Night of the Full Moon is a free-to-play mobile deckbuilding game with rogue-like elements. Players take on the role of Little Red Riding Hood whose grandmother has disappeared into the forest on a full moon night. Confront random encounters of increasing difficulty and build a deck from actions, attacks, equipment, prayers, counters, and spells.

Format: Android
Cost: Free-to-Play
Pressure to Pay: Low, read below for details

Build a deck to defeat enemies with a variety of card types and combos

Major Pros:

• Diverse cards for deckbuilding
• Good replayability
• Unobtrusive ads / paid content

Minor Pros:

• Thematic graphics with a clean art style
• Humorous character designs
• Offline friendly

Additional content can be purchased for about 1 USD

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Major Cons:

• No tutorial

Minor Cons:

• Minor errors in English story translation

One of my favorite enemy designs is a reference to Beauty and the Beast

In-depth Review

Night of the Full Moon offers a diverse array of cards for deckbuilding. There are over 500 cards including all the upgrade forms. Players start with a basic 10 card deck and then gain cards through leveling up, purchasing them in shops, or finding chests. These offer the player a selection of random cards from which to choose. Some cards can also be upgraded to more powerful forms and some random events allow players to remove cards from their deck or trade for random cards.

Chests offer free cards, but it may be advantageous to leave some behind if they don’t fit with the player’s deck

Night of the Full Moon features over 100 boss and normal monsters, more than 50 achievements, two difficulty modes, and a multitude of chapter events depending on the class / story being played. Unfortunately, despite this depth of content, the player is given no tutorial to the game. Much of the content can be gleaned by genre expectation and experimentation, but some rules are more subtle. For example, at the end of a battle any cards left in the player’s hand are returned to the top of the deck in the same order. Meaning players can set themselves up (or mess themselves up) for the start of the next battle based on their choices of finisher cards.

Players choose between 3 current pages at a time, but can trash any of them to get another.

Characters in Night of the Full Moon are a mix of some traditional enemies such as Devil, Phantom, or Treant, along with some more humorous characters such as Lusty Quagmire and Pig Widow. After defeating an enemy, there’s a chance players will get dialog options with the defeated character which can result in gaining or losing Reputation, Courage, Health, and Gold. The game will mark answers explored on previous runs with their outcomes. Gaining enough Reputation or Courage leads to small benefits. Stories behind these characters can be explored in the index, but like much of the story related text it’s full of minor translation errors. Card text is free of such issues as far as I’ve seen.

Dialog options are sometimes available after defeating an enemy

Night of the Full Moon features a clean artstyle and nice user interface. Cards (in hand and in the top history bar) as well as effects can be pressed to bring up tool tips and explanations of keywords. Fitting in with this, there are no ads on screen while the player is playing. Ads are entirely voluntary at the end of chapter boss fights to double the gold given for victory. There’s no pressure to put more money in and the entire first chapter/class of the game can be played unlimited times without paying.

Watching ads is entirely voluntary and isn’t necessary for progression

I’ve found the replayability to be good even for just the first chapter. Given the random enemy, event, and card assortments on each playthrough I’ve gotten to build some interested combos on each run. I also enjoyed discovering new enemies and learning what their decks are like. Additional chapters/classes can be purchased for about 1 USD, which can unlock alternate cards, enemies, and story. Offline play is also supported regardless of pay status.

It takes multiple runs of the game to encounter all of the enemies

Recommendation

Overall I found Night of the Full Moon to be a very enjoyable free-to-play deckbuilding game. Once players learn the mechanics, there are lots of interesting cards, enemies, and events. The pressure to pay is low and viewing ads is entirely voluntary and unnecessary to progress. I enjoyed the art and themes of the game despite some of the minor translation errors. I recommend Night of the Full Moon to any players looking for a no-pressure deckbuilding game with good depth.

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• Cthulhu's Critiques' Tumblr
• Cthulhu's Critiques' Steam Curator