Hauntii

My first hour with Hauntii felt like finding a record sleeve in a charity shop: the cover art stops you cold, but you don't quite know yet whether the music lives up to it. It absolutely does. Moonloop Games' debut is a twin-stick shooter wrapped around a collectathon soul, set inside one of the most carefully hand-crafted afterlife worlds I've wandered through. The art leans on a lino-print two-tone palette - monochromatic blacks and greys punctured by single accent hues - and the restraint of it makes every new biome feel like turning a page. Fungal spirit forests, an angelic cityscape, a spectral carnival: each area has its own color language, its own texture, its own residents worth talking to. The central mechanic is haunting, and it carries the whole game. You fire ghost-matter from the right stick to possess almost anything in the environment - trees you shake loose for currency, bomb-hauling enemies you commandeer to clear obstacles, a ladybug you inhabit to flutter between branches, an entire rollercoaster you ride through a trap-laden carnival level. The variety keeps escalating in ways that feel genuinely inventive rather than padded. Progression works like a scaled-down collectathon: gather stars scattered across each area through puzzles, NPC quests, and mini-games, then arrange them into constellations at altars. Each completed constellation either reveals a fragment of the ghost's past life or upgrades core stats - health hearts, dash charges, or essence (the resource that fuels your shooting). It is, quietly, a light RPG loop wearing an adventure game coat, and the dual purpose of those constellations - mechanical reward and emotional storytelling - is the game's smartest design decision. Where Hauntii stumbles is in its balancing. You always respawn with only two hearts regardless of your maximum health, which turns some of the tougher boss fights into endurance tests you probably did not sign up for. A handful of puzzles - particularly a race sequence in the Void area - have finicky requirements that sit awkwardly against the otherwise contemplative tone. The fixed top-down camera occasionally makes spatial depth hard to read during heavier combat sequences, leading to the odd frustrating hit. None of it is fatal, but players sensitive to difficulty spikes in otherwise cozy-adjacent games should go in with fair warning. The soundtrack, composed by Michael Kirby Ward, is one of those rare scores that actually changes the temperature of a room. It moves from sparse piano to soft jazz to lo-fi saxophone grooves to full swelling orchestral moments, and it lands every tonal shift. The story it accompanies - a voiceless ghost piecing together a lost life only to face surrendering those memories to ascend - is quietly devastating in its final act. Dialogue is minimal and deliberately opaque, so if you need explicit narrative hand-holding this will test your patience. Lean into the art and the atmosphere and it pays back with interest. At roughly eight to ten hours this is a game that knows exactly when to end, which is rarer than it should be. Steam players have rated it Very Positive and professional reviewers have largely agreed that its minor rough edges are exactly that - minor. This is Moonloop's first released title, and it is a genuinely confident one.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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