue scene and tried it a couple of times, wondering if this was some kind of meta puzzle I had to solve before we finally contacted the developers. (Nope, bug!).

Ultimately, is it fun? I don’t know. Sometimes, you take the pill and see what happens. Buy the ticket, take the ride.

The Final Word
You clearly appreciate Moroi’s unapologetic weirdness and commitment to its aesthetic. The world-building, puzzles, and writing are engaging if you’re on the game’s wavelength. But the frustrating combat mechanics, occasional bugs, and unclear progression logic (especially with doors and puzzle gating) create a high barrier to enjoyment. It’s a fascinating mess, but it is best suited for players with patience and a taste for the bizarre.