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The turn-based, Roguelike, deckbuilder genre is one that I’ve personally come to adore in recent years. While there is a steadily growing number of entries in this category, the most prolific (and still my favorite) example is Slay The Spire. I never would’ve predicted it going into the experience, but Slay The Spire is a game I’ve put several hundreds of hours into at this point.
Following ly in its footsteps, and bursting onto the 2025 slate of games in the final hours, comes Hunter’s Moon: A Sovereign Syndicate Adventure. While the original Sovereign Syndicate was a Steampunk, horror/fantasy RPG aligned with the overall stylings of Disco Elysium, Hunter’s Moon is a spinoff that takes an entirely different gameplay approach while still being in-universe.
After spending a lot of time with this latest foray into the specific brand of deckbuilder that I love, Hunter’s Moon didn’t quite live up to how amazing it seemed to be shaping up to be in the early hours. At the same time, there is also a много to feel positive and optimistic about as well. Let’s shuffle the deck and show you the deal.
Immaculate Gothic, Steampunk Vibes
Прежде всего, Hunter’s Moon looks and sounds incredible. Everything about the mechanical visuals, like UI and menus, feels perfectly Slay The Spire-adjacent, if not directly inspired. There’s a fine line here, because I do think I caught onto the game so quickly due to just how similar it looks and feels to this competing title, but as such a personal fan of Slay The Spire, I ultimately didn’t mind.
From there, the ‘Steampunk-meets-Gothic London with a high dose of horror’ art style feels like a truly wonderful mashup of Bloodborne’s Lovecraftian terror combined with Darkest Dungeon’s grim, yet beautiful cel-shaded design. At the same time, Hunter’s Moon also feels artistically its own, trading in the graphic novel panels of Sovereign Syndicate for storybook-like cutscenes and dialog encounters.
The music is an additional standout, offering more of a variety and vibe-setting quality than several other similar games in the genre. It’s eery and unsettling during certain random encounters and battles with lower-tier enemies, before launching into pulse-pumping tracks in some of the more notable boss fights.
Once fairly quickly unlocked, your cast of four playable characters (called Agents) fly around this dystopian version of London aboard an airship called The Starling. There are some fun moments of banter between characters, but it’s never excessive, nor gets in the way of the game itself.
The story is a little sparse in general, but still is more of a prominent feature than we’ve seen in other similar games. Essentially, something is causing terrifying mutations across England, and it’s up to you and your crew to figure out each source and take it down.
This lore is peppered in during mid-run quests, random encounters, and little blurbs of dialog that will play as you start each new mission. The voice acting is great, and the performance of the narrator and everyone else involved is top-notch as well.
A Familiar Gameplay Loop With Some Tweaks
To be blunt, if you’ve played Slay The Spire, then you know how Hunter’s Moon functions from a gameplay perspective – At least, for the most part. At the base level, you’ll be engaging in turn-based battles against various creatures while using a deck of cards filled with various powers and abilities. Each card in your deck is dealt to you randomly, and every one also comes with an associated energy cost to use based on its overall strength.
Once you’re out of energy to play any more cards, the turn swaps to the enemy, and the process is repeated until someone emerges victorious. As you progress through the run, you’ll have the opportunity to add more cards to your deck, as well as upgrade pre-existing ones in your possession. The balance then becomes building the best deck possible to synergize cards with like uses together in order to give yourself the best odds of finishing a run in one piece.
Like Slay The Spire, you’ll also have powerful relics to acquire, each of which gives you a game-changing bonus, like more energy to use on your turn, more HP, special resistances, and much more. You have the choice to navigate encounters during a run in whichever order you see fit, so there’s additional strategy in planning ahead and picking out encounters in the optimal order to survive.
Hunter’s Moon, however, adds more ideas to the mix, and in fact becomes a bit deeper and more layered than Slay The Spire once you learn all of its systems. Most notable are the companions, which fight alongside you autonomously, so you need to factor in their moves – as well as their health bars – in order to keep them contributing to each battle as optimally as possible. I wasn’t sure I liked or needed the companions at first, but they’d won me over completely by the end, since the added complexity to each battle is nice to master and plan around.
There’s also a lot of post-run meta-progression here, as The Starling has rooms to repair with currency found during a run. Making these repairs makes you noticeably stronger for your next run, and also is how you’ll unlock new characters to use moving forward. It’s a nice system, and makes it feel like you’re really working towards tangible rewards and results on a run-to-run basis.
You’ll also earn XP, which unlocks points to spend on each character in a skill tree of sorts. I did think this system was bugged for a while, since the game didn’t explain to me that the skill points were divided up evenly between characters, but I adjusted to this idea once I’d figured this out. This shared skill point system prevented me from truly going all-in on my favorite character since I had to treat everyone equally, which is fine since it encourages you to try everyone out, but ultimately a bit of a nuisance as well.
While the game is mostly explained well, there was a continued theme of certain ideas not always being portrayed in an intuitive way. Most cards and items come with a reference card to tell you what each buff, debuff, or mechanic does, but some just… don’t. I spent too many rounds trying to figure out what each type of damage or debuff actually did, because it simply wasn’t made clear at times. I learned and figured it all out eventually, and you surely will too. Just know you’ll have to do a little bit of legwork here as well.
