Cynthia Hidden in The Moonshadow is a small indie game from developers Catthia Games. The game is best described as a cozy, light-hearted, stealth-focused jaunt across a stylised world. The game plays heavily towards the narrative side with some engaging exploration that is held back by its very linear world design.
While out exploring and training far from home, Moonshadow Huntress, Cynthia Strandborg, eagerly awaits her return trip, specifically to see her boyfriend. But while she’s out, the Priests of The North, wielding dark magic, have attacked her home, abducted her boyfriend and turned everyone else to stone. It’s up to Cynthia to find two artefacts that will help her stop the Priests and save her loved ones, her boyfriend especially.
While Cynthia wields a bow powered by the artefacts, and possesses a variety of moves such as climbing, sliding, dodging and three different arrow types, combat almost never happens except for a few enemy types and the games last sequence. Cynthia Hidden In the Moonshadow is, instead, more interested in stealth adventure, which does tie-in more closely with Cynthia’s status as a Hunter.
Stealth itself is not a complicated affair. Tying in with the cozy nature of the game, a very simple stealth system is employed, focused on hiding in long grass, crouching behind obstacles and avoiding the enemy’s sight, which can go from lightly alarmed to attacking you. Which you don’t want as there’s a one-hit system in place. If you do get caught and whammied into stone by the priests magic attacks, a quick reload will pop you back to your last auto-saved point and away you go. There’s no real penalty for death, beyond some loading and a lesson in been more careful.
It’s also one of the areas that doesn’t quite make sense as Cynthia can use her arrows to distract guards, drop crates onto them, blind their view or confuse them into attacking each other. Outside of the games last boss fight, and a very specific roaming energy ball enemy, you can’t use your bow to kill enemies through the rest of the game, which makes that final sequence feel out of place.
Adding to that feeling are some of Cynthia’s moves. The dodge feels pointless as there isn’t any reason to use it because you don’t really get into combat. And the same goes for her slide move, which does look really cool but is only used to slide under rocks. While the slide has a handful of uses, the dodge I used only once during the tutorial section.
With Cynthia Hidden In the Moonshadow been rather short – you can finish it in one sitting – and the move-sets that never get fully used or fleshed out as though the developers forgot to take them into account as development progressed, Cynthia Hidden In the Moonshadow ends up feeling more like a prologue or proof of concept than a full adventure. There’s nothing wrong with short games, in fact they’re a sight for sore eyes in an age where most games are pushing to take over all of your free time, Cynthia Hidden In the Moonshadow ends just as it begins, with a possible promise of more to come.
When you’re not playing as Snake-lite, you’ll be exploring the rather linear levels in search of Guardian statues to activate, diaries entries to read which add lore onto the world, light puzzles to solve, outfits to collect and arrows to craft. I was never sure what exactly the blessing from the statues did, though finding the lore entries added some much needed meat to the games narrative bones.
The puzzles, which ranged from flipping levers in specific orders to stepping on tiles in specific patterns were easy to solve and broke up the stealth pacing. The crafting is also kept small and simple with a handful of items to pick up that are used to craft your three arrow types. With the amount of materials on offer, running out of ammo is never a concern.
Visually, Cynthia Hidden in The Moonshadow is an appealing and colourful game. The stylised look, which we should all be used to by now, gives the game some great environmental moments but the environments are let down by their simplicity and relative emptiness. The grass, water and character models are wonderfully done but the lack of props and clutter in the environment makes the game seem bare.
Which makes the fact that it suffers from frame drops, whether I played on Xbox One or Series X, a bit of a concern. It doesn’t affect the action but is very noticeable during exploration.
The game suffers from a series of issues in animation – such as the slow and awkward climbing, design and size that clearly shows its smaller budget, indie status. There’s an interesting proof of concept, design style to the game that’s just begging for a larger budget and sequel that, hopefully, Catthia Games can fulfil on.
Cynthia Hidden in The Moonshadow Trailer
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