Every now and then we publish a round-up of game or demo recommendations, and all you regular readers dutifully fill the comments with recommendations of your own. Our round-ups are, of course, a devious trap for your curiosity and connoisseurship, designed to save us the labour of discovering good games for ourselves. I learned about Moadra from a comment by Galactic Man on our latest Steam Fest demo round-up. Developed by Gloomsoft, it casts you as a dinkier species of Predator, scouring inky catacombs of corpseflesh for a missing alien princess.
That’s the plan, anyway, until you find the princess and she rips your gun-arm off. Fortunately, a fugitive boffin soon hooks you up with a new arm comprised of evolving primordial muck. Thanks to this timely injection of locally grown biomatter, you gain access to an upgrades tree with unlockable appendages such as Morrigan-style vampire wings. Then you set off afresh to find that pesky princess and, I imagine, rip her arms off. I think Moadra has the right attitude toward monarchy so far.
The Steam demo plays a lot like the more recent iterations of Metroid, with a fast, nimble protagonist who can crawl into chutes and charge up projectiles that bounce from certain surfaces. The backdrop is straight out of Scorn, however. Everything looks like the inside of a sickly lung. Such technology as may be found is busted and unclean.
A smaller point of differentiation: you shoot doors to open them, as in Metroid, but in Moadra, you shoot them to activate short-ranged teleporters that flense you apart and put you back together in the next room. To ask the age-old question regarding teleporters, am I dying every time I use one, with my atoms and memories then forming a brand new being?
Honestly, if that’s the worst thing that happens in Moadra I’ll be thankful. There’s a bossfight that basically traps you inside a cybernetic stomach with a brace of turrets and the head of a bellowing rat ogre. There’s also some scanner functionality care of a flying drone pal that naturally harkens forward to Metroid’s first 3D incarnation, Metroid Prime. Perhaps a cloaking device as well, Gloomsoft?
Will Moadra stand apart from Metroid in hindsight or will it prove to be just the same old metroidvania fittings coated in squirming filth, like a Samus figurine retrieved from the toilet? I’m not sure, but I look forward to finding out. There’s no release date yet. Thanks again, Galactic Man.
