This is a hard recommendation to deny, as Moonring does have some great qualities to it. The game starts off strong but as one plays, the problems become more apparent.

Pros:

- World building is top-notch, including five gods and their followers. The Archon, a neutral leader, is ailing, and you have the potential to collect relics for each god to become the next Archon.

- The stories and dialogue are very good and professional quality. It is fun traveling through the towns and experiencing their different cultures and perspectives on one another. It is a shame that the gameplay is too poor that I won't be experiencing more.

- Great atmosphere, with full line of sight mechanics

- For those with nostalgia: Presentation and some game mechanics reminiscent of Ultima 1-5, with some modern up/sidegrades. There a fast-travel locations that are more streamlined than moongates.

- Some cool levelup mechanics and powers

- Creative status effects and interaction with the world

Neutral:

- Game does not have a traditional leveling system.

- Relatively extensive automatic in-game note system in place of needing hand written notes like in Ultima. But not all topics are apparent on where to find them, and a quest tab would have been nice.

- Keyword based dialogue system where you type replies. Available words are suggested to you as a conversation goes and there are some hidden keywords as well. I personally like this system.

- Somewhat dynamic town economies which fluctuate and you can have an impact on. You also have a reputation in each town that can effect prices.

- Clues are much clearer than Ultima 1-5, but can still be somewhat cryptic for things that seem to be required to "beat" the game.

- Relatively forgiving food system (I never got below 40% tummy reserves)

Cons:

- Powering up your character's stats and abilities involve completing somewhat onerous tasks for the gods, such as collect 20 herbs. Each herb you must blindly go through a dark forest maze.... repeat 20 times (or likely more since you will die and have to revert to a save point).
Some of these tasks are creative like defeating a certain amount of enemies while Mad or Blind.

- Dungeons just aren't very fun from my experience. They are randomly generated and mostly involve stumbling around trying to find keys.

- Even as someone who enjoys being challenged, the game is a bit difficult. I know that's what the game is aiming for it fits in with atmosphere and I appreciate the mindset of forging through an unforgiving world... but even traversing the overworld between towns expect to die a lot, often going mad and losing control of your character's directional movement. Yes there are ways to counter this, but they seem to be tedious/expensive. In retrospect, I should have tried hiring sellswords as 25g an (in-game?) hour might be worth it. Most overworld encounters you will have to run away from. This may or may not get better, but even after a few equipment and stat upgrades, Moonring is still prohibitively hard.



I would love for the developer to implement these things so I can some back to Moonring:

Quest Tab in notes.

Options to tune down difficulty and tone down encounters so that I can experience more of your awesome world.

If you aren't going to handcraft dungeons, options to shrink them a bit and have a bit more visibility (less stumbling around). (This seems like it would improve with more perception which is the one stat I hadn't upgraded).

I wanted to like this

Its got a lot going for it, but the bugs take away my recommendation:
the worst one has to do with the second ending for the game, essentially I couldn't access a macguffin (which is just a piece of information you use to shout at the end of the story) but my access was blocked, all guides say you're supposed to be able to disembark from your ship but the location is entirely blocked off on the far, far, far north of the map and all spots are "too high land to disembark.

Instead I opted to just look up the information and tried to win off of that, but even after trying multiple times I realized the game must be hard-coded to expect you to gather all 5 macguffins.... one of which I can't get... I spent over 20 hours on this game only to lose to a simple bug.

The other one is much more lenient, you gain an ability to summon allies and sometimes they lose their allied status for one reason or another. Main questline npc was killed because a summon entered a city with me and that happened to be exactly the one I needed to talk to in that moment, but it turns out all I needed was some basic info from him to continue the quest and thus you don't actually need him alive.



If those two bugs are fixed I'd absolutely recommend it though, it has charm and interesting world and some very good game mechanics (for example; there is no XP system, all gains are tied to beating quests)
The music and sound design are solid
the way quests from the gods strengthen you aren't usually too tedious and had done more than half of them w/o focusing on them by the end
I love seeing all the little traders coming and going across the world, though it seemed strange that when on the ocean there weren't any traders of any kind, just pirates.
I loved the feel of how dangerous the world is when you're first starting out, its a fantastic feeling to get immersed in

there are some bad design elements unfortunately, despite the charm most dungeons just feel the same, and the lava sections are very tedious to get through since progress is always halted because of everything in the room or path ahead bursting into flame, and usually lighting me on fire as well.

I don't enjoy the boat much, it doesn't automatically follow you through fast-travel so once you get it you get sort of limited to only traveling by that boat, you also don't automatically eat food so I often find my character starving no matter how well I packed my lunchables.

Dungeons reconfiguring hardly made any sense to me, sense dungeon bosses were always the same. the random dungeons felt too overused and perhaps this was what harmed the experience for me, the main part of the game didn't feel hand-crafted unlike everything else and by the ending made the game feel more like a grind.

If the Dev makes it good on steam deck and iron out some of the content the dude will earn quite the coin. I would gladly pay 5£ for this on the Deck.