If you've ever played The Yawhg, you were probably left scratching your head a little, but played at least a few times trying to get the best ending possible. If someone asked you to describe the game, you might find yourself short on words. Moon Hunters is a bit like that, but not in a good way.

I played Moon Hunters, but I find myself struggling to say much more than that. It starts off promising enough, with a variety of character to pick from. If you've ever played an RPG, you'll be familiar with the classes, warrior, hunter, magic welder and so on. The art style is lovely, the world and characters bright and pixelated. Say what you will about pixel art, but it seems to stand the test of time better than polygons.

The music, when it played, blended in perfectly with the art. Though at many times, it was glaringly absent. That however was probably a bug, as the game is fairly riddled with them at this stage. Boss monsters not fighting back is another bug, one that makes the game rather easy to beat. The path-finding on the normal mobs leaves something to be desired as well, as more often than not, they got stuck on a piece of scenery, allowing you to kill them from a distance.

Moon Hunters, is an RPG and RPGs need a good story. Unfortunately, Moon Hunters decided to take a page from The Yawhg, which instead of being fun, was simply frustrating. It starts off simply enough, you travel to your home for a big party, during which, the moon disappears. The village elder tasks you to find a priestess to give you answers. At least, that seems to be your quest, it really isn't terribly clear.

Once you leave your village you're faced with a map screen. Branching off from your location, you can visit a variety of other places like mountains, forests and deserts. When you hover over each location, they don't give you much information beyond "Ingredient: Herbs" and "Dangerous." As far as I could find, these labels didn't actually mean anything.

Each location you visit will have a few mobs to kill, sometimes an NPC to talk to, but overall they're left feeling extremely empty. Once you're done in an area you camp for the night. At camp, you can do different things like hunt, cook, sleep, keep watch, and look at the stars. Each activity will raise a different stat, much like The Yawhg. What these stats do for you, I can't really say, at no point during my own playthroughs was I faced with a challenge I needed a certain stat for.

Gameplay consists of button mashing, spamming the few skills you have. Fairly typical of a simple hack and slash, though it would be nice if there was more to upgrading your skills. When you kill enemies, they drop orbs which you use like currency to upgrade your few set skills. After visiting one location, you'll have enough to afford all the upgrades and won't need orbs anymore

After camping, you're faced with the extremely confusing screen 'four days left'. Four days until what? It's entirely too vague for an RPG, while it might work in a visual novel type experience, it's only frustrating and unsatisfying in an RPG. You'll probably assume you have four days left to find the priestess and save the moon. However there's no indication which map location will provide this information for you, or even which way to go. That would be fine if you weren't limited to only a few locations before your time limit was up. But in this case, it only feels like you've lost before you've even begun.

At the end of the countdown, you're told to pick a location to battle someone. It's not made clear why you're battling anyone, why you're doing this instead of saving the moon. A lot more information and story would make this big 'showdown' feel more important. In each of my playthroughs, the final boss remained still and didn't attack me, which made winning feel rather empty. Afterwards, you win, but lose too. You beat the bad guy, but the moon is lost forever. I never did manage to save the moon.

Moon Hunters isn't out yet, but with a current release date of February, time is running out. My play time clocked in at roughly 20 - 40 minutes for each attempt, leaving the beta feeling more like a demo. It's possible only a small part of the game is currently available for those playing the beta and that the full game will have much more to offer. Unfortunately, it's only possible to discuss what is there to be seen. At the very least, there's a few bugs to iron out.