Day 10 - Night of Full Moon

Deckbuilder, Rougelite, Has Treant Protector In It  · 

Sam’s Take:

We’ve got another tough one here friends. If I review this game in a vacuum, then it’s alright. Looks fine, plays fine, some bad translations, but I’ve seen worse in the indy space (I’ll defend Gunfire Reborn until the day I die). Unfortunately the game has one huge issue, and it’s not even in the game. That issue is Slay the Spire.

Yes, Night of Full Moon is a roguelite deckbuilder, and as unfair as it is, it’s impossible not to make the comparison. There are few genres so defined by one game as deckbuilders are by Slay the Spire, and unfortunately for NoFM, the reason for that is Slay the Spire’s unfathomable depth. When you start Slay the Spire, almost everyone goes through the same progression. You almost beat the first boss, learn from your mistake, beat the first boss, get your first real deck, get to the end of a floor, try a new character etc. and before you know it you’re creating infinite power loops on defect while fighting double bosses on ascension 20. The number of builds for each character that are viable on even high levels in Slay the Spire is insane, and I already know that.

But to get there and see those depths, I have to play tens of hours of Slay the Spire. Luckily when it came out, there was nothing like it (or at least nothing popular enough to break into the mainstream so my dumb ass could hear about it). It had no competition, it was novel, and the progression was good, so I kept playing and slowly could explore what the game had to offer.

Night of Full Moon
Night of Full Moon
Slay the Spire
Slay the Spire

My point is that NoFM could have that sort of depth. It might very well have tons of viable builds. Maybe the other characters really spice things up, maybe once you memorize the abilities of the monsters you fight, choosing your battles wisely becomes a satisfying practice. There is clearly effort put into creating different builds. Just from my one run I saw cards for an armor defense build, a low health revenge build, and a max health double attack build (which I went with). The issue is that Slay the Spire exists now, and so the start has to be so interesting that it pulls me away, and as unfair as the comparison is, NoFM just isn’t Slay the Spire.

Even on my first run there was a pretty basic issue. There were several draw spells that cost no resources. Anyone who knows Yu-Gi-Oh probably equates 0 resource draw spells with “Pot of Greed”, one of the most famously broken cards in any trading card game. I took all of them, and every turn drew and played my whole deck. That might sound cool, but I didn’t have to be clever to get there. It wasn’t big-brain. Anyone who has played card games like these knows that drawing cards for free is busted, which on first impression makes me wonder if these devs have played many card games before…

This is why I bring up Slay the Spire. If there wasn’t a dominant game to compare to, I might be willing to assume that card draw gets weaker at higher difficulties, or more enemies punish card draw, or maybe I was just playing the baby-mode character, and the meaty challenge is actually playing the mage. If I wasn’t doing a review a day, maybe I could take the time to really give this game a long enough go to speak on the game’s balance and depth.

To hook me away from Slay the Spire though, you gotta come in strong. Recently Balatro was able to awake me from my Spire stupor, and it did it in mostly two ways. First was hiding an absurdly complex scoring system behind game mechanics we already understand from other games (a deck has 52 cards, four suits, a flush is 5 of any one suit, a straight is better than a pair, etc). If you pretend for a second that you’ve never seen a deck of cards before, Balatro is probably one of the most confusing games I’ve ever played, but so much of that burden is taken off by just using a deck of cards.

The second way Balatro hooked me was by being so different that it’s hard to even compare to Slay the Spire. If Spire is primarily about building a deck, Balatro is about building a scoring system. Yes, you eventually want to remove/copy cards to morph your deck, but the first key to success in any Balatro run is to obtain cards that boost your score when specific cards are played. You change the parameters of the game, then build your deck to fit those parameters. Where Slay the Spire emphasizes being prepared and overcoming challenges like a chess puzzle, Balatro is an exercise not in minor optimizations, but in tearing down whole systems and saying “no, you’re playing my game now”.

