I get a kick out of making mistakes. I find them to be the best way to learn. The consequences of mistakes tend to be the largest driver for change.

In the video game world, the only true consequence is time. In Everquest, you died, lost XP, and needed to get it back – time. In a permadeath/hardcore mode, you lose a character and have to rebuild – time. In Valheim, you get taken out by a deathsquito – holy moley the time.

In Return to Moria, when you die, the cost is generally a mild amount of time to return to the place of death from your bed. The cost to create a new bed is relatively small, sort of like a mini-save point. For some encounters, this is absolutely required. For the more complex areas, the game tends to provide a fast-travel point. Now, have I died in really bad spots that caused horrible corpse runs? Heck yeah! The Deep runs in particular (holes in the ground that require 4x rope ladders to get down to, and have a permanent DoT) are perfect examples of risk/reward, because they provide access to some rare materials. I’ve died more than a few times by pushing my luck to harvest a couple more Black Diamonds.

The dungeon tile exploration aspect also highlights this, very similar to a D&D campaign. You know there’s a door, will you open it if you are low on HP and lacking spells? Same thing here, do you want to open the new room when you’re tired, hungry, and your armor is gone? For the first half of the game, you are generally at a disadvantage to address those issues. Eventually you will acquire the material to build temporary (and useful) camps that address all that (medium hearth, table, bedroll, repair station, and mushroom/sun onions to cook). This temporary camp model is required, as the later parts of the game can go for very long stretches of combat/exploration. Orc camps or hordes will absolutely wreck your shield/health.

Which highlights a larger challenge with fast travel, where the game considers you having walked the distance. Meaning any buffs you may have acquired before travelling are mostly worn off by the destination (buffs that are stupidly short duration). This generally means that the home base model is more about a place to store stuff rather than prepare for the next run. It takes a long time to get a bag big enough for that to be practical.

I will flag that the game difficulty does increase over time, more so in the space of significant vertical travelling, more enemy density, and more environmental hazards. Vertical movement starts off rather simple, maybe a single floor up. Later though, you’re going to be going through 4 floors at a time in a single dungeon tile. Enemies move from patrols of 3 orcs to a dozen + wargs. And the environment is just chock full of poison/despair which eats away at your health if you don’t go above it. This costs time. Add into that the move from fairly linear exploration to multiple paths, there’s a crazy amount of time spent just trying to figure out where to go and getting there alive.

There’s a rather long list of QoL gripes I have with the game, and already patches are coming along to address them. You get stairs very early now!! Slag and Scales drop more frequently and less are needed!! It reduces the grind and RNG aspects. QoL things are often hard to balance out, so hats off here.

Now having opened the Dimrill Gate and effectively completed the main quest, there are some exploration and completionist portions that remain. Which I can say without hesitation is a much different game altogether. Having access to Tier 6 armor & weapon (after the final quest), plus continued access to Miruvor (a quite strong HoT) reduces the overall risk tremendously. And if you’re so inclined, you can lay down a special lamp to clear piles of purple mist. Sure, you may still encounter a large troll or fell beast, but you’re more than prepared for it after that final run. Of note, once you do have a particular item, you can restart a new world (or join another) and very quickly unlock a shortcut to the near-end of the game.

Hindsight is a heck of a thing however, and it is next to impossible to avoid comparison to Valheim, which is an all-around better game. Return to Moria is built upon, and suffers for, the need for claustrophobia and lack of freedom. Freedom is the reason survival games exist. I am not against the concept of dungeon tiles as an exploration mechanism, but the inability to make mistakes and explore too deeply is wildly confusing. “The dwarves were greedy and dug too deep” is not possible here. Every player will start in the West Halls, head to the Elven Quarter, the Crystal Depths, Lower Deeps, and so on, in that order. The concept of procedural generated worlds off seeds is almost pointless.

I will say that this disappointment is offset by potential. The game a week later is much better. Improved maps, improved food/buffs, clearer direction about digging in deep cracks, better building tools, and better combat are all things that would put this much in much higher regards.

The game does an admirable job of making you dig through a mountain, and once you’re done, you can look back and better appreciate that journey. And certainly the journey is better in a group. Return to Moria may not be a GotY candidate, but it certainly fits in the top shelf of of LotR games.