| Crimson Moon | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Release Date | Gameplay & Story | Pre-Order & DLC | Review |
Crimson Moon is a roguelike with co-op features running a soulslike combat system. Read on to learn what it did well, where it fell short, and if it's worth your money in our review.
Overview
What is Crimson Moon?
Crimson Moon is an action-adventure RPG that centers on bloody and brutal combat against vampires, the undead, and ancient gods. Players will encounter lesser enemies, formidable foes, and powerful bosses as with any action-adventure RPG, but the combat is inspired by the soulslike genre, which is known for its difficulty and emphasis on skillful parrying, dodging, and improvisation. During battle, players can also transform into the Nephilim’s angelic form.
Crimson Moon features:
⚫︎ Roguelike progression system
⚫︎ Soulslike combat
⚫︎ Co-op features
⚫︎ No class system
⚫︎ Equipment passives
For more gameplay details, read everything we know about Crimson Moon’s gameplay and story.
| Digital Storefronts | |||
|---|---|---|---|
 Steam |
 PS |
 Epic Games |
 Xbox |
| $19.99 | |||
Crimson Moon Review: There Was an Attempt to Make a Good Game Here
When Playing It is the Obstacle Between You and a Good Game
Some of the best or most popular soulslikes are defined by their jank. AI LIMIT, for example, had an insanely abusable replacement for its stamina system. Code Vein, meanwhile, featured partner characters that were probably stronger than you, even if you were better at playing than them. Even FromSoftware's own games aren't immune to it, with some of their “quirks” becoming almost as memorable as the games themselves like Bloodborne's camera occasionally playing partners with your enemies.
However, these games aren't good despite their jank either. The jank simply becomes part of the experience people remember, whether fondly or otherwise, adding a particular kind of spice that makes each game harder to forget. And Crimson Moon, a new co-op roguelike soulslike (that's a lot of likes) by developers ProbablyMonsters, seems to understand the assignment… perhaps a little too well.
Crimson Moon is a very fun, very deep game delivered to your doorstep unceremoniously in a garbage bag and layers of duct tape. It is incredibly difficult to appreciate what it has to offer when you have to peel away so many issues before you can experience the good parts. And by the time you've put in enough effort to understand why it's worth playing, you may have already exhausted too much of your patience to enjoy it.
Appropriately Simple, Predictable Story
Crimson Moon’s story is quite simple. Basically, there was a war between good and evil in the past, and the situation became so dire that humanity was forced into the heresy of intermingling with angels. This created the Nephilim: humans born with the explicit and divine protection of angels. But despite bringing victory to the previous war, you were chained to the Church because of your forbidden origins, forced to continue fighting against the forces of evil that seek to revive their gods.
That said, the game’s narrative progression is similarly straightforward. The entire premise of your runs is to collect a number of items needed to access the final boss, and almost everyone else you encounter along the way follows a similarly simple pattern. Most are given one-dimensional characterizations and barely any screentime beyond a single cutscene. There is one notable exception, though even that character largely serves as the game's singular recurring antagonist and mastermind.
It is a shame that Crimson Moon’s story is so shallow because it does sound fascinating, but it’s also somewhat understandable given its structure. Roguelikes naturally fragment their narratives across repeated runs, making it difficult to tell a deliberately complex story without risking players losing track of important details between attempts. Crimson Moon could certainly do more with its premise, but asking it to carry a sprawling, intricately developed narrative would arguably work against the very structure the rest of the game is built around.
It does compensate for that deficiency somewhat, at least in terms of worldbuilding, through the sheer number of lore collectibles scattered throughout the game. It’s certainly one way to address the lack of active narration, albeit one that can’t be fully appreciated. After all, Crimson Moon is essentially sidestepping the problem altogether and telling players: “You want to learn more? Then just read it yourself.”
Even its ending is just the game accepting its fate. The sequence involves nothing but a couple of cutscenes, one of which is just the main antagonist performing the typical “I’m going to tell you all about my plans and you’re going to stay there and listen” performance, and an epilogue that wraps everything up with a vague conclusion. I mean, it has to make you expect something more, right? It’s a roguelike, after all.
