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The excellent 2023 first person RPG Lunacid is getting the last (but coolest) follow-up I ever would have expected. Lunacid: Tears of the Moon is a spinoff made with Sword of Moonlight, an incredible little game-making toolkit released by FromSoftware all the way back in 2000, and Tears of the Moon is releasing next month.
Lunacid itself is an homage to King’s Field and Shadow Tower, the primeval FromSoftware first-person dungeon crawlers for the PlayStation and PS2 that Sword of Moonlight is based on. Lunacid is a game of secrets and incredible atmosphere, a descent into a subterranean universe under a dying earth.
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PC Gamer contributor Kerry Brunskill praised how tense and survival-focused Lunacid was at the time of its release, and also appreciated the way it nailed its homage to classic PlayStation aesthetics in its menus, rendering, and art style.
Even if you’re not a big FromSoft head, I think Lunacid has a lot of crossover appeal for fans of Metroid Prime or even System Shock. Lunacid isn’t really an immersive sim—it doesn’t have much “sim” like Baldur’s Gate 3’s physics or Thief’s sound propagation—but you can stack crates (coffins, actually) to get places you “shouldn’t.” So Lunacid has some of the spirit of an immsim.
There’s currently no trailer or gameplay footage for Tears of the Moon, but the game’s Steam page shows some really striking environments, as well as two monster designs: A little bug-fella, and some kind of goopy, decaying dinosaur.
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Amusingly, Tears of the Moon does have a PDF game manual in the style of a classico physical release. It’s pretty cryptic, and mostly focused on getting things like gamepad support working on the positively ancient Sword of Moonlight engine.
We do get some story deets though: Tears of the Moon is set thousands of years before Lunacid proper, and has us playing as Calamis Cerulean, a very spoilery character in the main game. While Lunacid saw us trying to wake up the great beast that’s dreaming the world, putting an end to a fallen age, Tears of the Moon is about lulling it back to sleep so the world can survive until that time.
And now for the insanely cool tech behind the game, Sword of Moonlight. I consider myself a pretty big FromSoftware fan, and I still wasn’t familiar with this utility. Originally released in 2000, Sword of Moonlight is a flexible, powerful, but seemingly approachable tool for creating PC fan games using a modified King’s Field engine, as well as a library of King’s Field and Shadow Tower assets that devs can build on with their own work.
“FromSoftware’s own Super Mario Maker” is a cursed phrase that came to my mind unbidden and I couldn’t shake. But really, Sword of Moonlight has more in common with the Aurora Toolset for Neverwinter Nights or DromEd for Thief given its greater flexibility in allowing custom assets, art, and code. FromSoftware (and BioWare and Looking Glass) does what Nintendon’t.
The pièce de résistance is that FromSoft released it under a shockingly permissive EULA that even allows developers to monetize their games as paid products—hence Tears of the Moon’s Steam release. This is a vanishingly rare thing in games, a generous gesture that feels so in keeping with the PC’s anarchic, DIY spirit. Doom’s open source nature is something similar that comes to mind. Sword of Moonlight continues to be supported by a passionate community, and has a library of completed projects that reminds me of fantastic modding rabbit holes like Doom, Thief or Neverwinter Nights.
In the manual, Kira wrote that, “This being tech from 2000 and using its own strange file formats, my creation process was greatly hindered and limited. But I sought to use these limits to challenge myself and be more creative.
“And because of this engine’s age, it won’t play as well on every system. But I believe these quirks will add to its placement as a prequel set in a more ancient time.”
Given Tears of the Moon’s presumably smaller scope and withered tech, I would expect it to come in well under Lunacid proper’s already-bargain $14 price tag. You can wishlist Lunacid: Tears of the Moon ahead of its April 12 release over on Steam.
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Kurt Indovina
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