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Review
Is there a pun in English more groan-inducing than knight/night? That obvious, superficially rich but in reality kind of banal equation is understandably catnip for wannabe poets[1], as well as the Marvel comics writers responsible for the character whose name makes me do a double-take when reading this game’s title. But the thing is, a person in armor, and feudal relationship with a liege, really bears very little resemblance to the dark time of day, even though each of those things is awesome on its own – the pun is just wordplay, it’s not really saying anything.
What the Moon’s Knight presupposes is, maybe it is? This Neo-Twiny Jam entry makes one of the cannier moves for dealing with the 500-word limit by leaning hard into poetry, personifying the moon and mythologizing the knight so that the two can fit in the same frame. They’re not on the same level, though: that possessive clearly indicates that the moon is the one wielding gravitational influence over her knight. The knight is the more relatable figure (the game’s one choice focuses on them) and the conflict they face is with a terrestrial army, but that outer combat is only a pale echo of the angst they experience from daring to be the moon’s lover.
The plot is heavily bottom-lined, in order to spend scarce word-count on evocative imagery – there’s an implication that the knight seeks out battle because when arrows blot out the sun, that darkness might bring out the moon even during the day, which is both more romantic and more bad-ass than the line from Herodotus that inspired it. The prose throughout cleaves to this lyrical, heavy-metal vibe:
"Morning - Death - lies beyond the ridge-border. Atop it, the Moon caresses your cheek longingly."
For all that the setup, conflict, choice, and payoff are necessarily condensed, there’s still room
for specificity in the details – I especially liked the ampoule of starlight the knight wears at their throat. And it’s hard not to feel invested in a doomed love that’s bound to end in tragedy no matter what, either the knight or the moon inevitably weeping over their misfortune at the finish. While I’m not sure the game fully sold me on how the corporeal battle that’s the subject of the plot relates to the emotional tug-of-war between the two main characters, I can’t deny the drama and poetry here on display: the moon is awesome, knights are awesome, both together are awesome.
[1] This is a digression so long and discursive that even I couldn’t figure out how to cram it into the intro, but since this is a relatively short review I’ll allow myself a footnote to explicate it: the secret origin of my dislike of the knight/night pun goes back to Jewel, a notably successful singer-songwriter of the mid-90s Alternative scene. She was a great performer with a bunch of songs I enjoy to this day, but her lyrics, standing on their own, were enough to make you contemplate the inevitable heat-death of the universe with barely-repressed yearning. I’m spoiled for choice, but “You’ll be Henry Miller/and I’ll be Anais Nin/but this time it’ll be even better/we’ll stay together in the end” was a standout, because 1) I guess toxic narcissists deserve each other, but good Lord, in what universe would that be “better”? and 2) the meter, oh, oh, the meter. Anyway she released a book of poetry alongside her second album, it was called “A Night Without Armor”, I can still remember perusing it out of morbid curiosity in a Long Island Barnes and Noble and almost swooning.
