Puppet soldiers doing your dirty work while you stay safely out of harm’s way sounds like a cop-out mechanic on paper, and I went into Labyrinth of Galleria expecting exactly that kind of shortcut. Instead it turned into one of the more distinctive hooks I’ve run into in a dungeon crawler in a while. Eureka, a cheerful young woman with a talent for finding lost things, answers a help-wanted ad that leads her to a remote manor housing a labyrinth full of magical treasures called Curios. She can’t safely enter the dungeon herself, so working alongside the witch Madame Marta, she helps bind a spirit into an army of soul-infused puppet marionettes that explore the depths on her behalf, and I spent my first several hours just getting used to commanding a party that technically isn’t made of people at all.
This is a sequel, and knowing that going in shapes a lot of how the whole experience lands. Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk was a surprise hit for Nippon Ichi Software, the kind of game that snuck up on people with wall-smashing exploration and a story-heavy structure nobody expected from the genre. The Moon Society carries that DNA over almost entirely intact, and it mostly succeeds on its own terms, even though the shock of discovering those tricks for the first time is obviously gone the second time through.
The story splits across three distinct arcs, and I’ll be upfront that my own connection to the game rose and fell depending on which arc I was in. The first arc floored me. It centers on a genuinely touching relationship between two women navigating loss and connection, and it stands as some of the strongest, most emotionally focused writing I encountered in the whole runtime, a self-contained story that hit with real weight entirely on its own merits. The arcs that follow widen the scope considerably, bringing in the titular Moon Society and a much larger cast, and I felt the story get noticeably messier here. More plot threads, more exposition, and a central antagonist who never came close to matching the emotional pull of that opening arc.
By the final stretch, the game leans hard into dense science-fiction and anime-inflected territory, and the pacing buckled under the weight of all that exposition for me. Where Labyrinth of Refrain closed on a genuinely earned emotional note, this entry’s ending shifts focus toward tying up a wide net of side characters and NPCs instead, and since I hadn’t invested in that wider cast nearly as much as I had in the first arc’s central pair, the finale landed with noticeably less impact than the opening promised.
What kept me anchored through the rougher stretches was Eureka herself. She carries real warmth, and the series’ commitment to giving named, developed characters actual screen time, rather than treating your party as faceless stat sheets the way most dungeon crawlers do, remains one of its clearest strengths. Madame Marta and several key figures from that first arc specifically carry genuine depth, and I felt real payoff by the time their individual stories wrapped up. The manor setting itself is rendered with real atmosphere too, and I’d argue it’s an improvement over the town setting from the previous game.
The wider cast introduced across the second and third arcs is where things fell apart for me a bit. Several new characters, including the Moon Society’s own members, came across as underdeveloped relative to how much narrative weight the story asked them to carry, and the antagonist driving much of the back half’s conflict struck me as one of the weakest the series has produced. It’s a real step down from how tightly focused that opening arc manages to be, and the unevenness across the full cast kept the story from holding the same quality bar across its considerable length.
Combat and character-building systems are where I ran into my sharpest frustration mechanically. The sheer density here overwhelmed me even as someone with dungeon crawler experience going in. Multiple stat growth types, several distinct categories of critical hits, and an enormous web of passive skills with cryptic descriptions meant I spent dozens of hours not fully understanding systems the game expected me to engage with regularly. Auto-optimize options helped take the edge off the worst of the micromanagement, but I still found myself sinking real time into menus if I wanted to actually understand what I was doing rather than just letting the game handle it for me.
The dungeon crawling itself remained a genuine highlight throughout. Wall-smashing, gap-jumping, and hole-dropping abilities gave exploration a satisfying sense of actively subverting the genre’s traditional maze design, even without the same shock of novelty the first game delivered. Art direction was the one element I never had a single complaint about. It’s striking, detailed, and distinctly stylized in a way that elevated even routine dungeon-crawling sequences into something visually memorable, and that quality held rock steady across every hour I spent with the game regardless of how I felt about the story in any given stretch.
By the time I reached the credits, that first arc’s emotional peak was still the high point I measured everything else against. The later arcs never quite matched it, particularly given how much of the finale’s attention went toward wrapping up side character threads instead of delivering another tightly constructed emotional payoff. Still, pushing through the more mechanically overwhelming and narratively uneven stretches paid off in its own way, and I came away describing the cumulative experience as addictive even when it wasn’t hitting those same emotional highs consistently.
Verdict
Labyrinth of Galleria: The Moon Society succeeds as a worthy, if inevitably less surprising, follow-up to a genre-bending original, delivering striking art direction, a genuinely emotional opening arc, and dungeon crawling mechanics that still felt satisfying to me even without the shock of novelty that defined the first game. Its later arcs introduce a noticeably weaker antagonist and a wider cast that doesn’t develop as consistently as the story’s early highlights, and its overwhelming density of combat and character-building systems will be a real barrier for anyone without patience for heavy min-maxing. If you’re a dedicated dungeon crawler fan willing to meet its systems on their own demanding terms, and especially if you fell for Labyrinth of Refrain the first time around, this remains a substantial, if uneven, continuation of a genuinely distinctive series.