Deckbuilder Flow States, But Imbalanced Ones
Any game of this sort has a learning curve, so initially, encounters will feel quite slow as you read and learn what each and every card type and ability does. I love this part of a deckbuilder, because it simply makes me feel smart as I come to grips with all of the presented ideas and mechanics. Once it all clicks, it’s a truly rewarding sensation since you feel like you’ve done your part to learn how everything works too.
As much as I enjoy this learning phase too, however, games like Hunter’s Moon truly shine when everything starts to become second nature. Eventually, you’ll learn all your cards, the on-screen indicators for every type of action, and the energy costs for everything you want to accomplish on your turn. It’s in this moment when you can start flinging cards around like a player possessed, and I find it to result in a type of flowstate gaming that many other genres can never replicate quite as well. That feeling is alive in Hunter’s Moon, and it’s awesome.
Of course, RNG is at play to a high extent here, because the success of a run becomes dependent on which cards, relics, consumables, and other items you’re coming across throughout an attempt. But regardless of your ultimate chosen build, there are few games that feel as rewarding as Hunter’s Moon in the genre once you’re putting it all together.
Or at least, that’s the case until you start to feel some of the imbalance of the title. As much as I love the loop and completing various quests on runs, Hunter’s Moon is pretty easy once you figure out the builds you like to use. This is вид the case in a game like Slay The Spire too (at least until the end), but it’s much more pronounced in Hunter’s Moon. Grizwald became my main Agent, because along with the four companions you can summon alongside him during a battle, runs became almost guaranteed wins for me regularly.
There are four sections of the game, and genuinely, I don’t think I died once in levels one through three, simply because Grizwald was so overpowered, even against what seemed to be the toughest of boss encounters. Nothing could stop me. In total, three of the four characters feel this same way once you figure them out, and the fourth character plays like a total joke in comparison, to the point that I’m not sure why anyone would ever actually select her. Sorry, Nandi. You seem nice. But… I’m still “никогда не научится делать” going to use you in a run ever again.
The game continues along at this ‘much too easy’ pace for a long time until you reach the fourth and final level. This is where the challenge level spikes, and in turn feels like it’s demanding you grind a bit in the lower levels to continue on to the actual completion of the game. I’m fine with grinding, but when I feel like I’ve totally mastered everything already, this sudden spike really just killed my momentum and made the pacing of the game feel inconsistent and strange.
The good news is that these things can be tweaked, and I’m hopeful that the developers will get similar feedback to make Hunter’s Moon feel more appropriately scaled and paced in the difficulty department. I’d much more prefer a game that ramps up evenly instead of just feeling pretty much dead easy before stonewalling you at the end.
Needs A Little More Time In The Oven
The balance of the game was my biggest gripe overall, but I do sadly have to talk about some performance issues as well. For the most part, Hunter’s Moon does run incredibly well. The visuals are crisp, and even when there are a много of actions playing out on screen at once or in quick succession, it keeps up really well in terms of frame rate.
The issue that I kept having over and over was that the game would simply get stuck between my turn and the enemies’. I’d play all my cards, exhaust my energy, and end my turn. Then, nothing else would happen, as the characters on screen simply stood around in their idle animations in perpetuity. This, of course, rendered many combat encounters completely unplayable, and it’s truly a shame. The worst part was when this would happen during a boss fight I was about to win.
It wasn’t the end of the world, because I could still quit to the main menu and go back into my run. The horrible part is that whenever this would occur, I’d have to start said encounter back over from square one. I’d also have my cards dealt to me in a different order when doing this, so it was frustrating to be so to a victory, have to restart because of this issue, and then be given a less optimal hand on my next attempt. It felt like punishment for something I had no control over whatsoever.
It wouldn’t have been a big deal if this only happened a couple of times, but it truly became a pervasive issue in the end, with more than a dozen isolated occurrences. It got the point that every single time I’d click «End Turn,» I’d sit there wondering if the game would let me keep playing or not. This, of course, is not a good feeling at all, and needs to be patched and corrected before I can truly sign off on Hunter’s Moon.
It just feels so unfortunate, because I really think Hunter’s Moon will be a genuinely отлично game once these issues, along with the balancing, are ironed out. I powered through the technical hiccups because I liked the game that much (and well, because I’m reviewing it), but surely not every player will do the same.
Заключительные комментарии:
Hunter’s Moon: A Sovereign Syndicate Adventure is a deckbuilder that I absolutely любимый early on. The presentation is fantastic, and the Slay The Spire-esque gameplay is top-tier. Unfortunately, the more I played, the more I’d encounter substantial performance issues and an overall feeling of imbalance. Give this one some more time to be optimized, and it’ll be one of the best titles in the genre. Until then, it’s still a good time, but hasn’t yet reached its full potential.
Плюсы и минусы
- Gorgeous design and presentation from top to bottom
- Flowstate deckbuilder gameplay once you’ve learned the ropes
- Lays the foundation for one of the coolest games in the genre
- Worthwhile tweaks and additions to the genre’s formula
- Persistent frustrating performance issues
- Imbalanced-feeling characters and combat encounters
- Some ideas that aren’t explained very well
