It’s amazing to watch, let alone play, and I would say that this game is worth purchasing for that encounter alone. A sword-wielding priestess, she performs beautiful combos as the player flails around trying not to die. Pardoner Fennel, a boss encountered in the middle of the game, might be one of my favorite boss fights ever. They all take place on one screen, have identifiable patterns, and feel very fair. The real glory in Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight is the boss fights. Each of these changes the game in a slight way, but none of it feels too under- or overpowered. There are usable items, and there are items that give you a passive benefit. There are collectable Ivory Bugs to pick up. Some you see again some I left in a dungeon, withering and alone. Sometimes you talk to NPCs who, in the Dark Souls style, cryptically tell you about what they are going to do with their lives. You interact with this beautiful pixel world via a three-hit combo and a bow, the former for close combat and the latter for hitting the dangerous enemies that you want to keep at a distance. What is that, exactly? You traverse a wide map, from outlying forest to interior castle, to defeat a queen who has poisoned the world. This is the highest praise I can give a game of this kind doing the stuff that this game does. Reverie pulls enough from those games for me to recognize the reference while enjoying it for what it is rather than enjoying it for what it references. I haven’t spent the rest of my life chasing the feeling of completing, or even playing, them for the first time. They were games that I played when I had the chance, but none of them made the kind of deep-seated marks that I could never get away from. I have nearly zero love for games like Super Metroid or Castlevania or Shinobi. Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight does it. Games designed around nostalgia create hyper-excited in-groups and very confused out-groups, and watching the former become disappointed or policing the latter is one of the worst things that can happen in any kind of media culture. I think there’s very little scarier to me than hearing a game developer or a reviewer talk about how a game is designed around or gives off the feeling of a game from that developer or reviewer’s childhood. I spend a lot of time worrying about the effect of nostalgia on games. As best I can tell, they’re all action platformers that have you running about a world finding pickups, defeating bosses, and doing the kinds of things that will throw you back to console games of the late 1980s and early 1990s. These games have been coming out fairly regularly since 2010, with Reverie Under the Moonlight being the fourth in the series. Momodora hasn’t ever been on my radar, and that’s apparently all my fault. It’s simple, and it’s a breath of fresh air. Everyone and their cousin is making the newest, most clever crafting game with roguelike elements piled under four hundred metric feet of lore, and here’s Reverie, a game about a young priestess who goes to the city of Karth to rid her world of the great evil that’s emanating from it. Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight is so good that I spent a huge chunk of my time with the game wondering why there aren’t more clean, simple action platformer games released.