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 carved out a distinct identity by blending action combat with light fantasy RPG elements. Genre hybrids like this were still rare in the early ’90s, partly because limited RAM and disk space placed strict constraints on how many systems a game could reasonably support.
For a while, Moonstone gained a devoted cult following by being bold, unapologetic, and instantly accessible. It allowed players to enjoy the feel of an imaginative board game either solo or with up to three friends, while punctuating that experience with real-time combat sequences that relied more on player skill than on luck. You skipped the hassle of setup, and to sweeten the deal you got the gore. In 1991, no game was more explicitly brutal: every enemy encounter was capped off with bizarre, blood-soaked death animations.
For some reason, though, the cult never truly flourished. Today, the Moonstone druids can only occasionally be heard chanting on Amiga and DOS emulators scattered across the globe. Why didn’t its legacy endure? Did the game fail to live up to the promise of its radical concept? Or did Moonstone simply sink along with the Amiga itself?
STORY AND SETTING
The backstory is basic to the point of absurdity. Once every thousand years, the moon spirit Danu shifts his gaze from the cosmos to our insignificant planet. The druids of Stonehenge celebrate this event by selecting their finest knights to compete in the quest for the Moonstone. Published by Mindscape and programmed by Canadian developer Rob Anderson, Moonstone lets you control one of four nearly identical medieval knights, differentiated only by their starting position and the color of their surcoat.
The initiation ritual is depicted in a superb introduction that alone occupies most of the first disk (out of three). Set to a dark, ominous score by legendary Amiga composer Richard Joseph, a group of druids march through a moonlit forest before assembling at Stonehenge. Storm clouds gather, lightning cracks the sky, the music escalates into frantic drumming, chants rise — and a red knight steps into the circle.
He completes the ritual and sets out in search of the Moonstone, hoping to return it to the druids and receive Danu’s gift of ultimate power. What that gift actually is remains one of the game’s best surprises, and I won’t spoil it here.
A BOARD GAME APPROACH
Structurally, Moonstone borrows heavily from board games like Talisman and The Dark Tower. The entire overworld fits onto a single, non-scrolling screen. Players take turns moving their knight icon across the map. If fewer than four human players are present, the remaining knights are replaced by black-clad, AI-controlled rivals bent on sabotaging your progress.
The map is dense with points of interest: monster lairs, two cities, your home village, a wizard’s tower, the Valley of the Gods, and Stonehenge itself. The land is divided into four territories, each populated by its own distinct monsters.
The quest itself is needlessly convoluted, and its objectives are only explained in the manual or hinted at through loading-screen messages. To obtain the Moonstone, you must reach the Valley of the Gods at the map’s center and defeat its Guardian. Entry to the valley, however, requires four keys hidden across various lairs. Once you finally acquire the Moonstone, you must carry it back to Stonehenge — but Danu will only accept it if the current moon phase matches the stone’s alignment. If it doesn’t, you must wait.
While you wait, every surviving knight will hunt you down.
As if that weren’t enough, a powerful dragon eventually begins roaming the overworld in search of prey. Entering its path — or any monster lair — triggers combat.
MORTAL COMBAT
Combat shifts the game into a single-screen, side-view brawler inspired by Barbarian. By modern standards, it’s serviceable at best. At first it feels punishing and unfair, but once you discover the optimal attack pattern, it becomes trivial. That pattern barely changes across enemy types, meaning even the dragon — supposedly the game’s ultimate challenge — can be defeated early if you know what you’re doing and avoid its fire breath.
Your knight has a surprisingly broad move set, with attacks in multiple directions, but you’ll likely rely on just two or three of them. Blocking and evasion are difficult to execute due to the game’s frantic pacing. Enemy attacks resolve in just a few frames, with motion blur standing in for proper animation, leaving little time to react. A universal block — perhaps shield-based — could have shifted the challenge toward timing rather than guesswork.
Victory yields loot and experience points, which can be invested in Strength, Constitution, or Endurance. Items range from weapons, armor, and gold to scrolls and magical artifacts. Some are situational, others outright broken — the Sword of Sharpness and Scroll of Acquisition can trivialize the game. Cursed scrolls reverse their intended effects, turning Haste into a crippling slowdown, for example. Cities allow you to gamble, heal, or buy equipment, though doing so often feels like wasting a precious turn.
And that’s essentially the loop: take turns traversing the map, clear lair after lair, slaughtering monsters as you go. In your wake lies a blood-soaked land, ostensibly prepared for conquest by the druids — mysterious zealots whose motives are never quite explained. You are their instrument. They follow an inscrutable god. Draw your own conclusions.
OUTDATED AND IRRELEVANT
What Moonstone still does well today is its visual design — particularly its monsters and world. Instead of relying solely on familiar Tolkien-inspired creatures, it presents a menagerie of uniquely named and designed horrors rendered in large, detailed sprites. The Mudmen of the southern swamps are especially memorable: grotesque, inventive, and capable of killing you in a single hit regardless of stats. The hulking Baloks of the northern wastes are another highlight, bounding across the arena and crushing careless players. They are uniformly hideous — and oddly adorable once reduced to corpses at your feet.
Everything else that once made Moonstone stand out has since become commonplace. RPG elements are everywhere — even sports games have them. Shock value has been dulled by decades of escalating excess. Modern board games are vastly more complex. Frankly, even Tic-Tac-Toe offers more meaningful decision-making.
That’s the problem with relying on violence and rudimentary progression as selling points: without deeper systems to support them, they collapse into pure sensationalism. At least the DOS version had the decency to include some hilariously awful sound effects.
As a single-player experience, Moonstone offers little longevity. The initial novelty fades quickly, and replay value is minimal. You’ll see nearly everything in one playthrough, with only minor variation provided by different starting positions.
Moonstone: A Hard Days Knight scrapes by thanks to its short runtime — roughly 30 to 60 minutes — its striking visuals, and its multiplayer mode. It works best as a party game, preferably with friends who aren’t overly skilled, where everyone can laugh at the slapstick violence and absurd death animations. For solitary players, however, the season of the Moonstones has long since passed.
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