Crimson Moon: the studio founded to reinvent AAA finally ships a twenty-dollar game, and that may be good news

There is a story behind this game that is not in the game, and it deserves to open this review.

ProbablyMonsters was founded in 2016 by Harold Ryan, former president of Bungie, with a specific promise: to build a better model for big-budget game development, a stable place where teams would not blow apart. The company left stealth in 2019 with nearly nineteen million dollars in funding.

What followed looks like what it claimed to be avoiding. Layoffs in 2023, including the closure of its Cauldron studio. Around fifty people let go after a project was cancelled. More layoffs in early 2025 after several efforts were wound down. And former employees describing chaos and mismanagement.

Ten years on, what finally emerges from that house is not the blockbuster announced. It is an action game at 19.99 dollars.

And honestly, that may be the best thing that could have happened to it.

What you play

The city of Gildenarch has fallen. Once a holy jewel, it has been handed to demons, undead, vampires and abominations called Hellgrowth.

Humanity's last hope is the Order of the Crimson Moon, and its most feared weapon is you.

You embody a Nephilim, a human-angel hybrid forged to defend the world from Hell. The game asks you to master supernatural powers, weapons, melee combat and angelic transformations, across brutal missions and encounters with the Dead Gods.

This is unembarrassed gothic high fantasy, and the soundtrack follows exactly the same programme: orchestra, choir and metal. The studio published a whole video about that fusion, and for this kind of game it is the right call.

The structure, in repeated hunts

This is the point to grasp before buying, because it defines everything.

You do not work through a linear campaign. You chain hunts, returning between each to Sanctus Clypeus, the Divine Shield, the ancient stronghold serving as headquarters for the Knights of the Crimson Moon.

That is where you recover, strengthen your arsenal, prepare your equipment, and plan the next mission at a war table. The studio stresses that the place is more than a menu, with characters to meet.

And every successful hunt opens new missions, new modifiers and new mastery objectives. That is the loop: you go out, you take risks, you come home stronger, you go out again.

No classes, and it is the game's best choice

Here is the design decision I take away.

There are no traditional character classes. Each Nephilim is defined by the build you give them, from four bricks: gear, Weapon Arts, Boons and Angels.

The benefit is twofold. First you are never locked in: you can aim for overwhelming damage, switch to a defensive style, or hunt combinations that reward staying aggressive. Second, and more importantly, every item you pick up can redirect your character rather than simply raise a number.

In a game built on loot, that is the difference between vertical and lateral progression. The first eventually bores because you always know what you are looking for. The second makes you change your mind about what you were becoming.

The Angels are the part I most want to see over time. Entities you attach to your build, combined with angelic transformations and powers granting temporary abilities for devastating attacks, promise occasional spikes of power rather than a steady climb.

Difficulty, set by you

The game offers dynamic difficulty scaling, and the principle is clear: every mission adjusts to your level, but higher difficulties pay more.

That is the modern answer to the argument that has poisoned this genre for fifteen years. Rather than imposing a wall and letting players fight over whether an easy mode would be a betrayal, difficulty becomes an economic variable. You want loot, you raise the dial. You want a quiet ride, you lower it and accept earning less.

Nobody is excluded, and nobody is denied reward for having suffered. It is clean.

Co-op

The game plays solo or with others, and the studio's phrasing catches the spirit: crusade alone or slay together.

That is coherent with the hunt structure. A time-boxed mission with modifiers and adjustable difficulty is exactly the format that best supports playing with somebody on a weeknight, without having to synchronise a forty-hour campaign.

What remains to be verified

Three things, and they will decide the game's real value in a month.

Hunt variety. A repeated-mission structure lives or dies on how many different configurations exist. If the advertised modifiers reduce to damage multipliers, repetition will arrive quickly. If they change how you approach a map, the game holds.

How the melee feels. The studio promises relentless, visceral combat against hordes. That is the kind of promise only a controller can judge, and it is also where games of this calibre most often break.

And the real depth of the builds. Four bricks on paper is promising. The question is whether they genuinely interact or whether you end up stacking the same damage bonus under four different names.

One note for collectors: there is a Deluxe Edition at 29.99 dollars, and armour sets tied to pre-ordering. In a game whose subject is collecting equipment, reserving appearances for early purchase remains a questionable choice, and players pointed it out before release.

What I make of it

There is something touching about this launch, and it is not irony.

A company created to prove that very large games could be made differently spent a decade cancelling projects and laying people off. And what finally reaches players' hands is a gothic action game at twenty dollars, with a clear loop, no classes, difficulty you set yourself, and a co-op mode.

In other words, the exact inverse of the original programme. A human-sized project, with a defined scope and an ambition that fits the budget.

You can read that as a failure of the 2019 promise. You can also read it as the one lesson ten years of cancellations could teach: better to ship a good modest game than never to finish a great one.

At twenty dollars, the question is no longer whether this is a masterpiece. It is whether the hunts hold up by the tenth one. From what I have seen, there is reason to hope.

Do you raise the difficulty for loot or play it safe? Come and confess on the InsertCoins Discord.