Plasma Deck is CRACKED
Plasma Deck is CRACKED

NoFM has differences to Slay the Spire in mechanics, but not in philosophy. You can choose between a few monsters to fight, which is different from the semi-randomness of Slay the Spire, but it’s really just a minor twist on Spire’s branching path map. NoFM doesn’t have a mana system like Spire (at least not for all characters) but that just makes your resource the number of cards you draw (hence card draw being overpowered). When push comes to shove, both games have starting decks where you can slowly add and remove cards and try to keep your deck on the power level of slowly escalating enemy power. They aren’t the same game, but it’s not busting the whole genre open like Balatro. NoFM is just another deckbuilder and unfortunately, that’s like being a shooting guard on the Chicago Bulls while Michael Jordan was on the team. Maybe you were good, we will never know.

And you certainly weren’t good enough.

Recommend: No

Replay Percentage Chance: 10% I’d be down to actually see if this has depth, but we got a lot of games to get to, and Skeeter would have to be real into it.

Time Played: 45 Minutes

Skeeter’s Take:

Sam touched on a lot of the same complaints I had with this game - notably card draw felt broken, basic cards cost nothing to cast other than you needed to have them in your hand, and I crawled all the way to level 3 before killing myself with a mechanic I wasn’t paying attention to (damn you Pirate man). As Sam said, there’s really no way to talk about this game without also talking about Slay the Spire, so allow me to offer an alternative madhouse route - try to stay with me here.

I’ve recently become a little obsessed with the Vampire Survivors genre. The fact that the genre itself is named “Survivors Type” should be enough to tell you what a powerhouse it is. Honestly, “Rogue-Like Deck Building” genre should just be called “Spire Type” at this point and I feel like that would be appropriate. For those of you not familiar with Vampire Survivors, it is essentially a reverse bullet hell game. Your goal is to survive 20 minutes, pick up experience and power-ups along the way to become as OP as possible. Enemies generally just walk at you and your only goal is to hold out until that 20 minutes is over. There’s obviously a bit more depth to it, but that’s not important to what I’m trying to say with this review, so I’ll save you the time.

I really like Vampire Survivors. It is the crowning jewel of “Survivor type” games for me. I had at one point (before the released the Among Us DLC) earned 100% of the achievements in the game. It’s what I refer to as a “YouTube” game, where I can play it, but watch some movie or 5 hour long review on my second monitor. It doesn’t take a lot of focus. I enjoy that when I’m trying to unwind. Now, when I say I have recently become a “little” obsessed with the genre, I may have lied. Let me list all the games I have played that are self-described “Survivor Type” games (Sam PLEASE don’t link to all these games, you mad man - I’m just trying to illustrate a point. SAM NOTE: I did it anyway)

Needless to say, I’ve played a few of them. But none of them are Vampire Survivors. So, why do I keep buying and playing these types of games? Well, perhaps I’m a little loony, but each one of these games above introduce different ideas into the genre. Each one has their little quirks, has something that differs enough from Vampire Survivors to make me interested. Obviously, some stick to the Vampire Survivors formula really close, but there are standouts from this list for sure. If I’m comparing Vampire Survivors to Slay the Spire, then Boneraiser Minions has to be my “Balatro” (since Sam mentioned it). It really feels like a completely different game than Vampire Survivors, just using the same core mechanic. Most of these games don’t feel that different from VS. (Want to throw an honorable mention out to Bio Prototype - it’s got a crazy weapon linking system that is definitely worth checking out.)

The problem with NoFM (I’m just going to steal Sam’s abbreviation here), is just like Sam said; It’s just not different enough to stand out from the crowd. It feels just a little too similar to it’s influence to elevate to a place of being great.

