Moroi grabbed my attention when it was announced late in 2024 with its grimdark aesthetic and grotesque characters. Taking its name from a Romanian folk monster (apparently some kind of vampire) the top-down hack and slash action game looked like a spiritual successor to the excellent Van Helsing series. Having now got my grubby hands on a preview demo – available now via Steam Next Fest – and spent some time in a Q&A with the developer, I am pleased to report that it is actually so much more than I expected.
There is a clear sense of mystery and deliberate confusion in the world of Moroi. You begin by waking up in a prison cell with no memory of who you are and how you got there. The door to your cell is open and you begin to explore your strange surroundings. During the roughly 30 minutes of the demo I encountered a cast of bizarre characters, some fun combat, and a series of enjoyable – if simple – puzzles.
The graphical style that first caught my attention looks great in the demo build. While the bulk of the demo takes place in a dark prison environment there is a good level of detail and excellent lighting to add to the atmosphere. The star of the show, though, is clearly the character designs. Your own player character looks like a mannequin of sorts (in a manner that begins to be revealed as the game progresses) but NPCs look uncannily similar to the nightmarish cenobites of Clive Barker’s Hellraiser series.
Brief conversations with early NPCs do little to unravel the mysterious nature of your plight, but odd characters such as a self-aware furnace are as quirky as they are unsettling. Perhaps the most important character in the early stages is a talking duck that gives you his teeth to upgrade your weapon and enable you to break through barriers. The fact that such a sentence rolls off in this preview is a testament to how strange the world of Moroi really is.
Puzzles here are mostly generally simple find the correct object affairs, but there are a couple which require you to read the various lore messages you find along the way. Combat is either melee or ranged with the chaingun you find – the latter showing the way that the developer is clearly aiming for fun rather than any kind of realism. The chaingun has no ammo counter but is on a cooldown so there is some strategy involved in either dodging around enemies or switching between weapons during fights. The playthrough I watched during the Q&A presentation made the combat look particularly challenging, but on Normal it feels pitched quite well. Attacking enemies builds up a finisher meter that enables a one hit kill which also heals you so there is a good sense of rhythm to the combat.
About 20 minutes into the demo, your player character is seemingly killed and there is a drastic change in tone and scenery. The tonal whiplash from this moment is my abiding memory of my time with Moroi. It is clearly a game that isn’t afraid to take you in some weird and unexpected directions, reminding me in part of recent classics like Indika or the Zeno Clash series.
If the rest of the game comes close to the strangeness of this 30 minute demo then Moroi should be guaranteed to become a cult classic. With a release date of early 2025 we shouldn’t have too long to wait before checking out the full game.