Kenam Moorwak - Chronicles of the Moorwakker

A text-based RPG with combat tactics and levelling-up your abilities. I must say, I haven’t played a lot of games in this genre. The closest thing I can compare Moorwakker to in my limited experience is probably Roadwarden, which I thoroughly enjoyed. And I must say, with a bit more polish and the eradication of those last few coding errors and minor flaws I encountered in this iteration, Jupp’s game can proudly stand next to Moral Anxiety Studio’s creation.

Chronicles of the Moorwakker takes the player along through an intriguing and well-composed story. The basic backbone of the narrative is the well-known and and very effective (especially in IF) “uncover the backstory”-structure. Moorwakker drops a few surprising hooks early on which serve as enticing starting points for the search for deeper understanding.
Progress through the narrative is subtly and unobtrusively gated to ensure the player has gathered enough information and/or strength to be ready for the next chapter. Perhaps an advantage of the choice-based system, this can be done by directional links simply appearing or disappearing at the right time, instead of placing a conspicuous locked gate or guard asking for a shrubbery on the protagonist’s path.
At the beginning of my journey, I did encounter a few continuity glitches, where the fragment I was reading contained surprising or unexpected information, seeming to rely on knowledge from another branch I had not yet found. This could just as well be my brain still finding its way into the story and not being in the zone enough yet.

The writing was both efficient and emotionally gripping.
– On the smaller scale of individual fragments, each screen has no more than a few sentences, a short paragraph or two at most (with some exceptions for longer events). Those select few words still manage to convey the atmosphere of the present location, drive the story along a bit, and highlight some particularly moodsetting details of the surroundings. Strong sparse writing.
– On the larger scale, the overarching structure, Moorwakker begins as a broad adventure-style “Quest for Knowledge and Weapons”, and, with enough of the backstory exposed, increasingly zooms in on the narrower and more pressing objective of tracking down the culprit responsible for the main character’s hardships, and perhaps to seek revenge. Looking back after having played The Cronicles of the Moorwakker, this zooming in becomes an almost cinematic experience, especially by how it’s reflected in the game’s use of space.

There are a couple of nifty buttons at the bottom of the screen. [Inventory] shows (obviously), the weapons, talismans, potions and whatnot the PC is carrying. [Journal] opens a log of the lessons and discoveries found encountered so far. On this screen, there is also a link to the [Map].
This beautifully drawn map gives a sense of wide-open space and an abundance of possibilities. Even though the actual number of available directions is limited and carefully pruned, the visual map paired with the moody location descriptions presents an impression of an expansive land to explore.
Travel through the gameworld feels organic. This is especially noticeable when an obstacle (or just a pinch of sudden curiosity) drives one off the intended path, away from the planned destination. The newly taken route never feels forced, but rather a natural consequence of the circumstances. It definitely helps that the new path or detour is itself always rewarding or thrilling with its own range of fresh discoveries or, um, sometimes less-fresh dangers…
While exploring the land, I particularly enjoyed the variation between long travels between far-apart landmarks such as towns or moors across great distances on the one hand, and the much more tightly-knit, almost parser-like room-to-room movement between adjacent locations in some of the larger areas. My investigation of the Eastern Moor felt especially tense and wriggly, with danger lurking behind every corner. I got out pen and paper to sketch a map of that confusing patch of marshland.
The fine-grained parser-like navigation culminates in the final chapter, with a spine-tingling search of The Castle, which illustrates the narrative narrowing of focus reflected in the use of space I mentioned above.

While I don’t usually pay much attention to graphics in text-games, they certainly add to the overall quality of Moorwakker.
Each screen has its own small and delicate grey-tone drawing to augment the atmosphere. Even aside from the content of the drawings, their placement serves well for dividing the screen, providing a resting space for the eyes and greater reading comfort.
The quality of the graphics ranges from nice and pretty, like the landscape renderings which offer an enhanced visual grasp of the surroundings, to exquisite and deeply moving, as seen in the final confrontation with the main adversary. The facial expressions of the NPC in question gave me the creeps!

I’ve gone on at length about the narrative qualities of The Chronicles of the Moorwakker, the writing, handling of space, graphics that drive and enhance the story. Time to turn to the challenges that make the game enjoyably hard for the player to work through.

