The Moon's Knight

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 25 Review

Style: Choice-Select
Played : 7/14/25
Playtime: 5m, two playthroughs, all 497 words

Another in my "Penny Pinching Parity" review sub-series. Microgame jams are a practically review-proof endeavor. If we take the reviewer’s task to its most transactional core, the question at play is ‘Is it worth a player’s time?’ Of course this question is nuanced. A simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ is so heavily steeped in the reviewer’s biases and fascinations that without context it is practically useless.

So we try to build context, frame our reactions. Readers can ideally extrapolate their own response based on this, either in sympathy or opposition. Y’know what that takes though? Words, man, lots of words. So.. at what point does the review become out of scale to its subject?

In service of a sub-500 word game? I’m not sure I can decide on a MOVIE to watch in fewer than 500 words, let alone capture complicated feelings from art! And for these short works, length matters. Investing in gameplay for multiple hours, to be underwhelmed is opportunity cost frittered away from other things you COULD be enjoying more. Investing in review reading is time you could instead be playing the game in question! I mean, I’m pushing half this game’s word budget, and haven’t said a damn thing about it yet!

Let’s just posit that 5 minute art IS worth your time. You will waste far more than that on far less rewarding elements of your day. Like reading these reviews.

Of, say, The Moon’s Knight! Art thrives under constraint, and MK is no exception. Every word is crucially important, and must cover multiple bases: mood, character, plot, scene. This is actually true of all writing, but the clarity of hard limits drives it home. I am an unabashed fan of this author’s prose. Their longer works cast a spell on me through the power of carefully crafted, moody sentences. It is a fair question, if I pretend I don’t know the answer, whether shorter works would clip these wings too short to fly. Well, no, not at all. MK makes the perfect decision to tightly constrain narrative focus - a study of a mythic, doomed romance set against a backdrop of brutal warfare.

Ok, writing it out like that doesn’t sound clipped, nor does it feel so in the moment. We are treated to visceral yet lyric passages that feel exactly as elaborate as needed to weave this particular tale’s spell. There is no sense of pushing against an arbitrary boundary, only the incredible sharpness of it. The discipline comes in what to leave out: backstory that is more powerfully inferred anyway; rounded character traits that are immaterial to the central conflict; world building that is so much chrome. Jettisoned or gestured at without belabored fanfare. This is a focused work that lets its prose breathe where it needs to, and does not waste time where it does not.

Do yourself a favor. Spend the 5 minutes. (497!)