Moroi: A Grim Top-Down Survival Horror That Echoes the Dark Vibes of Little Nightmares and American McGee’s Alice

It was around the time the sigil-ridden corpse hooked up to a breathing tube pooped out a slithering, smiling garden gnome, and shortly after I had to sacrifice my arms, legs, colours and voice to a bunch of hideous trees that I realised that, hang on, this isn’t my current lunchtime favourite Bracket City. This is the demo for Moroi, a top-down “dark fairytale” from Violet Saint and publishers Good Shepherd, in which you are a horrible little man in a world of talking meat grinders, plughole maggots, and clamp-faced crawling things.

The friendliest the demo gets is when an anatomically improbable duck tears out its own chunky molars for you to glue to your sword. Suffice it to say that Little Nightmares has fresh competition in the subgenre of mutilation-driven action games, though the mechanics and tone are perhaps more in keeping with the venerable American McGee’s Alice. Here’s a trailer (it’s an older one – there’s a newer one but it has a spoilery voiceover).

The premise here is that you’re a prisoner of the Cosmic Engine, “a personalized hellscape designed to distort any semblance of normalcy”. You are there because you’ve done something really rather awful, but the Engine’s denizens aren’t especially inclined to fill you in. “Your name, your past: gone, but not the record of your misdeeds,” explains the Steam page. “Your crimes: beyond comprehension. Your conviction: incontestable. Your sentence: eternal. The need to escape and set things right: undeniable.”

Before you can get into all that you’ll need to massacre a lot of squidgy medieval thugs. Your starting weapons are a blade with a combo alt fire, and a Gatling nailgun that overheats. Fill up your Execute bar and you can slaughter people for health orbs – I didn’t come across any regular healing items in the demo. It feels like a straightforward shmup: backpedal, strafe, and kite until everything is giblets. I’m far more interested in the geography and mythology of this particular nightmare frontier.

In the demo’s Sky Prison, there is a pronounced emphasis on eating or being eaten. You meet a fellow who’s gnawing on his own arm – he promptly scolds you for not grasping “the beauty of my art”. The aforesaid sentient bone-thresher, meanwhile, asks if it can devour you after explaining that it was thrown in jail for guzzling a chef. Being something of a people-pleaser, I said yes, but the meatgrinder spat me out because I tasted bad. Rude. These culinary matters aside, I’m keen to learn more about the opening screen, which shows a hollow-eyed pixie blowing up an Ophanim like a party balloon.

There’s a slight sense of filthy-brained writers and artists engaged in ostentatious brinkmanship, striving to revolt each other at the expense of craft. Put it this way, you could upend the contents of the Sky Prison across the whole game and it’d be spilled intestines enough for most players. There’s a stop-motion judder and a rotten toybox ambience to Moroi that reminds me of Jack King-Spooner’s work, but so far, King-Spooner’s games deploy their ugliness more purposefully. At times, this just feels like grot for the love of it, with a predictable heavy metal soundtrack. It’s more butchery than surgery.

Still, I’m partial to a bit of grot now and then. Even over lunch, though I’m definitely thankful right now that I don’t eat meat. Moroi hath yet no release date – you can read more and find the demo on Steam.