Also for: DOS
Once upon a time there was a game called Moonstone: A Hard Days Knight, that should have ruled the world. When new Amiga releases were a dime a dozen, Moonstone found its own identity by mixing action combat with light fantasy RPG elements. Genre hybrids like that were rare, partly because limitations to RAM and disk space restricted the amount of features a game could hold.
And indeed, Moonstone gained a cult following by being bold, unapologetic and instantly accessible. It allowed nerds to play an imaginative board game solo or with up to three friends, with exciting action combat sequences relying on player skill rather than the luck of the draw. You avoided the bother of setting the game up, and to spice it up you got the gore. As of '91, no game was more explicitly brutal than Moonstone, with bizarre and bloody death sequences accompanying every enemy encounter.
For some reason the cult never truly prospered, however, and today the Moonstone druids can only occasionally be heard chanting on Amiga and DOS emulators on PC:s scattered around the globe. Why didn't its legacy endure? Perhaps the game didn't live up to the promises of the radical concept? Or did Moonstone just go down with the sinking ship that was the Amiga?
STORY AND SETTING
The backstory and setup is pretty basic and laughable. Once in a thousand years, the moon spirit Danu shifts his attention away from the cosmos over to our measly planet. The druids of Stonehenge celebrate this occasion by dubbing their best knights to compete in the quest for the Moonstone. This Mindscape-published game (programmed by Canadian Rob Anderson) lets you control one of these four near identical medieval knights, only separated by starting location and the color of their cloth.
We get to witness the initiation rite in an awesome introduction, which alone takes up most of the first game disk (out of three). Over a dark, ominous score created by legendary Amiga composer Richard Joseph, a dozen druids march down a forest path in the night, only to arrive at Stonehenge as the ritual is about the begin. The skies grow mad with black clouds and lightning, the music intensifies to a frantic drumming, the druids start their exalted chantin', and a red knight arrives at the scene.
He enters the ring, completes his initiation and feels psyched to go stone-searching. His goal? To bring the Moonstone back to the druids and receive Danu's gift of ultimate power. To see what that is, you need to complete the quest and watch the outro. I wouldn't dream of spoiling that surprise.
A BOARD GAME APPROACH
The game structure borrows heavily from board games like Talisman and The Dark Tower. It takes place on a big, colorful map squeezed to fit a single screen (in fact, no scrolling takes place within gameplay at all). You and your friends take turns controlling your knight helmet icon of choice. If you don't play with a full, four-player roster, the remaining knights will be replaced by black, evil, AI-controlled dudes who want to sabotage your quest. The map is laden with points of interest: lots of monster lairs, but also two cities, your home village, a mysterious wizard's tower, the Valley of the Gods and Stonehenge itself. The lands are divided into four distinct territories, each housing their own special monstrous beings.The quest is needlessly complicated, and its goals can only be found in the manual, or be puzzled together by the hints on the loading screens. To get the Moonstone, you need to reach the Valley of the Gods at the center of the map and slay its Guardian. But first, to even gain entry to the valley, you need to find four keys that are scattered across the lairs on the map. Once you gain possession of the Moonstone, you need to bring it back to Stonehenge.
Danu, however, won't accept it unless it aligns with the current moon phase. If you received, for instance, a new moon Moonstone, the moon must be new. If it ain't, you need to wait until it is. While you wait, all knights still alive will hunt and attempt to kill you and claim the Moonstone for their own.
And to make matters worse, after a few turns a powerful dragon will start crossing the overworld map back and forth in search of prey. Straying in its path or entering a monster lair will result in combat. This temporarily transforms the game into a sideview brawler (the 8-bit classic Barbarian was the inspiration) in which you enter a single-screen arena and fight an opponent to the death.
MORTAL COMBAT
It's hardly fair to compare it to today's standards, but now this part of the game is serviceable at best. It can feel very hard and unfair until you find the winning attack pattern, when suddenly it becomes a walk in the park. This pattern hardly differs between the different enemy types. If you know it, you could even beat the dragon (the supposedly hardest enemy of the game) right off the bat, as long as you manage to avoid its fire breath. This is why I could beat the game just as easily today as I did twenty-six years ago.
Your knight knows a surprising number of different combat moves, including attacks in every direction. You'll likely end up using just two or three of them, though, making all battles play out the same. Blocking and avoiding attacks are very hard to pull off, given the frantic pacing of the action. An enemy attack is completed in only a couple of quick frames, with fake motion blur replacing real animation, giving you no time to pick the right move. This could have been fixed by utilising only one universal block, for instance with a shield, reducing the matter to timing alone.
Once you start raking up wins, you gain loads of loot and experience points to put into a stat of your choice -- Strength, Constitution or Endurance. Pickups range from weapons, armor, gold, and scrolls to magical items of power. Some are very situational, and some are downright game breaking, like the Sword of Sharpness and the Scroll of Acquisition. Be wary of the cursed scrolls that reverse the intended effect. For instance, a cursed Haste scroll slows you down considerably. In the cities you can spend your gold on gambling, healing or purchasing new gear, but this can often feel like wasting a turn.
And that's the gist of it all - you take turns traversing the map, going after one lair after the other, exterminating the different monster species in the process. In your wake you leave a bloodied and pillaged land, ready to be conquered by the exalted Druids for unclear reasons. You're their henchman and they're the followers of a mysterious God. I guess that makes them, and you, religious fanatics.
OUTDATED AND IRRELEVANT
The facets of Moonstone that still remain strong are the visuals, particularly world and monster design. One would expect the usual Tolkien-fare like orcs, trolls and the odd giant spider, but the naming and designs are totally unique. With big and detailed sprites, you get a pretty good look at them. The Mudmen of the southern swamps are a sight to see; scary, innovative and one of very few enemies able to one-shot you, regardless of your health level. I also like the hulking Baloks of the northern wastelands, that leap around the arena and pop you like a bottle of ketchup if you linger at one spot for too long. These monsters all are different shades of hideous, but they look kind of cute when they lie dead at your feet.
Today, everything else that made Moonstone special has become mainstream. Every game and its mother has RPG elements. Heck, even sports games have them. The shock value is reduced to a spark when compared to the bombardment of mass executions on a daily basis. Heck, even the daily news are more upsetting. Contemporary board games are more complex and entertaining than this. Heck, even Tic-Tac-Toe offers more variation and decision making.
I suppose that's the drawback of selling points like violence and rudimentary RPG mechanics. You need the heavier content to back it up, otherwise it becomes nothing but sensationalism. At least the DOS version had some hilariously bad sound effects:
As a single player experience, Moonstone offers no longevity. The initial coolness factor wears down quickly. When all you're offering is gore and shallow mechanics, things start ringing hollow pretty soon. Replayability is low. You'll experience all it has to offer on a single playthrough, and the only variation is trying out different starting locations to see how it affects the difficulty curve.
Moonstone: A Hard Days Knight is saved to a passable rating by its short running time (you can beat it in 30-60 minutes), graphical design and multiplayer support. It works best when you gather a bunch of friends, preferrably not too skilled, and laugh at the slapstick, over-the-top death animations. For all the lonely gamers, however, the season of the Moonstones is truly over. A remake is reportedly in the making, but judging by the pace of updates it might be a thousand year wait. I don't see the point of it anyway. It needs to add so many features to stay relevant that they might just call it something else. Hey, how about "Druids are Monsters, too"? Or why not go for an even sillier pun, like "Moonsters: A Hardy-hard-hard Daze Knightmare"?
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