It’s nothing bad at the end of the day. Crimson Moon clearly understands the limitations its structure imposes on storytelling and makes a genuine effort to work around them, particularly through its extensive lore. But it never quite finds a way to turn that information into an actively compelling narrative. It’s a valiant effort, for sure, but one that ultimately doesn’t stray far from what you’d expect from the genre.
Frictionless Core Combat System
As mentioned, Crimson Moon is a roguelike with a soulslike combat system. And while neither half is particularly impressive in isolation, there’s a lot of fun to be had in the way they interact with each other in a co-op setting.
The combat being so simple makes it easy for anyone with even a modicum of experience with the genre to get into the game. More importantly, its lack of mechanical complexity means you aren't constantly preoccupied with mastering an elaborate moveset or navigating a dozen combat systems. Instead, your attention naturally shifts toward the things Crimson Moon actually builds its identity around: adapting to roguelike builds and dealing with the messiness of playing with another human being.
In that sense, the simplicity feels deliberate rather than underdeveloped. By keeping its soulslike foundation nearly friction-free, Crimson Moon funnels players toward the systems that actually matter more to its overall experience… even if those matters aren’t that deep, either.
Great Roguelike Progression Elements
The roguelike elements are undoubtedly the most essential parts of Crimson Moon. They dictate everything from your weapons and armor to your skills, stats, and, most importantly, cosmetics.
Ingeniously, Crimson Moon manages to condense nearly all of that into a single progression system centered around equipment drops. It works by combining every single passive, active, and stat-boost effect into properties called Boons, which can spawn at random on equipment that are dropped from monsters. Naturally, these Boons come with all sorts of different effects ranging from burning enemies whose attacks you block, letting you use magic, or giving you flat HP bonuses.
Keeping progression within a single system makes dealing with new drops remarkably straightforward. If a Boon doesn't fit your build, ignore it. If it does, take it. And if you're willing to diversify or change builds entirely, you can simply make the switch without having to untangle several interconnected progression systems first.
The real charm in this, though, is how it interacts with the fact that Crimson Moon is a co-op game, and how drops aren’t instanced per player. In other words, every drop can only be taken by one player. If both players want the same item, someone has to pass and hope another useful drop comes along later. Now that may seem like a limitation to many, and it’s understandable to think so.
But in Crimson Moon’s case, strict role division is difficult anyway thanks to the limited weapon selection and massive Boon pool. Shared loot therefore nudges players toward something the game already benefits from: build diversification. Rather than having both players independently chase the same powerful combinations, the path of least friction is often to take what complements what your partner is already doing (or vice versa).
Now you could ask: “Wouldn’t instanced loot also let us diversify voluntarily without forcing us to fight over items?” And you would be right.
The difference lies in the mindset shared loot creates. It actively encourages you to pay attention to what your partner is doing because you’re no longer evaluating every drop solely for yourself. When you find a piece of armor with great Boons, for example, you don’t simply ignore it if it doesn't fit your build. You’re incentivized to check whether it fits your partner’s build instead and whether it would actually be an upgrade over what they’re currently wearing.
And in a co-op game like this, added social layers that engage you deeper into the gameplay is very welcome.
Onboarding's Essentially Non-Existent
Though Crimson Moon's emergent cooperative layers are genuinely praiseworthy, there are some very real obstacles standing between players and actually discovering them. The first is that practically none of what I've described above is properly communicated to the player.
Yes, you have to discover almost everything yourself. How equipment loadouts work. How weapons and armor are unlocked.
How Boons are retained. How upgrades function. Practically every system related to Crimson Moon's meta-progression is left out of the tutorial entirely. Don't get me wrong, though; there is a tutorial. But it only introduces the most basic of concepts to you as possible.
Worse, the game provides almost no prompts or hints to guide players toward systems that are initially confusing but ultimately simple to understand. And that's especially frustrating because some of Crimson Moon's most important restrictions only become apparent when it's already too late to plan around them.
