• Price: $5.99 USD (currently on sale for $4.79 until February 14th)
• Developers: Pixel Trash, eastasiasoft
• Publisher: eastasiasoft
• Release Date: January 24, 2024

A review code was kindly provided by eastasiasoft on behalf of Pixel Trash. We thank them for being able to cover something they’ve worked so hard on.

Saga of the Moon Priestess is described as a “retro top-down action adventure [game] inspired by 8-bit and 16-bit classics.” It aims to have players reminisce about the simpler action-adventure games of times past. The graphics certainly reminded me of The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons/Ages, and I also approved of the female protagonist.

The story begins on a stormy night. The prince awakens and searches for his father in the castle – only to discover that someone has stolen all of their treasure, and the king has been taken by an evil being. Worried for his father, the prince offers himself in exchange. The focus then shifts to a young woman named Sarissa, a spear-wielding orphan capable of communicating with the Goddess of the Moon.

The goal is to rescue the prince. There’s not a whole lot of story or dialogue, although I did find some of the conversations amusing. You have to make your way across the map, but your path is blocked by a variety of obstacles. As such, you’ll need to find special items that can help you eventually get to where the prince is being held.

There are 5 dungeons to clear, 7 life containers to collect, and 15 different items to find along the way. Monsters and puzzles do their best to keep you from getting any further. The puzzles aren’t terribly difficult, and most monsters aren’t too challenging once you figure out their attack and movement patterns. At the end of each dungeon, you’ll confront a boss; some of them actually managed to defeat me a few times before I got the hang of things.

It also took me a while to get used to the controls since you attack with X, which felt awkward to me. You can’t remap the controls. Anyways, your primary weapon is the spear, but you can also use an acquired flame spell or bow and arrow, or rocks from your surroundings to defeat enemies. I particularly enjoyed using the flame wand.

Like I said, the puzzles are pretty straightforward, and it’s usually easy to determine what tools – if any – are required to solve them. But there were many times when I had absolutely no idea what to do next. The game doesn’t tell you what some tools do. For example, the flame wand destroys these crystals that block your path. I had no clue that it could do that until I tested multiple tools on the crystal out of frustration.

There’s a fortune teller who you can pay to give you hints as to where you should go next. However, the handful of times when I was completely stumped she wasn’t very helpful, like when the game expects you to bomb the unblemished side of a wall to break into the room on the other side.

When I reached what should have been the final boss, I had apparently missed something important along the way somewhere. I’d found 14 out of the 15 collectible items, so I’d clearly managed to discover most of the game’s secrets. But I was unable to finish the story despite visiting the fortune teller again and searching every nook and cranny on the map multiple times.

I think it could have been helpful if they showed you what percentage of a dungeon or area that you’ve completed. I definitely appreciated actually having dungeon maps. As far as the overall display goes though, the HP bar and box showing your active tool (top left) covers up too much of the screen. I could barely see that there was a door there in the screenshot above, for example. The box displaying your currency (bottom right) also blocks too much of the screen for my tastes.

Speaking of HP bars, another inconvenient aspect would be how the game only starts you off with a maximum of 3 HP when you start it up again; when I had 9 HP bars, this meant that I had to go around destroying things to find hearts to completely restore my HP. At the very least they should load the game with as much HP as you had in your last save instead of making you waste time unnecessarily healing yourself again.

I also experienced some freezing – usually when I used the swapping chain. The main issues I had with Saga of the Moon Priestess were mostly based on my frustration. It feels a bit too derivative as well; if you’ve played a game like this before it doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but for the most part it does what it sets out to do.

I really liked the inspiration and old school graphics style, and think it had potential with a story that reverses traditional gender roles for the savior and “damsel” in distress. There are some silly ducks outside of dungeons that seemed like they could have made for an interesting and/or amusing storyline. I just don’t think they expanded on their unique ideas enough. That being said, it’s more than reasonably priced if you are looking for a game like this. It’s not a bad game, but it didn’t stand out to me.