M.O.O.D.S. Preview

I got the chance to check out M.O.O.D.S. (which stands for Mechanical Organisms On Destructive Substances), a top-down roguelike twin-stick shooter developed by StickyStoneStudio and published with help from Erabit. From what I can gather, it has been in development since at least January 2020 and has now reached a point where it’s ready for Steam Early Access. So, what mood should you be in when playing this game?

In the future, humanity has left Earth, leaving behind their many, many robots. While the robots eventually learned to live without them, they soon began to try and understand them, creating modules that would replicate emotions. It… didn’t exactly go as planned and now some bots are becoming completely corrupted by those very emotions. You play as a robot who can’t be corrupted by emotion modules, so it’s your job to deal with them and resolve the corruption… through many, many of your deaths.

The gameplay is fairly easy to grasp. You’ll be using an S.R.T. (Short Range Teleporter) to select what reward you’ll find, fight through rooms to find the exit, facing bosses every couple of areas, until you face the final boss of the level. Do it all in one life and you’ll beat the run. Of course, there are going to be a lot of enemies in your way, so you’ll need to upgrade your arsenal and become strong enough to survive. Pretty standard affair for a roguelike. However, there is something special that you will need to deal with: emotions.

The main selling point of the game is the various emotions and feelings you can equip and convey. Each emotion acts as a character class, with differing stats, starting weapon, and a unique ability. You can become a Pride Knight, an Angry Berserker, a Sorrowful Mourner, or a Lethal Lover, with more to unlock as you play more of the game. They all have their strengths and weaknesses, but through finding and buying weapons, upgrades, add-ins (weapon mods) and levelling up throughout your run, you can turn a depressed bot into a depressed death machine.

Before every boss fight, you can talk to the big scary robot. Depending on the emotion of the response, you can either make the fight easier or harder; however the worse the difficulty, the better the reward. That’s right! Understanding a boss’s personality and thinking about what to say could be the difference between life and death. So that’s fun and a really cool mechanic! 

Between your runs (after you are inevitably destroyed), you’ll be uploaded to a new body back at the hub area, where you can spend any currency you picked up during your run (outside of scrap, which gets dropped) to purchase upgrades, new weapons, and new structures to make your next run a little easier. There’s plenty to unlock that will require quite a few runs to max out, but they can be well worth the time and effort.

And that’s everything I have to say about M.O.O.D.S. right now. From what I have played, I’m extremely interested in the future of its development and what it may become after its official release.

M.O.O.D.S. will be released on Steam Early Access on the 29th of July!