Hello and welcome back to my blog!
I was scrolling through some puzzle platformers on the Steam Store when I found this cute-looking game called Moonleap. The minimalist visual style, featuring cute pixel art, grabbed my attention straight away. It looked interesting and I wanted to give it a try. A demo is available in the store for you to try.
In this game, you play as a cute little moon-shaped character who is collecting some stars scattered across different levels. But the twist is, every time you jump, the world switches between day and night. This adds to a lot of interesting puzzle ideas like thorns growing in a specific location at day or night, vines changing positions, some bugs sleeping at night, etc. All of these little changes can help build some creative puzzles that are fun to solve.
The game gives you no tutorial about how it works, but it is not required at all. There are only a few things you can do. Running and jumping are the main controls you have. Every jump should be calculated precisely. I like games that don't teach you a lot about their world, it gives me a sense of mystery and finding out things by trial and error is always fun when you don't lose much progress. Level reset is quick, and there is no penalty for trying again and again, other than restarting the level from scratch.
For a platformer, the controls have to be super tight and responsive. They should not feel slow and sluggish. Moonleap excels in this department. You can control your character midway precisely without any delays. It makes the game less frustrating.
Let's talk about the visuals because that's what grabbed my attention at first. If you like pixel art, then you will love its visual style. The colour change between day and night cycle looks good. Every jump changes the background and other elements, and that feels a lot more dynamic for a game with fixed camera controls. The soundtrack is fine for this kind of game, too. It loops well and rarely feels repetitive.
The levels are very bright colours, while the level selectors have muted and darker colours, which I think is an interesting choice.
Talking about the levels, there are so many memorable ones. Finding solutions to them might not be straightforward at first, but once you figure them out, it gives great satisfaction. I would say the difficulty level is not too much if you leave a couple of levels.
There are more than 50 of them in the game. Depending on how quickly you solve each of the puzzles, this game can be done fairly quickly. I would say you can complete it anywhere between an hour (if you are a puzzle god) to about 3 hours. But if you get stuck on one of the levels, it might take a lot more.
There are many interesting levels with creative solutions, like jumping off the cliff just to realise that you loop back up. Breakable tiles, climbable vines, hoppable bugs and mushrooms, delay spikes, non-cooperating stars, etc, make these puzzles fun.
A good thing about the game is that you need very low resources to run it. It runs smoothly even on older hardware, and the size is very small as well. Less than a hundred megabytes. But since the content can be completed fairly quickly, the price tag might feel a bit expensive, at around $8, especially if you are buying it on your mobile phone. But if you wait for the sales, it goes on sale fairly regularly. It was 50% off just a couple of months ago.
The ending was quite memorable, too. I will talk about it separately in a different post some other day. It has beautiful poetry to go with it and a lot of spoilers even for this game, so talking about it in this post doesn't make too much sense to me. This post is more about my experience and a somewhat spoiler-free review of the game.
So, if you are looking for a cute puzzle platformer with vibrant pixel art and creative puzzles, then Moonleap might be the perfect game for you.
Until next puzzle...
- All the content is mine unless otherwise stated.
- Screenshots are from the game, Moonleap.
- Gifs created using ezgif.com.