A retro-inspired top-down action adventure game, Saga of the Moon Priestess is a great bite-sized take on the genre.
What Is It? Saga of the Moon Priestess (SotMP) is a modern game heavily inspired by the early 2D Zelda games. The chunky pixels bring back NES days while the actual gameplay elements land closer to A Link to the Past. It’s rare to see a game borrow so heavily from its obvious influences as SotMP does.
You play the role of Sarissa who starts with nothing but a spear. The prince of Lunaria has been kidnapped and you must rescue him. The opening intro is essentially all of the exposition you will get in SotMP.
Starting in a forest, you will find yourself using your spear to cut down grass and take out enemies who move in predictable patterns. A few screens later, you will find a small town with citizens complaining about monsters in the forest. Heading out, you will find a dungeon a few screens into the forest and begin the core gameplay loop.
Entering the dungeon, you will find a save point and a bunch of unexplored rooms covering at least one or two floors. The dungeon will have a new special item/ability, map, a bunch of keys, and a final boss who provides you with an extra heart upon beating them. There are some very light puzzles as well, mostly involving your new ability. Sounds pretty familiar, doesn’t it? This model repeats for five total dungeons in the game with each lasting no more than 15-30 minutes
Between dungeons you are walking in the overworld area. It is never super obvious where to go next, but each dungeon is blocked by something that requires the ability you gained in the last dungeon in order to get by. A large rock that can only be lifted with the power glove, for example, blocks the second dungeon.
The overworld does have enemies and you can find a merchant and other folks to talk to. There are a few secrets to find, but they are entirely optional. The bulk of the game is played in dungeons.
Combat starts out basic with a spear but upgrades, which I won’t spoil here, add some variety to that. All of this, again, feels straight out of the early 2D Zelda titles.
The game looks nice with strong colors on top of the chunky pixel art. There are small doses of humor and personality sprinkled in with your NPC interactions, these are not a focus by any means, but fun enough to stick in your head for a while afterwards.
The Best Part: How streamlined this game is. If you were doing some math in your head while reading the prior section you might have noticed that 1) the vast majority of the game takes place in dungeons and 2) the five dungeons each take 15-30 minutes. Add that up and you’ve got a full, honest Zelda-clone that plays in about three hours. The game respects your time as well, as enemies you kill in a dungeon remain dead after you die so you don’t have to slog through tough rooms repeatedly if you lose to a boss or anywhere else. This carries over to the platinum trophy, for those interested, as simply completing the three-ish hour game should earn the platinum. (I say “should” because there are Kill N Enemies and Collect N Gems trophies, which you could potentially miss if you truly rush). It is remarkable how much of the Zelda goodness is squeezed into just a few hours.
The Worst Part: There is a bit of control annoyance that is a little too similar to the early Zelda games. Enemies can occasionally come at you from an angle that makes them nearly impossible to hit without moving, but you can’t always move to hit them which leads to an annoying bit of damage you couldn’t have done anything to prevent (Sarissa does not carry a shield). You can also get stuck on top of certain enemies which will cause your health to drop to zero within a few seconds before you realize what happened. The one case where the game pulls a little too much from its inspirations.
The Verdict: I’m not sure I’ve ever mentioned price in a review on this site before. The reasons for that are 1) video game prices change all the time between sales and normal price drops and 2) “value” is a completely subjective issue in video games. I am breaking that trend here to mention that Saga of the Moon Priestess is $7 full price, with regular sales dropping it down to $3 or less. Price is important here not because “it’s so cheap, why wouldn’t you get it?” but rather “this is a really great game that also happens to be ridiculously cheap.”
I’m quite shocked at how much of the core retro 2D Zelda experience SotMP manages to deliver in three hours. Five dungeons, each of which is fun, offers a cool new ability, and features puzzles and a boss fight which leans heavily on said new ability. It’s wonderful game design to distill an experience down to its absolute core like this. The closest you will come to filler is figuring out which dungeon you can enter next, but the map is small enough that this never takes very long.
When you get too close to the edge of a giant pit in this game, an animation takes over which has Sarissa spiraling as she falls into the hole. I know this isn’t the exact same animation A Link to the Past uses, but seeing it instantly brought me back to playing that game. The one small moment is so incredibly ALttP-coded, even beyond the countless other mechanics the game pulls from that legendary title, that I couldn’t help but smile when I saw it. If pulling on these particular nostalgia strings, and doing so in an extremely streamlined fashion, is your idea of a fun night or weekend, I highly recommend checking out Saga of the Moon Priestess.
How to Play: PlayStation 4/5*, Switch, Xbox One/Series, PC
*console played on for this review
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