Labyrinth of Galleria: The Moon Society (2023) [PC] review

“Curiouser and curiouser!” Cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English).”

-Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass

With some games, you pretty much get exactly what you see. Mario’s not known for deceiving players, after all, unless we’re talking about that questionable Strikers comeback on the Switch a bit ago. Other games have a little more going on beneath the surface than one might expect. Think of it like opening a book and finding another book inside and you’ve got the idea. With that in mind, let’s crack open one of those books and take a look at Labyrinth of Galleria: The Moon Society, a NIS dungeon crawler that’s got plenty going on for the dungeon-diver with patience.

Eureka, a young noblewoman, finds herself employed at a backwoods manor built over a sprawling underground labyrinth. This labyrinth is home to both terrifying monsters and mysterious Curios, magical items of unknown origin. Humans can’t effectively get in and out of the labyrinth, but via some magical contrivances courtesy of her witch mentor Madame Marta, Eureka’s able to utilize the power of a magical lantern. This allows her to command artificial adventurers that can make the journey, and by controlling these puppet soldiers and spelunking into the Labyrinth, she’ll seek the Curios d’Art, the most mysterious and powerful of them all. Let’s not worry about the spooky implications of messing around with dangerous labyrinths and cursed magical objects; we’ve gotta make a living!

As with its predecessor Labyrinth of Refrain, Galleria is a combination of a visual novel and intense dungeon-crawler in the same vein as the Wizardry series. Between chunky cutscenes, you’ll find yourself delving into dungeons that are designed in the classical style. That means there are traps, pits, false walls, and such. The further you go, the more complex things get, and you’ll want to be prepared for some brain-teasers and mind-twisting exploration.

Every time you think you’ve figured out how dungeon-crawling works, Galleria adds another mechanic to mix things up yet again. Gotten used to exploring in the dungeon, mapping things out, and learning where everything’s laid out? Okay, now you can break walls, so all those bits of the dungeon you thought were inexplorable are now open for business. What about pits? Well, now you can jump over those, but there are still some that seem a bit too far, so who knows how you’ll deal with that? Deadly swamps? Got you, get to shlorping your way through them. There’s so much going on that it’s easy to get overwhelmed. You’ll want to be patient with this one, as it’s wholly possible to get stuck if you’re not exceedingly thorough.

A particular example springs to mind: you’re asked very early on to find three particular items in order to help Madame Marta complete a magical amulet. You’re told what to get, but certainly not where to find it, and the game goes so far as to suggest checking the buyback menu in the item shop in case you sold the goods. Mercifully, it doesn’t seem possible to have actually sold said goods, but combine a lack of guidance with the introduction of some fear, uncertainty and doubt and you’ve got a recipe for terror. D-did I sell one of the important items?! What if it got washed out of the buyback menu by other stuff I’ve sold?! And if neither of those are true, where the heck is it?! It’s that feeling of losing your car keys taken to the thousandth power. Resident Evil, eat your heart out; this is real survival horror.

Early on, combat takes something of a backseat to the ridiculous complexity of the dungeon and terrifying moments like the above, but it’s got plenty of depth all its own. The trick here, as in Refrain, is that your maximum party size is actually fairly massive, and while you’ll start with a fairly typical adventuring group you’ll end up with a team of twenty or more puppet soldiers at once. If that sounds intimidating…well, it kind of is, but as with exploration Galleria tries to go easy on you and introduce concepts gradually.

Going into too much depth would be out of the scope of this review, but rest assured that players who enjoy the kind of deep and complex character customization in titles like Disgaea will find plenty to love here as new quirks and mechanics continue to unlock. Don’t think you fully understand what’s going on under the hood here at first glance. In an effort to avoid spoiling things, let’s just say that everything you think you knew about how stuff works is going to go out the window here at least once, and it’s both a satisfying and overwhelming feeling. Some games are the size of a swimming pool but as deep as a puddle, but Labyrinth of Galleria looks like a swimming pool but is actually as deep as one of the Great Lakes.

As with Refrain, Galleria’s presentation straddles the line between cute and horrifying, sometimes wobbling back and forth over that line from moment to moment. Monster designs in particular are, well, something else. The anime-styled cutscenes aren’t too bad, given how long they tend to be, though this is very much a visual novel so you shouldn’t expect much in the way of animation there. There’s voice acting at least. You’ll want to keep it in Japanese, as while the English dub isn’t awful, it’s not great enough to merit keeping it around for the dozens of hours of cutscenes you’ll be watching as you proceed.

Labyrinth of Galleria is one of those interesting games where a simple review just isn’t the right medium to talk effectively about the sheer depth of content on offer. Don’t let the first few hours fool you. In fact, don’t let the first couple dozen hours fool you. There’s a lot going on here, more than the game even hints at early on, and players that stick with it are amply rewarded with devious dungeons, deep combat and a huge amount of interesting character and party-building mechanics. You won’t see a lot of this stuff coming. If that sounds like your kind of thing, it absolutely is, so dive in head first and watch the next fifty hours or so melt away.

We would like to thank NIS America for supplying us with a copy of Labyrinth of Galleria: The Moon Society for review.

PIXEL PERFECT

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Cory G. believes the pen is mightier than the sword…well, depending on how sharp the pen and sword are. A child of the ’90s and a prolific writer, he strews his work about like Legos made of words, just waiting for your brain to step on them. He enjoys a devilish challenge, so when it comes to talking about some of the more difficult games out there, you might just run into the Infernal Accountant Mage. Some advice: hold on to your soul around this guy, and don’t sign anything. Read more at popzara.com.