Eternal Silent Moon

Going by the name, I downloaded Eternal Silent Moon expecting a brooding fantasy RPG, then opened it to find a purple neon city. The first stage went by as smoothly as an ad trailer: a clean win in four minutes, and the game even handed me an MVP badge.

On the second stage my ten-thousand-HP wall broke on the tenth wave, right as I was starting to think this game was a breeze. It's the kind of game where the first three minutes feel like something to unwind with, and minute four makes you sit back and work out where your lineup is falling short.

Eleven waves and a ten-thousand-HP wall

Each stage is eleven waves of monsters pouring down from the top of the screen. Your team stands on a platform at the end of the path and fights on its own without moving, and you can't control the individual characters either. All you have to protect is the wall right behind them, which starts every battle with exactly ten thousand HP.

A battle ends when the eleven waves are done or the wall's HP hits zero, and a run like that lasts about three to four minutes. There's a 1.5x speed button in the right corner, so you don't have to sit there while your team fires one shot at a time.

The damage numbers floating over the monsters in the early waves land somewhere between twenty-nine and forty-three, which sounds trivial. But that number is exactly what tells you whether your team is getting stronger or treading water across several stages in a row.

Even if you lose, you still get rewards at the end; the difference is that only a win unlocks the next stage. Besides clearing the stage, the results screen lists two side goals: keeping the wall above fifty and above eighty percent HP.

Skill cards are what you actually control

Your characters shoot on their own, so the real playing happens in the deck at the bottom of the screen. Drag a card onto the field and that skill goes off right where you drop it. Every card costs energy, and energy refills quite slowly compared with how fast the monsters flood in.

As a result, the second half of every stage plays out the same, rather suffocating way. You're holding all six cards, the monsters cover the screen, and you only have enough energy to play one card, so you have to decide which one is worth more.

The cards come in three elements, Fire, Ice and Lightning, each with four cards that do very different things. Ice slows the advancing crowd and then freezes it solid, while Lightning stuns in chains. Fire is pure damage, and it's the element I used most.

Two identical cards side by side merge into a higher-level card, and that's the most fun part of any battle. Mid-stage the game also lets you pick a stacking bonus, and the one I drew made merges jump two levels instead of one.

Ignia, Ayla, Sola, and five locked slots

The character list has eight slots, but by the time I sat down to write this I had only unlocked three: Ignia, Ayla and Sola. The other five slots are padlocked, each one needs ten shards to open, and all five are sitting at a perfectly round zero.

The irony is that the game lets you bring up to five characters into battle, so right from the start you can see your lineup is two seats short. There are three ways to get shards: summoning, buying them in the shard shop, and picking them up here and there from end-of-stage rewards.

Summoning has a pity at fifty pulls for a high-quality character, and the shard shop sells ten shards for three hundred to six hundred special coins. Each item can only be bought three times before you wait four days for a restock.

Add it all up and this is progress measured in weeks, not sessions: you'll unlock your fourth character after many days, not after a few runs. If you're used to games that hand out unlocks by the bucketful on day one, it's worth knowing that going in.

Where the game starts squeezing you is the energy drink bar

Every stage costs ten stamina out of a hundred, so you get about ten runs before you have to wait for the bar to refill. That sounds generous, until you notice that a loss eats the full ten stamina just like a win does.

The main way to get stronger is upgrading cards, and this is where the numbers start getting visibly harsh. My starting Fire burn card needed four copies plus two hundred coins to reach level two, and level three already asks for six copies plus three hundred coins.

Meanwhile, clearing a stage outright only pays two hundred and eighty coins, so a little division shows the game's problem right away. Early on, one won stage just covers one upgrade step, after that it no longer does, and you have to replay stages again and again.

The main shop, your home and the guild are all still locked at level two, so early on there are exactly two things to do: clear stages and upgrade cards. That loop is tidy and easy to understand, but to be fair, it's also pretty cramped.

The ads here work, and they really pay out

At the end of each battle there's a button to double your rewards by watching an ad, and you get three uses a day. I tried it on the very first stage to see whether that reward still works inside VipMod, because it's the thing that breaks most often.

The ad played in full for about thirty seconds, had a close button in the top-right corner, and once it finished the rewards doubled exactly as promised. Two hundred and eighty coins became five hundred and sixty, forty diamonds became eighty, and everything else in the reward list doubled the same way.

The summon screen also has one free pull a day that you unlock by watching an ad, and after sitting through it I got an Ignia shard. It's a small reward, but it's the only thing that gives you character shards without spending a cent.

This is worth pointing out because not every game keeps these rewards working when it runs inside VipMod; in some, the ad rewards shut off completely. Here both work normally, and they happen to be the main income for players who don't pay.

The MOD button is back on the current build

Straight to the thing you came to this page for: our mod has two features, a damage multiplier and God mode. When we first wrote this page, though, it didn't recognize the build Google Play was serving, so there was nothing for you to switch on yet.

In practice, this game's tile in VipMod had no green MOD label like the tiles next to it, and opening the game showed no menu badge. We checked the game data the mod needs to touch, and it was exactly the same as before.

In other words, the game wasn't blocking the mod at all; the mod just needed an update to match the new build. That update is out: the mod has been re-tested on the build Google Play serves (version 1.0, build 321), and both switches work again.

The damage multiplier lets you pick anywhere from five to ninety times and change the level mid-battle, and God mode stops the wall and the whole team from losing HP. Those two hit exactly where it hurts most: the wall that breaks on stage two, and the ten stamina you lose outright every time you fail. Just keep in mind that the multiplier applies to the monsters too, so turn God mode on alongside it.

Pretty, smooth, well translated, and one stray word

The visuals are the game's clearest strength, with a purple-pink neon palette, big-eyed chibi characters and card effects that look great going off. The first three minutes are a treat to look at, and it kept that feeling for the whole session I played.

The settings have four graphics levels and three frame-rate options, thirty, forty-five and sixty. Weak phone or strong phone, you'll find a setting that runs smoothly and still looks good. There are also separate toggles for floating damage numbers and attack effects, for anyone who likes a cleaner screen.

The game comes in several languages and started in Vietnamese on our test phone, which is why the screenshots on this page show Vietnamese text. That translation was clearly done by people rather than a machine, and the one slip I found was the warning that your card slots are full, which used the Indonesian word Kartu instead of the word for card.

One more thing to know up front: the game requires an internet connection. I tried cutting the connection and it stopped dead at the data-loading step, never reaching the login screen. The login screen itself only comes in English and Chinese, a bit out of step with the rest, but you only see it once.

Who this game suits

If you like laid-back tower defense you can play in a few spare minutes, with cards to fiddle with and a lineup to build up over time, this one fits nicely. A run only takes a few minutes, and nothing in the first fifteen minutes asks you to understand anything complicated.

And if you hate being stopped by the stamina bar and by that wall on stage two, turn on God mode and most of the frustration goes away. The game is new, so Google Play shows only a little over five thousand downloads and too few ratings for its score to mean much yet.