Take loadouts, for example. You can freely change them before starting a run, but once you're inside one, you're unable to switch between them even when moving from one area to another. Nothing adequately prepares you for this restriction. In fact, the looting system creates the opposite expectation. That is, because you can hold onto equipment during a mission, it naturally suggests that you'll eventually have an opportunity to compare that equipment against your other loadouts.
And that's really the problem with Crimson Moon's approach to teaching its systems. Discovery is great when players are uncovering interesting interactions, experimenting with builds, or gradually realizing how its cooperative systems complement each other. It becomes considerably less charming when what you're discovering is a restriction you wish you had known about twenty minutes ago.
Very Limited Equipment Selection
Speaking of loadout limitations, Crimson Moon doesn’t really have much to offer when it comes to weapons and active skills. There’s really only a handful of one-handed weapons and a few two-handed ones—and none of them differ much in terms of how they influence your gameplay except for how they affect your range.
This is particularly noticeable because the Boon system seems perfectly designed to support more distinct playstyles than the game actually allows. Considering that magic exists, for example, it would have been nice to have a staff or similar weapon that enabled a genuinely dedicated mage build. That alone could have opened up far more interesting cooperative strategies, allowing one player to specialize in ranged damage while another built around guarding, parrying, and absorbing enemy attention.
Instead, every weapon being melee means both players are generally forced into the same space and competing for the same enemies. You can still differentiate builds through Boons, of course, but the game's limited weapon selection prevents those differences from becoming truly distinct combat roles. A guard-focused build is still useful, for example, but it's much harder to build an actual tank when your supposed damage dealer is standing right next to you and naturally sharing aggro anyway.
The sheer variety of Boons encourages experimentation and makes it possible to assemble wildly different combinations of effects, but the limited selection of weapons and active skills means those combinations can only diverge so far before they start playing similarly anyway. It creates a strange problem where the progression system feels more flexible than the actual combat system built around it
It’s not enough to ruin the roguelike progression system, especially because the shared loot system gives build diversification an additional cooperative purpose. But it does make you wonder how much more Crimson Moon could have gotten out of its own ideas if it simply gave players more tools to work with.
The Camera is One of the Enemies
Lastly, let’s talk about the funniest and at times most frustrating problem with Crimson Moon: the camerawork.
For the most part, it works well. In fact, I’d argue that it’s great about 98% of the time. The problem is that the remaining 2% somehow manages to occur at the absolute worst moments possible.
I’m talking specifically about the lock-on mechanic. It’s really weird. When you lock onto an enemy and it suddenly rushes toward you, there's a decent chance the camera will completely spazz out in one way or another. Sometimes, it decides to become part of the wall. Sometimes, it merges with the ground. And other times, it twists your neck so violently that you can no longer distinguish North from West. Additionally, for some reason, locking on to an enemy and being in melee range forces the camera angle down so much that you lose most of your peripheral vision.
Remember, we’re playing a soulslike here. Losing sight of an enemy for even a moment or having your peripheral vision suddenly cut off can easily result in your character crawling on the ground begging for a revive or, at worst, a team wipe. Its current camera system is an active hazard for anyone wanting to play Crimson Moon at a level where every hit taken counts.
Is Crimson Moon Worth It?
Wait for a Sale, or a Fix
Despite my complaints, Crimson Moon’s roguelike meta-progression system, which I suppose technically makes it a roguelite, is enough to make the journey of beating up every boss genuinely fun. Unfortunately, getting to the point where you can properly appreciate it requires an incredible amount of patience and understanding.
And sadly, that's enough to make even its relatively cheap price a questionable proposition. There’s clearly a good game buried underneath all of Crimson Moon's issues, but I can't wholeheartedly recommend asking players to dig through them just to reach it.
So unless the developers address its more apparent problems—and I do believe they will, considering that a patch for the baffling lack of key rebinding is already on the way—you're better off holding off on buying it for now.
Until then, Crimson Moon will have to stay on people's wishlists for a little longer.
Crimson Moon Related Guides
| Wiki Contents | |
|---|---|
 Bosses |
 Tips and Tricks |
 Weapons |
 Armor |
 News and Game Info |
 Review |
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