Although I have learned to enjoy, and indeed have wholeheartedly embraced, choice-based interactive fiction, I’m still predominantly a player of parser-based text-adventures. The kinds of puzzles and obstacles that are familiar to me are few and far between in Chronicles of the Moorwakker. There are some locked gates, some incantations to remember, some objects to combine, but nothing very complicated. Success in overcoming these obstacles mainly depends on thorough exploration beforehand, similar to the text-adventure approach of “grab/read everything you can get your hands on”. This will almost guarantee that you have the requisite objects or knowledge once the need arises. This also means that oftentimes you will “see the ladder before you’ve encountered the cliff”, meaning that you’ll find yourself carrying around objects just because you came across them, with no purpose or intention aside from the out-of-game motivation that this is what adventurers in games do.
Over the course of the journey, gaining a deeper understanding of the gameworld and its (magical) rules, it will become clear what to use when and where. In this aspect of puzzles, there are no brainbreakers. Memory, in-world common sense, and determination to travel all available paths wil suffice.
There’s no grinding, levelling-up flows naturally from thorough exploration, interaction with NPCs, and of course combat against adversaries whose strengths are well-tuned to your own at each level of the game. (I did play in easy mode. The adversaries may well be somewhat tougher on higher difficulty settings. Speaking of easy mode, this also lets you skip combat entirely, throwing you the win automatically and continuing with the story. If you’d want that…)

Ah! Combat.
There’s that word. Actually the whole RPG combat thing is pretty far outside my comfort zone. Micromanaging powers, attacks, and defenses is normally not really my cuppa. (I consider switching from sword to bow in Dink Smallwood a big deal…)
And Chronicles of the Moorwakker certainly has a fair deal of micromanaging. Summon beasts to shapeshift and use their abilities, summon rune-ghosts to strengthen yourself or weaken the enemy, decide when to attack or defend with your “normal” weapon (and which weapon to use at the start of a fight). All these things can influence each other, so it’s necessary to take into account the effects of combinations of beast, ghost, and weapon… Not to mention timing the extra potions or alchemical bombs in your inventory…

But!

The more I experimented, the more this intricate combat-system grew on me. It turned out to be a very tasty cuppa after all.
Once I had consciously shifted my perspective away from the superficial “fighting”, I realised that this is where the real puzzles lay. It became very satisfying to calculate (or guesstimate, or feel in my left pinky toe) the best timing to hit the enemy hard, or when to use a combination tactic that sacrificed one of my summonings in exchange for a quick mid-battle healing.
In this way, not only did Moorwakker provide a very pleasant gaming experience, but maybe it also nudged my view of RPG-combat in general toward a more positive inclination.

Which is nice.

This game was originally made as a tabletop RPG and then converted into Twine years later.

It features a pretty great storyline about seven women who conceived children from a devil (or so rumours go), one of which is you. You have demonic power like using spectres and giving your blood to spirits for more power. Your goal is to find out the truth behind your birth and to determine your future.

The game is very complex, with multiple areas, each with their own encounters, and each encounter being a large puzzle.

There is art (handdrawn and then enhanced by AI, a process that makes it more coherent than pure AI), which helps the game quite a bit.

The big draw here, outside of the art and story, is the combat. And this is also why I'm giving a lower score than the other reviewers (but would be happy to revise upward if the author feels it's unfair).

You see, the way combat works is that you and your opponent(s) alternate turns. You have 2 actions (at first) and your opponent has a varying number of actions.

One action can be used to summon a spirit or spectre to help you. Doing so costs blood. Each spirit starts with one ability that costs a few 'control points' and one that costs all control points. It's helpful to save the 'all control' points one for last.

You can also spend you action using an item or attacking with a relic (a weapon).

The issue is that using your abilities gives yourself damage, and your enemy gives damage. That means you lose health very quickly. You have two rations in your inventory that can heal you, and occasionally you can rest, but essentially there is no way to just go out there and grind combat to level up. In 3 different attempted playthroughs on three different difficulties (completed only on easy) I wasn't able to level up myself (apparently there are classes?), barely levelled up one relic by paying for it, and never reached the level 2 abilities of the spirits. Every early enemy is very hard, each beatable alone but not 2 or 3 in a row.

Reading other reviews, it seems like everyone is in the same situation. Rovarsson beat it on hard with 5 fights by save scumming but mentions never having health. The other reviews on here also mention that as well.

Even on the easiest mode, there isn't really a way to heal, just skip fights.

Now, I'm sure there is some reasonable way to play through and hit up a lot of encounters and level up items. The author mentions some combos of attacks; there are spectres with abilities like 'boost next attack' and 'do triple damage' which could theoretically one-shot people. But all of that takes damage to summon the spirits.

I think this would work better as a TTRPG, as intended, because there the DM or player can 'fudge' things if it gets too intense. But for right now, as a computer game, I just don't see any way to play through and level up yourself or abilities. If the author provided a sample walkthrough for the first two chapters, like suggestions on who to fight first or how to get stronger, that would be interesting and helpful.

Adapted from a SpringThing25 Review

Played: 4/11/25
Playtime: 1.5hr dying all the time, even in Easy mode?

Is there less invigorating an experience than to dive deep into the rules and setting of a game, tentatively conclude it is probably not going to be for you, then see that borne out exactly as you foresaw? Oh, I know! It would definitely be less invigorating to read a ‘review’ that only had that to say!

