Cynthia Hidden Within the Moonshadow Evaluation

Cynthia Hidden in The Moonshadow is a small indie sport from builders Catthia Video games. The sport is greatest described as a comfy, light-hearted, stealth-focused jaunt throughout a stylised world. The sport performs closely in direction of the narrative aspect with some partaking exploration that’s held again by its very linear world design.

Whereas out exploring and coaching removed from house, Moonshadow Huntress, Cynthia Strandborg, eagerly awaits her return journey, particularly to see her boyfriend. However whereas she’s out, the Monks of The North, wielding darkish magic, have attacked her house, kidnapped her boyfriend and turned everybody else to stone. It’s as much as Cynthia to seek out two artefacts that can assist her cease the Monks and save her family members, her boyfriend particularly.

Whereas Cynthia wields a bow powered by the artefacts, and possesses a wide range of strikes resembling climbing, sliding, dodging and three totally different arrow varieties, fight virtually by no means occurs apart from a couple of enemy varieties and the video games final sequence. Cynthia Hidden Within the Moonshadow is, as an alternative, extra eager about stealth journey, which does tie-in extra carefully with Cynthia’s standing as a Hunter.

Stealth itself just isn’t a sophisticated affair. Tying in with the comfy nature of the sport, a quite simple stealth system is employed, targeted on hiding in lengthy grass, crouching behind obstacles and avoiding the enemy’s sight, which may go from calmly alarmed to attacking you. Which you don’t need as there’s a one-hit system in place. In case you do get caught and whammied into stone by the monks magic assaults, a fast reload will pop you again to your final auto-saved level and away you go. There’s no actual penalty for dying, past some loading and a lesson in been extra cautious.

It’s additionally one of many areas that doesn’t fairly make sense as Cynthia can use her arrows to distract guards, drop crates onto them, blind their view or confuse them into attacking one another. Exterior of the video games final boss combat, and a really particular roaming power ball enemy, you possibly can’t use your bow to kill enemies by the remainder of the sport, which makes that remaining sequence really feel misplaced.

Including to that feeling are a few of Cynthia’s strikes. The dodge feels pointless as there isn’t any motive to make use of it since you don’t actually get into fight. And the identical goes for her slide transfer, which does look actually cool however is just used to slip underneath rocks. Whereas the slide has a handful of makes use of, the dodge I used solely as soon as through the tutorial part.

With Cynthia Hidden Within the Moonshadow been moderately brief – you possibly can end it in a single sitting – and the move-sets that by no means get totally used or fleshed out as if the builders forgot to take them into consideration as growth progressed, Cynthia Hidden Within the Moonshadow finally ends up feeling extra like a prologue or proof of idea than a full journey. There’s nothing mistaken with brief video games, the truth is they’re a sight for sore eyes in an age the place most video games are pushing to take over all your free time, Cynthia Hidden Within the Moonshadow ends simply because it begins, with a attainable promise of extra to come back.

Whenever you’re not taking part in as Snake-lite, you’ll be exploring the moderately linear ranges seeking Guardian statues to activate, diaries entries to learn which add lore onto the world, gentle puzzles to resolve, outfits to gather and arrows to craft. I used to be by no means positive what precisely the blessing from the statues did, although discovering the lore entries added some a lot wanted meat to the video games narrative bones.

The puzzles, which ranged from flipping levers in particular orders to stepping on tiles in particular patterns had been straightforward to resolve and broke up the stealth pacing. The crafting can be saved small and easy with a handful of things to choose up which can be used to craft your three arrow varieties. With the quantity of supplies on supply, operating out of ammo isn’t a priority.

Visually, Cynthia Hidden in The Moonshadow is an interesting and vibrant sport. The stylised look, which we must always all be used to by now, provides the sport some nice environmental moments however the environments are let down by their simplicity and relative vacancy. The grass, water and character fashions are splendidly finished however the lack of props and muddle within the atmosphere makes the sport appear naked.

Which makes the truth that it suffers from body drops, whether or not I performed on Xbox One or Sequence X, a little bit of a priority. It doesn’t have an effect on the motion however may be very noticeable throughout exploration.

The sport suffers from a collection of points in animation – such because the gradual and awkward climbing, design and measurement that clearly exhibits its smaller price range, indie standing. There’s an fascinating proof of idea, design model to the sport that’s simply begging for a bigger price range and sequel that, hopefully, Catthia Video games can fulfil on.

Cynthia Hidden in The Moonshadow Trailer

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