Moss is the story of a mouse named Quill. No, not that Quill. Quill lives with her uncle in a small village in the world of Moss, a magical world filled with wonder and the ruins of ancient civilizations. But this is no ordinary story. Instead, you are an active participant in the story because you are a Reader. Readers exist outside of the worlds of their books and the book of Moss contains Quill, her story, and her entire world! Oh yeah, we got philosophical fast here…meta concepts here we come! Ok…so you’re the Reader and you’re reading the story of Moss but you’re also a part of the story of Moss because readers can become joined with the stories they are reading. Got it? Good.
That’s the basic idea behind Moss: The Forgotten Relic. But if you’ve been gaming for a while, you already knew that because Moss originally released exclusively on PSVR in 2018 and was later released on both Windows and Oculus Quest for VR as well. Four years later, a sequel, Moss II, was released on PSVR as well before making its way to other VR systems. While Moss was a creative game, being restricted to VR kept a lot of players from playing it when it came out and the series was only marginally successful overall. That’s all about to change however, because developer Polyarc Games has finally ported Moss and Moss II in a single game to regular consoles with the release of Moss: The Forgotten Relic on PS5!
Ok, back to Quill. Quill loves to explore and push boundaries and one day she’s wandering outside of her village and finds a piece of Glass. Glass is capitalized because it’s not regular glass, it’s a magical glass that is part of the fabric of reality in Moss and anyone that holds all the Glass holds essentially unlimited power. Wars have been fought in Moss over control of the five pieces of Glass and while forgotten by most, are still very much a real threat. Quill picks up the glass and through her connection with its power, finds out that she is ‘twofold”, her destiny now intertwined with that of you, the Reader! Together you’ll end up finding out the secrets of the Glass, Moss, and the Reader and things get pretty wild for Quill from there! The original game left the story unresolved but Moss II picks up right where the first game left off and both are included in this new collection. Yes…we still haven’t gotten to what you do in the game though! Whoops!
In Moss: The Forgotten Relic, you control both Quill and the Reader. Using the shoulder buttons, you’ll activate the reader while the face buttons and left stick control Quill. The concept of twofold is integral to the gameplay in Moss. The game is made up of individual rooms and areas and each room has either a puzzle, combat, story elements, or exists to pass through to puzzle or combat. Often, puzzles require you to have Quill manipulate all the various objects in a room with intermittent intervention by the Reader. In other words, it’s a single player cooperative game where you have to work together with yourself. The original concept was that you as the reader were able to look around the world in VR but Moss: The Forgotten relic eschews that perspective for a fixed one. With the camera firmly in place and immobile, Moss instead becomes a very pretty vintage puzzle game with some light to moderate combat elements.
The goal here is all storytelling though, so even with some mandatory combat, your focus is on solving puzzles to progress and then discovering what is going to happen to the world of Moss. If you fail, destruction for all is assured so there’s no giving up! As you progress, Quill receives upgrades allowing her to power up her attacks and then you can really blow through the creatures. This is not a long game though, and before you know it, you’ll be at the final boss and things will be all wrapped up, but that’s fine because Moss II is right there waiting for you in Moss: The Forgotten Relic! Moss II jumps right back into the thick of things but follows the old video game trope of stripping you of all your abilities at the beginning of the game. Fortunately, there’s also a new playable character, Sahima, and she’s got a boomerang chakram that will help you get through the frigid initial areas of the game.
What’s interesting about Moss II is that the puzzle complexity is significantly higher and less intuitive than the first game which ended up being something of a softball. Moss II pulls far fewer punches and adds a huge amount of gameplay to boot, even though the length isn’t much different. As you fight your way through the various areas of the game and try to convince the sprites to trust you, you’ll quickly discover that there’s a lot more going on under the hood here. Eventually Quill comes back but she’s all powered down this time around. She’s still got her trusty sword but it doesn’t work the same way and once you power it up, it allows you to dash across gaps at high speed.
That’s not the only weapon at your disposal either. You’ll end up with new magical powers and abilities and several weapons that you’ll have to switch back and forth through on the fly in order to fight various enemies and solve puzzles. The puzzles are a lot less intuitive in Moss II as well and you’ll likely be pondering for a few minutes here and there before you realize how to use the hammer or the chakram correctly in order to progress. There’s certainly not much handholding going on here. Fortunately, just like the first game, death means starting back at the beginning of the room, which isn’t all that much of a pain in most cases. All too soon, you’ll be done with Moss II as well and the saga will be over (though there’s a bit of an opening left for another sequel!).
While Moss isn’t the longest game, it is incredibly pretty. The original game allowed you to use VR equipment to explore every nook and cranny from the reader’s perspective but this new version looks identical and is upscaled to modern TVs with a much higher resolution than PSVR. It’s an absolutely gorgeous game with detailed design work and incredible character realization. The narration and spoken dialogue is excellent as well and the music is particularly calm until a battle pops up and cranks up the stress levels with both tunes and action. There’s little question you’re going to love the look and sound of Moss: The Forgotten Relic from start to finish here.
It’s a gorgeous game with some creative, boundary pushing gameplay, but Moss certainly isn’t perfect by any means. The difficulty spike in puzzles may frustrate some players and losing a couple times in battles while you get a feel for the controls prompts the game to offer to let you skip hard battles very quickly rather than just letting you learn. Combat isn’t particularly complex, so that seems like a bit of a cop-out unless you’re all in on the storybook vibe and don’t care about fighting. The other issue is the pacing. Moss: The Forgotten Relic moves along at a methodical pace with slow and deliberate storybook dialogue during story sequences that you can’t skip if you’re a fast reader. You simply have to sit and wait. The Reader’s book reading story pages are different, allowing you to flip pages at will at the cost of skipping story entirely rather than seeing and moving through the subtitled dialogue. Between the two approaches, things move a bit slowly if you want to see everything and you miss key plot points if you’re running low on patience. Converting to a fixed camera also makes a few of the puzzles a bit more challenging than you might expect and some of the jumps are strange perspectives that are hard to hit until you get a feel for them, but all in all it works quite well.
Moss: The Forgotten Relic finally brings the Moss duology to everyone with this release, taking the series out of VR limbo and giving us a great story to play through. While it’s not completely without flaws, the game is gorgeous, compelling, and interesting, though there’s a bit of puzzle fatigue by the final quarter of the game. Regardless, this is an excellent series that very much deserves a third, darker entry (we can hope!) and even though it’s only about 10-12 hours long, Moss: the Forgotten Relic is going to capture your heart and probably your kid’s heart too (if you have kids)!
This review is based on a digital copy of Moss: The Forgotten Relic provided by the publisher. It was played on a Playstation 5 using a 55” Sony 1080p TV and on the Playstation Portal where it played equally well. Moss: The Forgotten Relic is also available on Switch, Switch 2, Xbox, and PC on Steam.
Nate Van Lindt has been a gamer since the days of yore (aka Commodore 64), and has played a bit of virtually everything out there. He's also an avid comic book collector, both vintage and current, and reads a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy. On top of that, he watches a fair number of movies and TV shows as well. Oh, and he has a family, a full-time job, and lives somewhere in the urban wilds of Southwestern Ontario, Canada, foraging for old video cables and forgotten game soundtracks.