Phrasemaker

Hunter’s Moon: A Sovereign Syndicate Adventure is a stylish deck-building card game with roguelike elements, blending fun gameplay mechanics with strong, eye-catching visuals. What initially looks like a relatively straightforward deck-builder experience soon gave way to a very engaging and addictive gameplay loop, thanks to strong character design, striking artwork, and a simple yet entertaining approach to progression.

Gameplay Mechanics & Loop – Satisfying Steampunk Adventures

Hunter’s Moon plays like a classic card game at its core. Players will draw cards from a deck unique to their character each turn and spend a limited amount of energy to cast cards. Cards can be used to deal damage, to apply status effects, or to set up defensive armors for your character and their allies.

At the start of their next turn, players regenerate the maximum amount of energy and draw a fresh hand, creating a nice turn-by-turn gameplay flow. It was easy to fall into, and incredibly fun and satisfying to play. As someone who has played a lot of Hearthstone on and off, these mechanics instantly felt familiar to the mana/spending systems and various card types found in that game.

Players utilize a travel card mechanic to work their way through each run, with the cards they draw/play determining the events that occur on each stage. This can range from meeting characters and gaining items, entering combat, and other events.

As players choose their own order of events from the cards they have available, this also helps combat to feel satisfying and engaging rather than repetitive. It works similarly to other roguelike titles, such as Monster Train, where players build up their deck across each round, using the different events and rewards along the way to power up their character and cards.

There are also incredibly engaging narrative events to be found, each one narrated in a storybook-like manner. This added a huge amount of charm and personality to my runs, with these moments feeling like tiny snippets of a tabletop RPG. It reminded me of the same feeling you get when a Dungeon Master is explaining a high-stakes risk vs. reward situation where your actions may pay off immensely, or totally backfire.

The combat encounters themselves are great, and were my personal highlight of the game. Each character has their own gameplay style determined by the cards in their deck, which enables players to choose their preferred strategy. On top of this, you can earn new cards to add to your deck along the way, enabling customization and strategic deckbuilding to play an important part in your adventures.

Unfortunately, I did stumble upon one particular bug whilst enjoying my time with Hunter’s Moon. While selecting a card to drag onto the track, the card glitched out and became frozen. This resulted in two copies of the same card overlapping one another. However, I was unable to drag either of them, or any other card, onto the track. The rest of the screen essentially seemed frozen, too, which locked me out of progressing.

Thankfully, I was able to get around this error by opening the menu, selecting save and exit, and then reloading my game.

Art Style & Visuals – A Beautiful 2D World Comes to Life

Hunter’s Moon is absolutely gorgeous on the visual front, with the game utilizing a striking, beautiful art style that evokes the likes of bold graphic novel/comic book styles. This style is elevated even more through vibrant attack animations, breathing life into the 2D environments and character sprites.

The character and enemy designs are a huge highlight too, playing on an aesthetic that feels familiar to Darkest Dungeon – just with a slight Steampunk edge. Lastly, the attack animations and VFX showcased throughout combat encounters and cutscenes add a level of polish, popping beautifully against the darker environments. It reminded me of the subtle, yet hugely impactful 2D animations seen in the environments/attacking motions of characters throughout the Arcane TV series, adding striking color without creating visual clutter.

Characters – Unique and Satisfying to Play

In Hunter’s Moon, each character feels unique from one another, all containing their own deck of cards with different strategic approaches. There’s a great variety in the cast of selectable characters for each run, meaning there’s likely someone for every kind of approach/player. This also helps to keep gameplay fresh as you try out different characters and experiment with various builds.

Personally, Molly stood out to me as my favorite. Her gun-based attacks and large range of damage cards made her extremely fun to use. She had very fun card combinations that could be used on each turn, and she felt closest to a DPS-style type of pick, which is usually what I gravitate towards in games. It made each and every combat extremely satisfying, even to the point where I began prioritizing combat in each run I took on with Molly.

Music & SFX – Atmospheric Tunes Creep into Each Combat

Another lovely aspect of Hunter’ Moon is the sound design. From the main menu to each little combat encounter, the music selection adds an ambience to the world that really drives those steampunk and Victorian horror inspirations home. It manages to strike a balance between mysterious and intriguing, quirky, and charming, perfectly complementing the visual style of the game.

Voice acting is another strong point. Despite the characters being limited to 2D portraits and mostly static sprites with some animation tweening, voice performances bring them to life. As mentioned earlier, the narrator also makes each and every event that you stumble upon feel more curious and engaging.

Hunter’s Moon: A Sovereign Syndicate Adventure – Final Thoughts

Hunter’s Moon is a very entertaining title that manages to blend satisfying card-based gameplay loops with striking, stylized graphics. Any Roguelite deckbuilder fan will surely gain enjoyment out of Hunter’s Moon, if not for the addictive gameplay, then simply for the style and aesthetics themselves.

It’s not the most full-on game out there, but what it does offer, it does extremely well. This makes Hunter’s Moon a very satisfying choice, and one I can definitely see myself playing heading back into to finish my playthrough entirely.

However, as there seems to be a limited amount of content in the main story chapters, I can’t say for sure that I’d ever really return to the game once it is beaten. In the case that more missions or characters are added in the future, though, I’d be totally on board!

Hunter’s Moon manages to grab your attention through the addictive progression, and I found myself diving into ‘just one more run’ far longer than I had expected to keep playing. Small narrative moments and choice-based events create risk-vs-reward satisfaction, and the deck customization enables players to choose their own playstyle within each character’s skillset.

Minor technical hiccups did interrupt the flow of gameplay on occasion, but this didn’t stop Hunter’s Moon from being a highly engaging and enjoyable experience. If you’re a fan of roguelike progression, such as Monster Train or Slay the Spire, or the striking artwork found in the likes of Darkest Dungeon, then Hunter’s Moon may just be able to scratch that same itch. It’s clear that a lot of heart and care were put into the game, and as a result, it punches far above its weight.