Tobari and the Night of the Curious Moon (PC)

Tobari might just be the most devoted hall monitor to have ever lived. When the moon in the sky begins to turn strange and rabbits descend down from it to cause trouble with their magical powers, Tobari simply sees saving the world from them as a natural extension of her role as protector of her high school’s halls.

To be fair though, there is a bit more going on than just a super devoted hall monitor trying to save the world. Her school actually has a special tie to the moon, a few other students getting wrapped up in the unusual events including Tobari’s best friend Hina who began acting strange right before the incident began. The cast remains rather small still, to the point that the other students who have roles as bosses get reused in more difficult battles later in the game, but there is a message at the core about the close friendships between the characters, particularly Tobari and Hina whose mutual desire to protect each other has lead to them growing apart as they both try to prevent the other from getting involved in dangerous matters. Funnily enough, Hina’s desire to be the one to solve the problem so she can prove herself actually leads to the other classmates impeding Tobari’s journey to set things right, but this tale of strained friendships actually stays relatively positive to match the game’s cute character and enemy designs.

Funnily enough though, the game’s soothing music and adorable visuals actually hide that this is a game that will quickly escalate in difficulty. Beginning as a pretty simple platforming adventure where levels can end almost too soon, when you start reaching later worlds and especially the optional content like the post-game worlds and the moon shard quest to unlock them, things begin to amp up in difficulty considerably. Accurately leaping from small platform to small platform at high speeds while avoiding plenty of mobile enemies or their long range attacks becomes more and more common, and while the design is there to make for an incredible challenge for those looking for it, the main game remains more accessible so a regular player can get to the end even though it will be a hard fought battle at times. Unfortunately, there is one small aspect that lets down the platforming and makes it harder to engage with these designs, and that’s the slippery nature of the game’s momentum system. Tobari’s jump distance ties heavily to how much speed she had before she takes a leap, and since running just involves moving forward for a certain amount of time rather than being a button you press to make running a simple active or inactive state, the distance of your jump is surprisingly variable and difficult to gauge in the span of time needed to accurately move. It is possible to gradually acclimate yourself to its peculiarities, but it’s incredibly common to overshoot a jump or fall short due to its finickiness, and even when Tobari lands, she often has some momentum she still needs to burn off, meaning even a successful jump can then lead to her sliding off the small platform she was aiming for.

The game tosses in checkpoints, extra lives, and a quick and penalty free way to restart a stage by exiting to the world map from the pause menu to ease some of the frustration, but it does make engaging with the more difficult moments of the game a bit less enjoyable. Precision requires tight controls and Tobari and the Night of the Curious Moon feels a bit too loose before it even begins to couple with other game mechanics like an ice world with slippery floors or a snowball you’re meant to move that doesn’t seem to have its own movement coded too well. Most level gimmicks aren’t so troublesome, things like sinking sands in the desert world or dark castles with climbable chandeliers easy enough to overcome, but many levels stray away from world-focused gimmicks and instead often offer up challenges based around platform, enemy, and hazard placement. Some are straight forward left-to-right affairs, others maze-like, and some long vertical climbs or descents, levels often sacrificing recognizable gimmicks to ensure they can instead execute challenging and distinct level layout concepts.

Thankfully, there is much more going on in Tobari and the Night of the Curious Moon than just jumping around well, and that ends up saving it from some of its movement problems. Tobari’s staff is useful for smacking any nearby enemy, the staff eliminating some foes but causing a medal to appear in special cases. Picking up these medals will give Tobari a unique ability she can then utilize throughout the rest of the level, Tobari able to store two at a time that she can swap between freely or jettison either one if she wishes to get a new power. On the surface, many of the powers may seem like simple improvements to your offensive capabilities, like a fireball you can shoot ahead, an ice power that freezes foes, and a spark that can travel around the surfaces of platforms to hit anything on them. As the levels begin to get a bit more complex though, soon each power will reveal it has extra utility. Fire can burn down leaf blocks, ice will cool down fire vents, and many abilities can end up finding usefulness in activating switches that might not otherwise be within reach. For example, the lightning bolt power isn’t very useful in battle for being slow and not much of a range improvement over your staff, but since it comes down from the sky, it can be used to target enemies above you or activate switches you could not otherwise reach.

