Lunar Quest is a straightforward game about being summoned to clear out a temple on Moon. Like any other daily occurence, your unphazed hero troupe is out and about to defeat today's evil and be home for dinner.

You have a little bit of an odd-ball group on adventures - sadly, while the little dialogue there is is amusing and a nice break, it is only ever used at the very beginning and the very end, an unfortunately common occurence.
Style-wise the team- and dialogue formation, their clashing oddball personalities reminded me a lot of Indrah's games, and the creator does draw some inspiration from her. The battle system and overall flow is quite different, however, making it a very different experience.

As the title Lunar Quest suggests, a temple needs to be restored on the moon, on you go to do it. There is no explanation or lore beyond this.

Battles

Lunar Quest is a dungeoncrawler with mostly optional touch-encounters. This, combined with the ability to save at any given moment means that encounters are very very controlled.
This is good in the sense that you can skip a lot of battles, reload if you messed up a fight, and explore at your leisure, but it also means that you have many blobs of enemies just waiting around without you ever engaging combat. Most smaller enemies, bare the enemies blocking passages and chests, are there in case you want to grind, which I see little use for. There is no shop or way to gain more restorative items beyond the ones you find in chests - due to the limitations of monster to fight, however, you will need few of them at all. Because you have weak mana- and heal-restoration spells in-fight (your manaregeneration spells is limited to 3-4 casts per fight and uses some mana to use) means that if you fight wisely you will barely need any restorative items at all. I only used a few very very late right before the last bossfights. Facing the endboss, I had all revive-items, all higher-tiered restorative items, most of my health and about half of my manapotions, leaving me with 7 or so (I was about half mana and used them to fill myself up before I went).
I really enjoyed the ability to abuse your battle tactics to keep yourself healthy, but it also allows for different playstyles relying on mana-eating attacks and keeping yourself up with potions. So I can imagine others would have much more use for them, as personally I try to avoid using items unless absolutely necessary.
Now there is also to mention that when you heal sleep, knockout or other ailments (paralysis seems to do nothing tho, what does it even do?), you can immediately use the healed character. This is so incredibly handy and makes curing ailments almost always worthwhile!


Enjoy the stun Chimera. You will have it for the rest of this battle.

Most later spells you learn are in no way a huge upgrade (bare the paladin's single target attack), or only for certain situations, as they are mostly area-spells using up huge chunks of mana.
A huge exploitative, or planned factor, is that ailments are very strong. You have different dmg over time effects, namely poison, burn, and later blood (altho much harder to apply), while you also have a single target stun with low mana cost and a 4-5 turn duration, working on more than half the monsters, including many of later boss fights. Meaning if you are not immune to it, they will be rendered unable to act and you pummel on them until they fall. Combined with the thief's poison cloud, applying sleep and poison with a full hit rate whenever possible for 3-4 turns (no misses here) with a low mana cost, means that you can win most fights by simply letting the dots tick them death while you use auto-attacks inbetween to conserve mana. Conversly, many enemies hit really hard, so unless you focus a few of them out, or render them unable to act, they will almost insta-kill your characters. You have no revive spell, so you need to be careful.

And this combination is what made the battles interesting, despite them being mostly easy. The moment you lose sight of the ailment/buff durations or let monsters do as they please, you will pay dearly for it, and the few monsters immune to ailments you will need to buff up for and need to fight with strong attacks. This means you need to keep paying attention to your mana, your buffs/debuffs and survive. The mist jar was one of the more annoying enemies due to its resistances to such, and I frankly skipped the golem and picked the three elementals in order to proceed instead.

The endboss, too, is played in this vein, as you will need to keep your magic-countering spells up at all times, 'lest your characters want to be killed with one spell. Beyond this, it is a very simple and needlessly drawn-out fight, as you will just spam your strongest attacks, restore mana and repeat until it finally goes down.


What are you saying? Your job is to stun and refresh our mana!

The Little Bits

Your party has a nice balance of supporting kit and offensive spells. I found Vesph (the poison thief), and our hot-blooded mage to be the best supportives assets throughout the game, while the paladin was something in the middle, and the fire-fighter had a lot of offensive prowess to use + the atk buff. These two also have a cheap physical and magical spell which seems very similar, but are naturally used against their respective weaknesses' in the enemies armor.
It seems there are a lot of extra-effects that simply are not used - your paladin's special attacks remove blessings, just too bad that not even one single enemy used any. Only the end-boss does, and that blessing you cannot dispel.
Fire attacks also remove freeze-status' .. too bad you do not have the ability to freezy anyone anyhow.
Also, much love to our mute thief.

The dungeon is fairly simple, there are pathways, slime-formed enemy encounters, a few chests hidden behind monsters and plenty of chests out in the open. The chests seemed far too easy to obtain making the guarded ones seem like a minor let-down due to getting a few health-potions after having to spent quite a chunk of mana, when you already have a base-stock of items. There are a couple of feline tutorial guides, now I love seeing cats and rejoice at every occasion to behold their glory, but they seemed rather cluttered and too many for their purpose on the first floor.
What I liked were the variations of having to walk over spikes (with that evil extra-long break of them not appearing, hah!), and later needing to choose the right door to procceed. I simply fought my way through all doors, but you may want to do smarter than that. You sometimes need to fight monster to procceed, or fight monsters to clear the way, or choose which monster to .. this all comes down to just fighting more, as you can see, but it does feel a little varied in its approach, artifical or not.
The floors do not feel very repetitive at all, due to the variety of monsters with different immunities, spells and such as well. You may wonder why elements, cursed knights, vampires, dragons, bats, machines and bees are all gathering in the temple on a moon .. but .. let's not sweat the details, for there is no guiding line to be found.
As you start medias in res without any story to speak of, so are the battle environments.

The graphics are consistent and enjoyable. I quite like the different simple portraits of our characters. There is only a visual bug where enemies stay onscreen after they died due to damage over time effects (burn, poison, bleed). They are not targetable, however, and only remain as a visual distraction.

In short - this is a fairly easy but fun dungeon crawler. The story makes no sense, nor makes claims to make any sense. There is a lot you could tweak or adjust, but it works and was a surprisingly enjoyable game in a small scope!