That’s not to say it doesn’t have some fun ideas. To start, instead of the typical Slay the Spire path you follow, you get a choice of three decisions on how you want to proceed:

After you clear a battle, that card (the game calls them “papers”) gets replaced by another random card. Shops stick around, but don’t refresh. Same goes for card upgrade shops, healing encounters etc. You have the choice to remove the non-battle papers (oh god, I’m saying it now) to refresh that card slot and roll again. I think this is a neat mechanic. I found myself at one point with a full heal, a card upgrade shop, and a card removal shop and had to make the hard decision of which I wanted to remove so I could continue the game. You’ll notice in the screenshot above there are a certain number of papers you need to get through before you hit the boss. I thought this was different and fun and not something I had seen in this type of game before.

Another interesting idea that I liked is you have an active ability that would refresh after a certain number of battles - the number of battles scaling with how powerful the ability is. This, again, I haven’t seen before and made for some fun choices of “should I use this now, or save it for the boss encounter in a couple turns. Will I even flip another battle before the boss, or am I going to find a treasure chest or a shop?”. Decent idea. I’m sure the other characters have different abilities as well, but I’m not sure as I only played the one.

Another thing I liked was how the whole thing is based on Red Riding Hood and told through a sort of “Fairytale Story” lens. Each new level is referred to as a “Chapter”. Doesn’t really affect the gameplay, but I thought I’d throw it a mention. Also, most of the characters were voice acted, which was a nice touch. I had a mushroom tell me he hates Apothecaries because they always take away his friends. It’s small, but it’s nice seeing the extra time put into these details and atmosphere.

One thing I don’t know if I liked because I couldn’t determine the effect of it was after every battle, you had a choice of three options on how to deal with the character you had just defeated. Something like “Beat him on the head - Give him help - Follow him”. Most of the time I had no idea the effect the option I was choosing would have. Occasionally I would get somethin that said “minus 1 reputation” or “plus 1 courage” - what the hell these did, I could not tell you. Maybe they affected the ending, some hidden stats or something? I really couldn’t tell you. Seems like a cool idea if it does something. If not - why have it? This is probably a result of not playing enough, so I’m not going to bash it too hard. It was another thing I hadn’t seen in these types of games though.

Now on to some things I didn’t like:

I could never tell what cards were going to be played, or how much damage the enemy was going to do. I’ll be willing to eat my words if this is a “me” problem and I just didn’t see where the indicators were, but it made it really difficult to be tactical, or calculate that risk/reward system that I really enjoy in other deck-builders. Again, it could be me, but I was always surprised by the enemy pulling out 5 cards in one turn when I wasn’t ready for it.

Sam already talked about the card playing system and how card draw seems broken, so I won’t rehash. I still wanted to mention it here though.

I also didn’t like this guy:

I’m playing Red Riding Hood - a child. This absolute creep snuck out of the woods, carrying a red rose and tried to hit on me. “Maybe he didn’t know your age!” I can hear some of the wispy mustachioed individuals grunting out there. And to that I say:

OH REALLY? He only said he wasn’t interested after I bashed his skull in after the fight.

All jokes aside, and to bring this back around to the Vampire Survivors rant: This game isn’t revolutionary in the genre. It’s not going to be the Vampire Survivors of its genre, or even the Boneraiser Minions of its genre. But it does have some interesting ideas it’s toying around with, and isn’t trying to be a 1:1 to Slay the Spire. It’s not likely something that casual fans of the genre are going to come back to when there are other options out there. To compare it to food - if you’ve been eating a 3 star Michelin meal every night at the highest rated restaurant in town and are starting to get bored of the same old thing, perhaps try out the restaurant down the street with a “C” from the health inspector posted proudly in their window. You just might find a few new flavors from the menu you really like.

Recommend: Only if you are a die-hard fan of the genre and are looking for some new ideas within it. Hell, these might not even be new ideas as I’m not as versed in this as I am a genre like… Oh, let’s say “survivor type”. I can say that I wouldn’t recommend it to me, or my friends.

Replay Percentage Chance: 10% I’d be down to actually see if this has depth, but we got a lot of games to get to, and Sam would have to be real into it.

Time Played: 60 minutes BAYBAYYY

P.S. - Is that fucking TREANT PROTECTOR???

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