Things definitely get more interesting when powers purely devoted to new movement and navigation opportunities appear. Things like a broom that will give you a huge burst of forward aerial momentum, a double jump ability, and the almost out of control ball powerup where you roll around inside one all lead to special platforming segments, the game’s levels sometimes even requiring certain powers to reach the end goal. Early on, only searching for special level exits or the moon shards absolutely mandates the use of certain abilities, but the game definitely feels distinct from other power-stealing platformers by making them mandatory in its later levels, your power acquisition often focused on what you might think will be useful ahead. One issue this does come up though is the game doesn’t telegraph what powers are necessary all the time, meaning you might reach a certain part of the stage only to learn you didn’t bring what you need to complete it. Shops can sometimes mitigate this, coins collected throughout the levels used to buy powers in-stage, extra lives and health, or even bunnies who will give you tips on what to do. The game also makes sure that boss battles will always have opportunities to give you offensive powers in case you died and needed to start from the nearby checkpoint to rematch them. Still, level restarts are to be expected as you learn them, and sometimes even if the power is pretty obviously needed, if you can’t hit the enemy or accidentally defeat them by jumping on them instead, the level is then unwinnable.

The power use in level navigation is definitely the highlight of Tobari and the Night of the Curious Moon despite its downsides, but the battles have some interesting uses for them too. Whether it be minibosses who are just bigger versions of regular enemies in arenas meant to make them more challenging than usual or one of your fellow students like the chipper athlete Asuka and the magical minion summoner Tsubaki, they all put up a decent fight that will require you to dodge well without really taxing the slippery movement too much. They can get difficult, but learning the attacks and which powers can deal heavy damage or exploit openings make them enjoyable challenges when they do crop up. Powers like a heavy axe that might be too slow to use in a fast paced regular stage can find a lot of use in dealing hefty damage to bosses during appropriate openings, and while having your double jump available makes a stage easier, not having an extra attack option during a boss can make success less likely. Whatever powers you use in a stage though, they disappear at the end of the level, each stage able to focus on being interesting playgrounds for whatever abilities they offer instead of trying to accommodate every possible power combination a player might have.

THE VERDICT: There was a lot of potential for Tobari and the Night of the Curious Moon to be a cute game that used its level-specific power challenges to gradually go from good fun to engaging challenges, but a lot of the design is undercut by the simple failure of the jumping momentum. It’s a game that can still be played through and enjoyed well enough, but the awkward nature of the slippery movement will lead to mistakes and restarts in a game that really wants to push you to remain extremely accurate in your movements. Having the powers be both important for battle and for level navigation makes them a good fit for adding variety to the play, but even this is let down a little by stages that don’t communicate what is needed well or provide powers in missable ways. Many of the problems can be pushed through with persistence to get to a decent and challenging experience, but a bit more time spent figuring out how to make the momentum mechanics and level design gel better would allow the ideas to blossom into something more enjoyable.

And so, I give Tobari and the Night of the Curious Moon for PC…

An OKAY rating. Tobari and the Night of the Curious Moon feels like it could have been much more effective with a little more refinement. Small touches like having mandatory powers remain accessible would prevent needless backing out of a level and would easily supplement the more challenging designs without taking anything away from them, perhaps even allowing them to get more ambitious, although the extra worlds are already rather insane without that level of freedom. The jumping mechanics are the obvious point for improvement though, the jumping not needing its weird momentum mechanics and a much simpler version not only seemingly easy enough to implement over top of the current game, but it would also allow the challenging segments to demand more of the player without having the odd slipperiness weighing things down. The main journey is still achievable for a normal player and has plenty to work with in the different ways you can use powers to navigate levels, but extra content stretches things at time, especially since some of it even involves the fast paced action and precise jumping intermingling more actively with things like the poorly coded snowball riding.

There is a kernel of a good game inside Tobari and the Curious Moon and one that can almost be extracted once you’ve adjusted to its loose momentum, but the slips up it causes do lead to the cute adventure hitting a few snags. If everything was tightened up just a bit, the platformer we’d end up with would have the level design and power complexity it needs to shine. If you’re curious if you should pick up Tobari’s game in its current state though, just know that it takes some getting used to, the problems not prohibitive but still a present enough concern to hold its components back from being something more.