The bland “Game Changer” intro disappeared, and after a few moments was replaced. Your stomach lurches and your heart pounds with nostalgia, as you recognised a title from your childhood.
Moon Shards.
A game developed late in the 8-bit era, Moon Shards was a somewhat dark action adventure game, it cast you as a resident of Walden, a small town protected form creatures of the night by the Moon Shard enshrined in the church. But this isn’t enough to stop the minions of the vampire Countess Carmine from stealing the crystal fragment, and you set out to retrieve it.
But you discover that there are actually seven Moon Shards, and that Carmine is trying to collect them all to become a new moon goddess. So your mission changes to trying to stop her. So you fight through seven levels, fighting bosses and sub-bosses until you confront the vampiric Countess herself atop her castle.
For an 8-bit game, a lot of content was packed into it. You can pick one of four characters to play as, and when you collect your first Moon Shard you discover that they are “lycanthropes” and gain slightly different abilities for each: Richter the werewolf is balanced; Sofya the werefox, has stronger magic; Klaus the werebear has more health and attack power; and Mikella the werecat is faster and has a higher jump. Cutscenes between each level advance the story, and while the graphics are fairly simple, an excellent soundtrack helps to draw the player into the game’s gothic atmosphere.
Each Moon Shard collected after the first bestows an additional power-up, like more life or a double-jump. You also discovering that several of the bosses are your friends, turned into monsters like a minotaur and brainwashed by the Countess using the Moon Shards. At the end of the game, the Countess uses her greater knowledge of the Moon Shards to take yours from you and unite them into the Moon Heart, but you defeat her before she can complete the ritual.
At this point the voice of the previous moon goddess speaks from the crystal, asking you to shatter it, and you get a choice. You can agree, shatter the Heart and return to Walden with a single Shard; or doing the ritual yourself and becoming the new ruler of the night. There are also two bad endings: You can accept Carmine’s offer to join her, and become her top general; or if you lose to her, she instead brainwashes you itno being her guardian and implied lover.
All told, you thought it was an amazing game and it made quite an impression on you. And you never thought you would play it again. But here you were. The gameplay and music were as good as ever, and the graphics seemed even better than you remembered. Before you knew it a couple of hours had passed and you were watching the ending cutscene.
You shook your head in wonder, then stood up and stretched. Retrieving the cartridge from the Game Changer’s mega-hybrid console, you stared at the cartridge, which was now clearly Moon Shards.
That was amazing... but what now? You look around the eerie, empty store. Or... bemused, you see it was no longer quite so empty. A woman had appeared at one of the cash registers, and she waved to you to get your attention. You found yourself walking over. In a blur she put the game in its box and also produced a console for you to play it on -- and both of them cost $5. Not questioning your good fortune, you gladly hand over the money, and the next thing you know you’re walking out of MEGA-X RECORDS with your incredible purchases.
It all feels like a dream, and you refuse to look back just in case the eldritch store has disappeared. You’ve had enough of the uncanny for a lifetime.
The rest of your day passed pretty normally, apart from not being able to get the game out of your head. Sometimes you even lost yourself to a daydream, exploring a dark forest or gothic castle before coming back to the familiar sights and sounds of the real world. That nostalgia must have hit even harder than you realised.
So maybe it wasn’t surprising that you dreamed of the game that night. It was a very vivid dream, one in which you found yourself turning into one of the characters and taking on their role.