![]() ![]() The willingness to go from ‘moe cuteness’ to ‘surprise death’ to ‘bizarre existential parable’ is one of Momodora’s most endearing features, and I think it’s worth digging into. No matter how cute Momodora might get, there’s always going to be a chance that that next room hides a character death, or a seemingly insurmountable combat challenge, or some other bizarre, surreal horror. It gets quite real, by the end, and that’s without mentioning the Cat thing. In so many other ways, Momodora clearly draws from the Souls games: there’s the whiplash difficulty of many of the boss battles, the inscrutable and intentionally half-sketched lore of its world, the secret lore hidden in item descriptions, as well as that game’s lingering, persistent sense of melancholy. Like Salt and Sanctuary, it has a version of Dark Souls’ healing Estus Flask system, which replenish upon a save point visit, as well as a limited, strategic equipment component. It has the adorable, super-expressive pixel art of something like WayForward’s early Shantae games, but with a decidedly cutesy-gothic slant. It’s a game that wears its influences so far out on its sleeve that there might as well be an annotated list: it has the Metroidvania gated exploration, the gridded map and intimidating bosses, the traversal mechanics and quirky, mysterious NPCs. They’d look a lot like me – they’ve got my number to the tenth decimal place. It knows exactly who it’s after, and I think if you had a sheet of paper you might be able to draw them. ![]() It’s the kind of product that feels particularly targeted: it has cutesy key artwork, 32-bit style graphics in-game, a Japanese-sounding name and definite anime aesthetic, and an obvious Castlevania homage right in the title. Momodora: Reverie of Requiem Moon Cat Reverie is a game I’ve been looking into buying for about three years, ever since it first released and I caught the inimitable HalfCoordinated running it at a GDQ event.
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