Become the Moon

2025 just doesn’t know how to quit when it comes to roguelike deckbuilders. I could probably make a top 10 games list in the genre alone, and we’re still only halfway through the year. Hell, we even still have Slay the Spire 2 coming sometime in the next six months! But while most deck builders stick to iterating on Mega Crit’s incredibly solid base, Become the Moon seeks inspiration somewhere else: Hearthstone. More accurately: Hearthstone’s Battlegrounds mode.

When starting Become the Moon, you choose one of a number of leaders. Each of these brings their own added perk to your team, whether it’s reserving an extra spot for a minion, gaining a copy of each relic you earn, or being able to spend health points instead of mana, to name a few. From then on, you enter the world’s game, always starting out in the academy. You choose a starting relic, which works similarly to those in other games in the genre, and then you draft cards. There are (battle) spells, minions and relics, each with their own influence on your game.

Then, you draw your opening hand, and you can spend some mana to play cards. You start out with very little mana, so at the start your moves will be pretty limited. You play your minions, add your spells, and then you challenge your opponent. They bring minions and spells of their own, so planning is important, as the game is an auto-battler, meaning once you hit ‘end turn’, there’s nothing you can do to interfere. Minions will battle it out until one team has no minions left. Then, the other player’s surviving minion(s) will each do 1 damage to the losing leader, after which the leaders fight among themselves until one of them is the last one standing.

Become the Moon starts out easy but ramps up its difficulty pretty quickly. It’s up to you to create the best synergies to make it as far as possible, hopefully making it to the final encounter under the moon. Don’t expect to get there quickly though: there are plenty of walls to hit if you don’t make the best of your deck. Luckily, every time you have to reshuffle your discard pile into your draw pile, you rank up a tier, meaning you get to choose five more cards to add to your deck. Each card you choose is one of three available, so there is definitely an element of luck. There are rerolls available, but even then you won’t always draw exactly what you want or need.

There is so much strategy involved in how you plan your next move. Do you keep your current team of minions, or do you switch in another one instead? Which minions do you upgrade? In what order do you want to trigger certain spells? There’s a huge element of risk and reward in play, which might not always work out, but when you do pull it off, you create awesome combat scenarios in which you obliterate your opponent.

Since you get to choose how much time you spend in your prep phase, you decide how quickly your game will flow. For example, I prefer to wing it most of the time, meaning my runs pass by quickly and leave me hankering for one more go after every defeat. With the quick restart button, it’s incredibly easy to give in to that urge, so beware once you start playing. I haven’t felt this rush and this craving to make the numbers go up again since Balatro! I’m not saying Become the Moon is as good as LocalThunk’s masterpiece, but when you make your game almost as addictive, you’re certainly doing something right.

It helps that the presentation is completely on point. The cartoony art style works well to create a sense of wonder and adventure, while the UI clearly takes great inspiration from the aforementioned Hearthstone. Luckily, the game creates enough of an identity of its own to stand out from Blizzard’s mega hit while making everything on your screen abundantly clear, so you immediately understand what’s going on. Fights never get too frenetic to lose track of what’s going on either, so you can always analyse what worked and what didn’t with your chosen tactics.

With the number of different leaders you can unlock, there’s plenty of variety on offer as well. Each of them will take an entirely different approach, even though most of the available cards are the same. Combine that with a daily run mode, offering even more diverse challenges, and Become the Moon turns out to be a game you can quickly pick up if you need a fast dash of roguelike deckbuilding goodness. The game never feels unfair either, despite the difficulty escalating quite rapidly, so you’ll always leave a defeat with the feeling that you can nail it on the next run.

It’s impressive what Feldspar Games has achieved here. They could have easily fallen into the trap of creating something too similar to its biggest inspiration or could have struggled to get away from the clutches of the typical roguelike deckbuilder. Instead, they’ve created this beautiful mix of both, and it plays like a dream as well. I will definitely keep coming back to this game whenever I’m in the mood for some card play without losing hours to a single run. Instead, I’ll lose hours to run after run!