As many have echoed, the sentiment behind this game being free earns it a special place in my heart.

This beautiful game is well crafted, interesting, funny and full of great ideas. I spent a lot of time over Christmas losing myself in this game. That said, I didn't make a tonne of progress...

This is definitely a game I'll come back to when I have a bit more time and the brain space to think a bit more about what I'm doing but an easy recommend.

"Life is hard, COVID sucked, everyone's poor and stressed. I don't need the $300 this would make me: I'd rather take the goodwill." - palavras de um dos co-criadores de Fable e dev de Moonring, Dene Carter.

esse jogo é demais. uma carta de amor à Ultima e à todos nós. sempre fico super feliz e animado quando jogo algo diferente e mais ainda quando jogo algo que resgata a beleza do passado para o presente sem perder a estética! meu maior problema com remakes, reboots e afins é a perda total da estética. muda a vibe demais, mano. Dene Carter disse: AQUI NÃO!

uma delícia ficar perdido nesse mundo e ir descobrindo-o. acho muito maneiro isso de ir anotando palavras-chave pra depois juntá-las até convergirem em alguma nova descoberta. sensação maravilhosa. esse jogo ser de graça é mais uma das demonstrações do quão foda é a nossa comunidade.

One of the best RPGs I've played in years. Im not the best at articulating myself when it comes to these types of games, but heres what I'll say:
I spent 30 min walking to the other side of the world, and by time I got to my destination I'd forgotten what I even went there for. Which then led to me manually writing notes in pen & paper of what I've done, and what Im meant to be on the lookout for.
Besides the whole "retro" fps revivial, nothing else in gaming has made me feel more like a kid again.

An absolute treat for anyone that enjoys older CRPGs like classic Ultima. Mindboggling that this was released for free.

Really delightful homage to Ultima games, there's so many good ideas packed together. Fantastic exploration and discovery. Would recommend giving it a go for half an hour if you are interested in RPG design or a fan of older games, it's free, and I think if you don't like it you'll bounce off it very quickly. On the other hand, you could be drawn in for a wonderful time.

I did find that later on the game started to drag. There are roguelike generated dungeons that take a long time to explore and reset your progress if you die, but eventually these stop being rewarding or challenging in an interesting way and just feel like huge RNG time sinks. I thought these were optional for a while and avoided them while exploring the other mysteries that interested me much more, but eventually they're mandatory. I put the game down for good after spending hours banging my head against one of these dungeons that just kept crashing and losing all my progress.

Still, fantastic game and I still recommend it!

Glad I tried this game; I had never played this style of RPG before and it was fun and interesting for a while. The mechanics are very engaging and the lore and world is intriguing enough.

However there's an oppressive feeling to it all that ultimately makes it hard for me to want to keep going.

After spending like 2 hours on a very gripping but perhaps too-tense dungeon, my character was killed and then it hit me; the idea of going through that again wasn't appealing enough.

It's a little gem of a game for sure. And at the great price of free, it's absolutely worth trying. Just not sure if it will stress me more than entertain me.

I still can't belive this game is totally free. It's an amazing love letter to the very first Ultima Wave back in the first years of the '80s. It brings a lot of good ideas with it, and both the setting and the story surpassed my expectations.

I'm personally an huge fan of alternative ways to level up your character, so i loved the sistem in Moonring that's based on complete various tasks of each of the five gods in order to level up your stats and unlock skills instead of the classic exp.

The game propose a bump system for is combat, and combined with the skills it create a beautiful CS that hooked me until the end of the game.

What are you still waiting for? It's totally free, so go on and play it!

As duas inspirações mais óbvias se Moonring são Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar e Rogue. Do primeiro, temos o overworld, o sistema de progressão não-tradicional, a ambientação e quest design; do segundo, as dungeons geradas proceduralmente e o combate tático e dinâmico.

Só por suas influências este jogo já é notável. São pouquíssimos os games que tentam emular a série clássica de Richard Garriot para além da interface... Tão poucos que, sendo bem sincero, só conheço mesmo a série Ultima! Bem, conhecia, porque Moonring faz um excelente trabalho sendo um sucessor espiritual, com bastante foco na conversa com NPCs, bastante exploração das cidades, uma quest com várias pegadas de adventure e um enredo mais filosófico.

Mas por mais que eu ame Ultima por essas coisas, a série é um Oldschool RPG com O maiúsculo, então tem uma boa parcela de combate e dungeon crawling. E Moonring também, mas nesses aspectos sua inspiração é Rogue, não Ultima. Sempre que você entra em uma dungeon o nível é gerado proceduralmente e todo o combate é top-down e por turnos. O gerenciamento de recursos e uso tático de suas habilidades e itens é de suma importância — grindar níveis não é realmente uma opção, e apesar de equipamentos melhores fazerem uma boa diferença, mesmo com o básico do começo do jogo dá pra se virar. Se você morrer, volta pro início e um novo layout da dungeon é gerado. Há variedade o suficiente de inimigos e layouts para não tornar a experiência cansativa e o combate é bem divertido.

O quest e world design de Ultima com o combate e dungeon crawl de Rogue. O melhor de dois mundos. Não tem como dar errado, certo?

