Project Moonborn makes the pounce a jump and a kill at the same time

You play a werewolf den mother whose pups have been taken, and the rescue happens aboard an intergalactic space prison. The verbs are claws and movement — slash, pounce, wall jump, slide. Every run randomises the environment, the rewards and the encounters, the stages are multi-levelled and stuffed with loot and secrets, and the things in your way are corrupt corporate humanoid clones and the droids kept on as security.

The unusual part is that the pounce is not a dash bolted onto a combat kit. It is the same input the platforming already wants. Crossing a gap and landing on top of a clone are one motion, which makes every traversal decision a targeting decision as well, and makes a bad landing cost you position and health in the same instant.

That has a knock-on effect on what a level can be. When movement and attacking run on one system, a designer can put an enemy where a platform would have gone and it still reads as part of the route. String enough jumps and pounces together and a stage stops being a corridor with fights in it and becomes a single line you either hold or drop.

The collectible is the other odd call. The lost pups are not currency you touch and forget — you find them mid-run and escort them back to the Wolf Den, where they can be trained for combat, support or scavenging. A rescue you have to carry is a completely different pressure from a coin. It changes how you pick fights for the rest of the run, because you are now moving with something that can be taken off you.

Between runs the den is the part you own. Trophies from the things you killed go on the walls, mystical seeds get planted and harvested, companions train. XP buys new attacks, passive effects and powers, and the choices made along the way decide which of the several endings you and your companions get.

The Secret of Mario’s Jump (and other Versatile Verbs) is the essay this whole design leans on. Its argument is that a great verb is not great because of the button, but because the same input produces wildly different outcomes depending on timing, speed and what you happen to be next to. A pounce that clears a gap, opens a clone and sets up the next one is exactly that shape. If it only ever does one of those three things, the game is a much smaller game than the pitch.

Depth, Mastery, and Vanquish is the second half of it. Vanquish wears the costume of a cover shooter and is really a movement game, held up by an easy surface with expressive depth underneath — the same trick being attempted here in two dimensions instead of three. The risk carries over too: deep movement is only depth if the enemies are built to punish the lazy version of it. Foes who vary their tactics and carry different weapons and gadgets are the mechanism that keeps the fancy option worth taking.

Roguelikes, Persistency, and Progression is the one to hold the Wolf Den against. It draws the line between a roguelike and a roguelite at whether anything survives your death, and Moonborn has decided that a great deal does — rescued pups, trained companions, trophies, unlocked techniques. That is a generous setting, and generous settings are load-bearing. The run has to stay tense while the den quietly hands you advantages, or the difficulty drains out of the game somewhere around hour four and never comes back.

Project Moonborn is a solo project by Sean Sindahl Nielsen, self-published, filed under Action, Adventure and Indie. It is coming to Windows with no date announced. Single-player, with Steam achievements and full controller support, and the developer says plainly on the store page that the game is in pre-alpha and that everything shown is work in progress.

That admission is worth taking at face value rather than reading past. What is on the page is hand-crafted pixel art in an arcade register and a feature list that is almost entirely systems — freeform movement, randomised runs, a den you customise, multiple endings. Whether those hold together is a tuning question nobody can answer from a store page, including the person making it.

If it is the werewolf and the movement pulling you in, A werewolf game with no name, betting everything on how it moves is the one to read next — another solo developer, another lycanthrope, and a project that has stripped away the title and the store page to bet on locomotion by itself. Moonborn is the same wager with a roguelike, a litter of pups and a home to bring them back to built on top of it.