Moroi Hands-on Preview – Escape the Cosmic Engine

Formally unveiled last month, Moroi (developed by Violet Saint and published by Good Shepherd Entertainment) now has a playable demo to give players a hands-on experience of this deeply surreal upcoming game. Presenting an oddly compelling mix of black comedy, body horror and David Lynchian weirdness, Moroi is certainly one to keep an eye on for fans of puzzle and action games with a particularly unique sensibility.

In Moroi’s demo, you play as an amnesiac man in prison, with no clue of your identity or how you got there. The prison’s other inmates, including a man-eating robot, a potion-brewing witch and a curiously poetic cannibal, all seem to have their own things going on and whose explanations only serve to make things more mysterious. After trying to feed myself to the hungry robot (turns out I don’t taste good, fortunately), I managed to find a severed hand from a talkative cannibal who is immediately struck by lightning, which the robot found more appetising before it also burst into flames. Following a succession of fetch quests involving a wizard, a witch and a giant man with a pig’s head and wheels for legs, the player is free to explore their surroundings.

Once you get hold of a weapon (involving a talking duck jovially tearing out its own teeth, of course), you can finally engage in combat. It’s an isometric hack-and-slash sort of experience, with a DOOM Eternal-esque execution move that you can pull off on weakened foes to recover some health. You have both melee and ranged attacks, with your ranged weapons running off a cooldown mechanic rather than ammunition. The final game will include a large arsenal of tools to take down enemies. These will include a mace, a rocket launcher, a power hammer and a chainsword, among others.

Moroi often lurches from comedy to horror at the flip of a coin. Once you accept that most of the NPCs you meet might just randomly explode or otherwise die violently, and overall seem rather unattached to their body parts and happy to lend them to you in a pinch, it’s easy to get into the game’s bizarre groove. It isn’t for the weak of stomach; the game definitely doesn’t shy away from gore. For those looking for a darkly comedic body horror atmosphere, however, Moroi is set to oblige.

The title of Moroi refers to a type of vampire or phantom in Romanian folklore and, according to developer Alex Stanescu, does not specifically refer to the player character. In addition to Romanian folklore, Stanescu also mentioned the works of Franz Kafka and Douglas Adams as key inspirations behind Moroi’s atmosphere. Regarding the game’s mixture of puzzle-solving and tense combat, the likes of Silent Hill 2 and Undertale are listed as influences. One can especially feel the absurdist influence of Kafka’s “The Trial”, in which a man is arrested for a crime that the court refuses to explain to him.

Stanescu advised that the player can make choices that impact the ending, but doesn’t exactly have branching storylines. The core experience will take about 8-9 hours for players to complete. Moroi isn’t especially technically polished so far; my own experiences with the demo were marred by crashes, freezes and inconsistently acknowledging my plugged-in Xbox controller. That said, there is plenty of time for Violet Saint to fix up many of these issues before launch.

Moroi is set to release on PC and can be wishlisted on Steam, however no release date has yet been confirmed.