Become the Moon starts from its very title with an outstanding premise: You must become the moon. It reiterates this in the game's opening narration, teasing you with an image of a single card. The card is called "Moon Wish," and simply reads "Rewrite reality. Destroy this."
I'm now 30+ hours in and I routinely forget all of this. I'm in too deep. I'm praying for the bird that buffs other birds in my next round of drafts, or I'm desperately digging for my healing card as I stare down an opponent I know will mess me up. The moment to moment gameplay is so engrossing that sometimes the end of a winning run will even catch me by surprise. I'm too focused on the next hand. The next battle.
If that's not the mark of a good Roguelike I don't know what is.
Become the Moon was released on June 19th, the debut offering by developer Feldspar Games. Feldspar is a three person operation, but you wouldn't know it from the quality of Become The Moon. The art is gorgeous, the characters are fun and memorable, and the soundtrack is reminiscient of a somehow more ethereally funky version of Balatro's.
To expound upon its soundtrack, during combat, it becomes frenetic, combining with the sounds of clashing minions to heighten your sense of chaos. Then when you win, it slows down almost jarringly into a sparse, etherial soundscape. I'm someone who very frequently mutes my games to let whatever second monitor YouTube video I'm currently watching have no competition. But Become The Moon is so engrossing in its gameplay and its ambiance that it has demanded my full attention.
Become To Moon is a unique entry into the roguelike deckbuilding genre. Whereas Slay The Spire and the wide swath of games who've taken inspiration from it have you use your cards to attack enemies and defend yourself from their attacks, BTM takes a different approach. Instead, you'll fill up your board with Minions, buff them with Spells, and watch them fight it out against the enemy in a Hearthstone Battlegrounds-style auto-battler. It doesn't seem like that much of a change initially, but once you begin to play, you realize what a difference it makes psychologically compared to others in the genre.
In Slay The Spire, you feel in total control, attempting to drive your deck to a win over various monsters and beasties. In Balatro, your life hinges on the symphony of pleasing noises which accompany your hand's various additions and multiplications on its way to passing the target score. In Become The Moon, you're forced to just sit back and hope that your team can pull it off. You watch your minions fight it out, with precious little control over who they'll attack and who will attack them. You feel deliriously helpless, and oddly proud of your ragtag team when they manage to scrape out a fight that you thought would end your run. And when everything's firing on all cylinders, when you feel completely united with your team and set to rocket to the moon and beyond, it feels amazing.
The game offers ten different playable characters, each with unique powers, and a myriad of Relics to pick up through your runs. Finding the ones that go together and then, several runs later, managing to line them up in harmony, makes you feel absolutely unstoppable. However, this likely won't come for a while. This game is challenging. And only after hitting a few great runs do you truly discover how much there is still left to do. But it doesn't feel cruel or unkind. It truly feels like a challenge. And it makes those serendipitous runs feel that much sweeter.
At this point, the game seems to have unfortunately rode out its initial wave of momentum. At the time of its writing, it has just over 100 reviews on the Steam store, the frequency of which are steadily declining. Certainly the game received a bump from Northernlion featuring it on stream, but it's uncertain what the future is in terms of the playerbase. However, for those who have played it, it seems there's still much to look forward to.
For only a three-person team, the folks at Feldspar certainly haven't been resting since release. In their first major patch since release, the team impressively revitalized the gameplay experience. Less than a month from launch, they took some of the game's more underperforming or situational cards and completely revamped them. Now, not only are they more relevant than ever, they've opened the door for entirely new strategies.
For example, Sleeping Death was a card which previously was so irrelevant that there's no easily-accessible record of its original text. However, since its rework in patch 1.1.0, it now doubles random damage dealt by your minions and relics. A strategy to deal and increase random damage not only wasn't viable previously, it was hardly in the game. But since Sleeping Death's rework, it's become my new favorite build. This, in addition to some new cards added in the patch, have made the game feel much more fresh and interesting, without being the sort of sledgehammer-swinging balance changes that have made other games feel too difficult to keep up with (looking at you, The Bazaar).
Become The Moon is currently available for $16.99 on Steam.