The sound design also contributes to its palpable atmosphere-there’s little music and mostly a cavernous, echoing soundscape that makes you feel cold and alone, literally out of your depth.īizarrely for a game set so deep underground, there is also a day-night cycle to worry about. Moria, however, is properly dingy, so dark you need to hold a torch in your off-hand most of the time. Not many games get underground areas right: they tend to be too bright, lit up by endlessly flaming torches or mysterious candles that must have been lit just before you got there. Khazad-dimīizarrely for a game set so deep underground, there is also a day-night cycle to worry about. Viewed in that light, it can be a much more rewarding and atmospheric game. I came to think of Moria more as a dungeon, and Return to Moria more as a dungeon crawler. Instead, Moria is hemmed in by unbreakable walls: structural cave walls or monolithic dwarf masonry that not even the hardiest pickaxe can break through. If I can’t remember the exact path to that copper ore I discovered earlier, I should be able to carve a new way, through the rock and stone.

Yes, mines and caves are famously dim and samey places-but I’m a dwarf with a massive pickaxe in my pocket. They only show you vaguely where to go, but it’s a lot better than stumbling blindly in the dark.

So if you actually want to return to things, be sure to click the little closed eye icons next to your custom map notes. I had a paragraph here moaning about the custom map markers, and how they don’t show up as on-screen waypoints, but I checked again and they’re turned off by default.

Moria is hemmed in by unbreakable walls: structural cave walls or monolithic dwarf masonry that not even the hardiest pickaxe can break through.

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