Rhythm Action games often have their own unique twist to them and Moirs, a small and budget indie title on PC, reminds me a little of Beatmania’s keyboard element. It replicates the keys from F to C on the piano and asks you to stick to the music and press the right buttons.
Early on this on easy difficulty, this will involve you moving between ground notes in blue and sky notes in red. They replicate where white and black keys respectively sit on a piano so they don’t all hit the same visual trigger area on the screen. Initially, that’s fine but it becomes one of the key challenges on the game as I’m so used to having the hitbox in the same place for other music games. Expect your muscle memory to be tested and as the difficulty increases, duel notes appear combining both with connecting yellow lines between them to make it visually easier to distinguish.
Moirs is impressive in that the track keys layouts feel like a piano. You’ll move up and down the keys like you are playing the piano at times and the tracks feel fun to play. They sync really nicely to the various songs and the soundtrack, whilst electronica focused, have variety. They all have their own background too which feel like low-fi TV screensavers from evil 2000’s corporate America. This all combines to ensure each song feels and plays uniquely. You can also largely play as badly as you want and still make the end of the track too, all except for the final track in story mode which has a pass/fail rating system. It makes sense in the context of the story but does feel an odd switch up when you are playing in free play after.
The big issue is that there are only seven tracks. Each has four levels of difficulty and the difficulty level gets very steep on master but you’ll still burn through these tracks quickly. Outside of the songs, there’s a short story full of memes about building Moirs as a dev diary, which is cute but only a couple of minutes long. It includes a mini-game send-up that dancing funeral casket video too.
Moirs really feels like it should have taken the Muse Dash approach. By that I mean you get the base game out at a cheap price but then bring in DLC packs of extra songs to massively expand the game to its core audience. That’d allow avid fans to enjoy more of it whilst those who dip their toes in can flirt with the short and simple base content. As a result, this is a well polished and executed game that is purely lacking content.
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