... E realmente não dá! Moonring usa suas influências de forma bem consciente para fazer um RPG que poderia muito bem ter saído no início dos anos 1980, mas sempre com sua abordagem única para o resultado ser mais que uma mera cópia. Melhor, mesmo podendo caminhar confortavelmente ao lado de suas inspirações, Moonring não deixa de ser eminentemente moderno, com várias funções que aumentam sua usabilidade para audiências modernas: palavras-chave são marcadas durante o diálogo, há um sistema de notas automáticas muito útil, auto mapping, auto saving, NPCs que você não conversou são marcados, dá pra controlar usando só o mouse ou só teclado, e vários outros toques.

Tudo isso pelo baratíssimo preço de De Graça.

Moonring is an hidden gem developped by a single developper.

As someone who has almost never played any similar games I didn't expect myself to play it more than 1 hour, in the end I played through the whole game in 4 days and greatly appreciated it.

Nonetheless, while this happened to me, it is definitely not a game for everyone. I think many people will be turned off right away by the graphics or the dungeons themselves, but you have nothing to lose though by trying it out as the game is free. Like myself, players will probably have to make an effort at first to go out of their confort zone to truly appreciate what the game has to offer, which can be divided into three important points.

Moonring's world, its storytelling and exploration, all of these three share something in common : the player's progression through his direct involvement, sometimes through his character but more often as the player itself.

This is not a Baldur's Gate 3 type of game where every choice may result in different endings or events, this would probably be way too much work for a single developper but more akin to Outer Wilds. The game doesn't exactly tell you where to go and how to complete its story, you will have to think for yourself and theorize about the hints the game give you along your adventure.

As you wake up and start your adventure, you'll discover that the world is quite dark, there's literally no sun, a strange mist that has been here for as long as people can remember is all around the continent and make people lose their minds. You'll be often scared of anything you meet outside of a city at first and that's why the first place you'll probably go to is one of them.
Inside of them you'll meet many characters, receive many informations and hints about what's around, notice that the world and its places feel very tied to each other and often come out with more questions than answers.

The reason for that is how you get to learn more about your quest and this world you're a part of. When you talk to a npc, you don't simply ask already made questions and get answers to them like most games, you'll have to directly find the words yourselves and write them to interact with any characters, most of the interesting and important words are hinted heavily by the NPCs themselves but some are hidden and it's your job you, the player, to think about it and try to ask the characters.
I'm sure it's not the first time this has been done but it's the first game I've played with this system and I think it's brillant. It forces the player to actively think about what should he say to his interlocutor and become a real piece of the story, the player and not the character.

As for your quests, unlike most RPGs there are no quests to follow with fixed objectives. You only have your book containing the notes you wrote during your interactions with the world and its characters. You noticed something of interest while talking to a NPC ? You'll write it down, even if it makes no sense to you now, maybe later down the line, you'll understand its meaning :)
Again as I said before, this is great because compared to almost all RPGs, this part of the game includes player's involvement, the answer will never be given to you directly, it is your job to make sense of it and find your way.

Finally as you make your way out of the city you'll have to walk out in the unknown blindly and find caves, dungeons and ruins, you'll explore the world.
This is the meat of the game, you will spend half of your time outside the cities either in the overworld walking, finding places of interest, ruins filled with riddles you don't understand yet, ennemies that may or may not be too strong for you, note it down, comeback later more knowledgable and/or stronger in order to progress through your adventure. This also allows Moonring to be a very different game for each player; for example I personally missed a somewhat important line about the main city being near where I would find a priest able to guide me at the beginning and went the opposite direction. I ended up in a really dangerous place but braved through it and the pieces of the puzzle began to gather from a completely different point another player may have gathered his.

I can't really describe it but it felt very good to have this sort of cycle of :
- Go to a city
- Learn about places and get hints about your quest
- Go out a bit cluelessly most of the time
- Find a place, don't understand what to do yet
- Find other places, begin to gather the pieces of a puzzle
- Understand what you missed at first and get closer to your goal

The second half of the game and by consequence a big part of it is the combat, which most of the time will happen either in the nature on the overworld or inside dungeons, it takes form in oldschool roguelike mystery dungeon-type, you make your way through dungeons filled with ennemies, traps, a dangerous environnement overall and come out with treasures, gear and sometimes important items necessary for progressing your quest.
Frankly speaking it's not what makes the game great but it gets the job done by a long margin, each encounters feel different, with A LOT of factors to take into account : how many ennemies are there, which type of ennemy they are, are there pieces of environment I can take advantage of, where are my means of escape if I can escape ? If you try to bruteforce everything you'll quickly understand that it won't work, and this from the very first dungeon. The game is somewhat turn-based, meaning as long as you don't act, nothing will move or attack, letting you analyze the situation and deal with it adequately, it's nice.
You also have a lot of freedom in the way you decide to play, from being a very tanky guy swinging an heavy weapon able to repel your ennemies into walls or holes, to a sneaky assassin walking quietly to backstab an oblivious ennemy, or an archer taking advantage of the space around to kite his ennemies to a wizard throwing flasks, potions and summoning magic spirits and other playstyles I didn't think about...

I think I went on for long enough about this game and hope you'll like it as much as I did, I didn't talk about anything related to the story itself because I think this game is best discovered blindly on that front.
This game is not without its flaws, I could say that some part need some fixes and QoL here and there but the game is already really enjoyable as it is and its developper still plan to work on it and add new things in the times to come.

TL;DR : Moonring is not a game about getting stronger and beating the demon king at the end, it's a game about making sense of the world, your quest and goal by making you interact directly as the player with all its riddles, places and characters.