Momodora: Reverie Under The Moonlight

Momodora began as a series of free RPG Maker games from solo Brazilian developer rdein, and Reverie Under the Moonlight is the entry that turned that world into a proper commercial release — a 2D action-platformer that borrows a Metroidvania's exploration structure and a Souls-like's bonfire-and-boss rhythm, wrapped in some of the most consistently praised pixel art and music in its genre. Nearly 93% of its 4,170 English reviews are positive, and unlike a lot of aggregate scores this fleet has weighed this session, the praise here is detailed and specific rather than a vague "it's good" — reviewers reach for the same handful of comparisons (Hollow Knight, Ori, 2D Bloodborne) constantly and back them up with real observations about the game's world design and soundtrack.

A short, focused experience reviewers treat as a feature

At roughly seven hours to fully explore, Momodora is shorter than most of its genre peers, and reviewers consistently frame that as deliberate rather than thin. One detailed review calls it "a nice thing" specifically because it delivers "a short but intense experience" rather than padding runtime the way longer Metroidvanias sometimes do, and several reviewers who otherwise don't replay games in this genre specifically cite the New Game+ mode and multiple distinct endings as reasons they came back for a second pass. Combined with a low price point, the game earns consistent "buy it now" recommendations from reviewers who don't usually make purchases feel urgent.

A specific, detailed case against the combat

Set against that praise is a real, well-argued minority position worth engaging directly rather than dismissing as one player's bad match with the genre. The most detailed critical review in this game's sample makes a careful, comparative argument: contrasting Momodora's bosses against Hollow Knight's, the reviewer describes the difference precisely — Hollow Knight demands "carefully choosing the moment you're going to attack" and reading pauses in an enemy's pattern, while Momodora's bosses, in this account, mostly reward simply outlasting a health bar through repeated melee or ranged spam while an easily dodged projectile pattern goes unnoticed in the background. "The health bar is purely decorative," the review concludes, arguing the game "tests your ability to stay focused when doing a repetitive task more than it tests your skills and pattern recognition." That's a specific, checkable claim about design intent versus design result, not a vague complaint about difficulty being too high or too low.

A second, independently recurring complaint targets a different mechanic entirely: instant-kill spike hazards placed throughout the world, which multiple separate reviewers single out by name as feeling unfair rather than as a legitimate platforming test — one review calls attention to "insta-kill spikes on a METROIDVANIA" as a specific design choice that clashes with the genre's usual expectation of forgiving traversal. A third, smaller thread argues the default keyboard control bindings are poor out of the box, requiring a full remap before the game plays comfortably.

A fair debate over what genre this actually is

A quieter but real disagreement in the review base concerns labeling rather than quality: some reviewers argue Momodora markets itself as a Metroidvania but plays closer to a fairly linear Souls-like without the genre's usual emphasis on backtracking and non-linear discovery, or without meaningful RPG systems beneath its surface-level presentation. This isn't a complaint about execution so much as expectation-setting — a reviewer going in expecting Hollow Knight-style open exploration is likely to come away with a different, more constrained experience than the store page's genre tags suggest, and it's worth knowing which experience is actually on offer before buying.

What the completion data can and can't tell us

Momodora's Steam achievement list is short — just nine entries — which limits how much a completion curve can independently corroborate the difficulty debate above. The achievement for finishing the game sits at 26.9% of the tracked playerbase, and a no-death run sits at just 3.3%. Read in isolation, that finish rate might look like evidence the game's difficulty turns away a majority of buyers, consistent with the "unfair spikes" and "attrition-based combat" complaints. But a finish-rate in the roughly one-in-four range is common across action games generally, regardless of how fair or unfair their difficulty actually is — plenty of well-regarded, fairly designed games show similar or lower completion rates simply because many buyers never finish any given game. With only nine achievements and no finer-grained milestones to check against, this data is genuinely inconclusive on the specific fairness question reviewers are debating, and it's worth being honest about that limitation rather than stretching a thin data set to settle an argument it can't actually resolve.

A series with real history behind it

Reverie Under the Moonlight is the fourth Momodora game, following three earlier, free RPG Maker releases from the same solo-turned-studio developer. That history is worth knowing going in: returning motifs, the world's tone, and its central heroine all carry weight built up across releases most newcomers to this specific entry won't have played, even though the game stands entirely on its own without requiring that background. It's also a useful data point on the developer's own trajectory — a small, free fan-favorite series that graduated into a fully commercial, critically respected release rather than the more common story of an ambitious commercial debut.

Where it lands

Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight earns its Very Positive reputation on real strengths — a genuinely gorgeous, atmospheric world, a soundtrack that reviewers keep singling out unprompted, and a tightly scoped runtime that respects a player's time rather than padding it. But the detailed critique that its combat rewards attrition over pattern mastery, backed by a separate, recurring complaint about unfair instant-kill hazards, is specific and well-argued enough to matter, not just background noise beneath an otherwise glowing score. Go in for the atmosphere and the length, and temper expectations on how much the combat itself will test genuine skill versus patience.