Playing Moons of Darsalon on the Nintendo Switch is a masterclass in frustration. There’s an alright game somewhere in there, buried under a mountain of bugs, inconsistent AI, and dodgy design. Often it’s a race to see which comes first; a hard crash, or a rage-quit.
Moons of Darsalon is a 2D puzzle-platformer where you locate stranded ‘Darsanauts’ and lead them back to the safety of their base. The idea is similar to the 1991 game Lemmings, in that you’ll need to guide NPCs past lethal obstacles like dripping acid, homicidal aliens, or fatal falls. Unlike the cursor-controlled Lemmings, you play as another explorer, platforming through the level and directing your comrades with voice commands.
The Good
One bridge comin’ right up!
Moons of Darsalon has some cool vehicles and tools that bring more depth to the gameplay. There’s a laser gun for blasting aliens, a flashlight to help explorers navigate dark caves and tunnels, even a lamp-gun that lets you fire permanent light sources to light up dark places.
The ground maker gun was my favourite, shooting out little terrain-bullets that string together when you hold down the trigger, creating new paths and ramps to help your fellow explorers bridge gaps. You can even fire the gun while hanging out the door of the all-terrain vehicle, allowing you to create new paths while you drive.
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In the level ‘Holy Ship’, you take control of an aircraft and fly around picking up explorers before dropping them at the base. You could do this by neatly landing near each person and telling them to climb in after you’ve cut the engines, but a real ace pilot opens the doors and makes them jump aboard mid-hover!
The Bad
At various points during my playthrough I found myself questioning design decisions, mostly small things, but odd enough to stand out.
When you start the first level there are button prompts on the screen to help you learn the controls, except that the prompts are so over-simplified that they’re useless. There’s no point just having an arrow pointed at a tiny 2D black and white Joycon, when the arrow could be referencing any number of buttons. It’s obviously not a big issue, you can just mash buttons until you find the right one, but why not just say ‘press ZL to jump‘?
There’s a level called ‘Learning to Fly‘ that has you boosting around collecting coins, to teach you how to control the jet-pack. But you first get the jet-pack three whole levels before that, and have most likely got the controls down already. It doesn’t make sense.
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Loading screens have a very ‘AI generated’ look to them, feeling at odds with what the actual game is. While the use of AI generated art is often shunned in creative industries, it might be the only choice for an indie game developer on a tight budget. Though, I fail to see how big breasted women with low-cut space suits relate to the game, it just feels like a ham-fisted way of trying to draw the male gaze.
The Ugly
For a short indie game, Moons of Darsalon has more than its fair share of issues, and it’s hard to tell whether they’re caused by bugs, or the game design itself.
The biggest roadblock to my enjoyment was when NPC explorers would just walk through solid objects, often becoming completely stuck. Sometimes it would happen literally metres from the finish line, and I would have to restart the entire level again. This was persistent throughout my whole playthrough, I experienced it on almost every level, which soured the entire experience.
At one stage, I also got stuck in a tiny piece of floating terrain and couldn’t move at all… Until an enemy spaceship came and blasted a giant laser at me. The laser destroyed what I was stuck on and freed me, but it also killed half the explorers that were standing there… Thanks so much.
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Almost as frustrating as explorers walking through solid rock, was when they would randomly decide not to listen to the instructions you’re giving them. I lost count of the amount of times I would issue the ‘stay with me’ command, only for an explorer to sprint off in a random direction, often into danger and death. Sometimes I’d command the group to jump across a gap or over an obstacle, and all-but-one of the explorers would follow the order, the straggler refusing to do that exact same thing as their comrades.
Other times I’d get through part of a level with explorers listening with no issues, then I would die and have to restart the level. Totally normal. But then on my next try, suddenly the explorers wouldn’t want to listen. For example one explorer happily jumped off a cliff onto an alien structure in the first run, but now didn’t want to jump at all, or the explorers that quickly got onto the back of the truck when asked, were now refusing to catch a ride at all. I noticed it usually happened after a death, when I was re-attempting a level, and only a complete shutdown of the game would get the AI to listen again.
Explorers would just randomly up and die mid-level. At one point I had four explorers in different parts of the map, in no danger whatsoever, die at the exact same time. Another time I had the death counter go up by hundreds within a few seconds, causing me to fail the level; there weren’t hundreds of explorers on the level, there were less than ten.
A few times I had explorers perfectly overlap each other and move in sync, so I couldn’t tell how many were actually there. It didn’t stop me from getting them all back to base safely, but it sure caused a lot of confusion while I searched for the ‘missing’ explorers.
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A very frequent bug would trigger after my character died and I reloaded the level; the game would freeze for a few seconds and I’d get a second ‘game over’ screen, then the level would reload yet again.
The most literal roadblock I had was a hard crash that happened whenever I tried to load into level 15. After ten hard crashes in a row, I resigned myself to the fact that I wasn’t going to be able to brute force my way through the bug, and called it quits on the game. Thankfully the bug causing that big crash has since been patched, but (at the time of writing) the numerous smaller bugs and issues still remain.
Should you buy Moons of Darsalon?
There are some interesting ideas in Moons of Darsalon, many providing fleeting moments of fun, but they’re unfortunately undercut by buggy and frustrating gameplay.
I don’t mind a hard game, I’m fine with losing because of my own lack of skill or knowledge, but when I’m constantly failing because of broken gameplay and bad design, it just becomes overwhelmingly exasperating.
I wouldn’t recommend that anyone buy the Nintendo Switch version of Moons of Darsalon, the PC version might have less issues, I don’t know, but this version is frustratingly broken.
Quest Daily was supplied with an early review copy of Moons of Darsalon thanks to the publisher.
