Why Does Crimson Moon Ruin the Player's Effort with Its Absurd Gear System?

The gear progression system in Crimson Moon is an insult to the player's time: what's the point of sweating buckets farming souls to buy armor if the game steals it from you on the next run?

Crimson Moon sucks because of its absurd gear system

You've spent hours suffering through dungeons, risking your neck, and stockpiling every damn soul that falls into your hands. Finally you have enough to buy that armor set with better stats at the shop. You breathe a sigh of relief, thinking you'll finally be able to withstand the bosses' hits, you enter the next mission, you die—because the game is a relentless roguelike—and when you wake up in the hub, the set you bought with so much effort has vanished from your inventory as if by magic. They hand you another generic piece of armor and you're left looking like a fool, wondering if you just worked for the game for free.

The developers' excuse is that there's supposedly some "mechanical complexity" between what you buy, what you keep, and how you start each match, but the reality is that the current design is confusing, frustrating, and punishes the player in a completely unfair way.

To understand the scale of this nonsense, we need to separate three concepts that the game's creators explain terribly:

• The permanent gear you've unlocked: This is the supposed base "collection" your profile builds up long-term. The problem is that even if you spend a fortune in souls on an epic or rare piece during a run, the game has a habit of downgrading it once the run resets, forcing you to settle for a common or lower-tier version that's useless against the advanced challenges.

• The gear you buy/obtain during a run: This is where the developers' mental trap lies. They make you believe that the armor you pay for with the sweat of your brow in the middle of a raid is yours, but the system treats it as an ephemeral resource subject to a confusing "purification" process. If you die before meeting certain invisible requirements, the rarity and power you paid for simply evaporate.

• The loadout you start a new run with: Every time you fall in combat and get sent back to the start, the game strips you of your active equipment and slaps a predetermined set on you. It doesn't matter that you invested all your virtual economic resources into upgrading your previous look; the starting selection menu completely ignores it, forcing you to manually search—if the piece hasn't disappeared due to a bug—for the remnants of what you bought.

This mechanic doesn't add tactical depth or "old-school difficulty"; it only creates a brutal disconnect between the user's investment and the reward. Souls cost too much in this game for them to be picking your pocket every time you die. The developers urgently need to fix this and stop blaming "player confusion" when the real problem is a selfish, poorly explained progression design.