Chronicles codifies a very maximalist TTRPG-kind of experience. Deep world lore, informed by a bespoke magic system that translate to specific game mechanics. Evolving powers, abilities and capabilities that unfold as you progress. Learning the strengths and weaknesses of all those abilities as a kind of problem-solving toolkit to apply to continually varying challenges. An ethos of progression through conflict, where most interactions are framed as mortal combat-focused encounters. Young me would have fallen head over heels for this kind of thing.

And one presented so slickly: its uniform artistic esthetic (described a AI assisted? pushing my boundaries here!) and card-reminiscent stat-catalog graphical design underscore its RPG bones. It is also boldly attractive in its own right.

Older me is not so easily won over. Or, probably closer to the truth, less open to it. I struggled mightily with the magic/combat system. I never really tumbled onto an HP-recovery mechanic, meaning I would go from encounter to encounter being worn down by enemy steel AND MY OWN SPELLS, until numbers went to 0. Some encounters did provide a healing goose, but in a way that seemed to underscore its exceptional and scarce nature. I just did not have it in me to explore the interplay of spell/weapon values and combat sequence to discover optimal, effective strategies.

The NPCs I encountered, even the central mystery were all quite interesting and engaging. For me, it just continually ran aground on seemingly unavoidable combat that I never mastered the subtleties of, gatekeeping all that stuff I really wanted. I died and restarted (on ‘middle’ setting) so many times I finally just capitulated to Easy/Story mode.. and still died in combat? I did not detect the promised ‘encounter bypass’ mechanism, so much so I question whether I was actually in easy mode at all? Is there a bug there? Or just a player missing an obvious out?

I guess my conclusion is I liked everything about it EXCEPT the combat, but found the combat inescapable, and ultimately pushed me away, unfinished. So in an effort to provide any value at all to this abortive review, let me say: if you like dense lore translating to complex, subtle fighting mechanics, this will likely thrill you. The supporting story and graphical elements are dynamite draws to that central suite of mechanics you could just d20 with all day. Certainly I could see younger me doing that!

Horror Icon: Jigsaw
Vibe: Lore Heavy RPG
Polish: Gleaming
Gimme the Wheel! : If it were my project, I would repair the Easy mode. Who’m I kidding, what I’d really do is ignore the other two modes! This is why so many projects are NOT mine to fiddle with.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Chronicles of the Moorwakker has plenty of content which will keep you occupied for some time.

Your task here is to investigate the death of your mother, on a journey that takes you through fantasy medieval Germany. As a twine game, it felt really well-designed with that open-ended adventure vibe, as you decide which way you will travel and the things you can do in each location. There are some sections which will require you to go through different rooms to hunt down the various items you need to unlock stuff and proceed, including the section right before the final boss. It added to the feel, but it can get tedious at times.

I failed the starting battle twice, with my opponent suviving with one health point on both occasions. (Something must really hate me.) Afterwards, I decided to do this true story mode, and skip all the battles. A lot of work must have went into scripting the battle system, and I liked all the little details, just that I felt that it required a lot of clicking. You are allowed to retry or skip battles (I can't remember which difficulty I picked) so the game is still pretty forgiving there.

Once you finish, you can restart the game entirely, or at a chapter of your choice.

The art and sound, along with the gray color scheme, also fit the game pretty well. That said, the art is at least partially AI generated, with some human modifications.

In Chronicles of the Moorwalker, you play as a budding witch investigating the mysteries surrounding your birth and your mother's murder, while evading the grasp of the Inquisition. As you hone your skill in blood magic, you'll discover relics and talismans, collect potions and trinkets, and improve your relationship with your familiars.

I floundered on my first few attempts, since I struggled with the combat mechanics. There's a quick tutorial for your first fight, but to fully understand the stats involved, I highly recommend reading the rules in the Settings page. I played on the medium difficulty level, and found the encounters to be tough, but fair with a good dose of strategy and some chance. I ran into some difficulty trying to replenish my Vitality outside of encounters, though maybe that's because I couldn't figure out how to develop my alchemy skills. Towards the end, I started avoiding and outright skipping encounters, because I couldn't get my hands on healing potions until I was quite literally at the Big Bad's doorstep. Even so, the fights were rewarding to play through, with the generous use of the save/reload save button.

While the plot was a little predictable, I really enjoyed exploring the map and learning about the magic system. Alternate 13th-century Germany felt rich and full, no doubt enhanced by the sound effects, music, and illustrations. I especially appreciate the detailed accessibility settings for screen readers and touchscreens.

Finally, a little bug catching: A few times during the game, I couldn't return to the main story after opening the Journal, Inventory, or Settings page. Sometimes, there would be a pop-up that would give me the option to go back to the previous passage or completely restart the game, but more often than not, I would be stuck on a blank page. There's also some small typos here and there (E.g. "lose" >> "loose," "through" >> "trough"), but for a game of this size, I'd still consider it pretty polished.