Following my post about Cave Story, I felt like it may be appropriate to introduce a game series that was more or less directly inspired by it. Momodora is a small series of indie games that take the visual style and feel of cavestory and makes it into its own thing. It was released in 2010 and was/is still kind of a lesser known series outside of the latest game, Momodora: Reverie under the Moonlight.
How I ended up finding out about it was all due to sheer dumb luck. It's funny to see what you can end up finding if you just scroll through old threads and websites. Some time around 2013 I had finished Cave Story and wanted more; something similar but distinct enough. Sure enough, I came across a tiny forum thread that I cannot remember the name of and someone had mentioned to try out something called Momodora. A little fun fact is that the cover art was done by Temmie Chang, who, if you didn't know, has done a lot of work for Undertale and Deltarune in recent times.
Just to be clear and to get this out of the way, this game is pretty rough. And I don't necessarily mean by bad controls, it controls and handles pretty well. I mean more of stage layout and enemy placement. This can make it a bit of a hassle to go and 100%. I feel like it can be moderately excused since this was the first project Rdein had completed and it was meant to be more like an arcade game. A quarter eater.
I know, not an excuse for everything, but it doesn't feel like it had no effort put into it. But some of this problem is alleviated later on in the game once you find more weapons. If you don't mind taking it slow, you can get your hands on a weapon that will automatically track and hit enemies within a certain range. It kind of goes against what the game is supposed to be, but with how the last stage is laid out, I'll take it.
Story
- I feel like there isn't a whole lot to say about the story of Momodora. You play as a girl named Isadora who is on a quest to revive her dead mother. On this journey she has to face multiple levels of demons only to go head to head with the queen of the underworld to make her deal.
Music
- The soundtrack for Momodora is actually pretty small, clocking in at around 12 minutes for the whole game. If I had to pick one of my favorites though, I would have to say Stage 3 or Stage 4. I just love the slower pace of 3 but at the same time I enjoy the high speed action of 4. The video below is the entire ost.
Compatibility:
One thing Momodora doesn't take from Cave Story is how accessible it is. Instead of every device, it is native to Windows and Windows only. Now this isn't too much of a problem as a majority of people are likely using Windows. As for me, I have played the game on Windows and it works perfectly under Windows 7 and Windows 10 in my experience.
Momodora does work under Linux when using Wine, however it seems to suffer from being capped at 30fps and I couldn't seem to find a way to make it run full speed. This seems to be a common problem across the series on Linux.
Verdict
- As the first game in the series, I actually really enjoyed this title despite its short comings. It is a bit difficult at points, but I never really felt discouraged or that a lot of it was unfair. Most importantly, it laid the groundwork for its future titles. If you're in the mood for some more platformers, I would recommend the series as a whole, but it doesn't hurt to see where the series started and how it improved with each new game.
If you're interested in trying it out, you can get it for free here on Itch: https://rdein.itch.io/momodora-i