![]() The bottom of the barrel comes towards the end when the game exposits at you while locking you in a series of rooms, giving you nothing to do but listen to audio-logs - a pretty underwhelming plot device. Lastly, there are the infamous chase and stealth sequences that are almost rote in horror games at this point, which don’t work well with the game’s controls. One part makes you battle a plant-woman by pointing at parts of the screen and pressing button-prompts. ![]() There’s a strange sequence where you’re running around a cave, illuminating power stones with telekinetic powers that never seems to go anywhere. Had these puzzles stood on their own, Moons of Madness might work better, but Rock Pocket usually has you walk through endless corridors to find each puzzle while shoehorning in other mechanics. ![]() It’s also used to direct the player through the world and manage the inventory. It’s a clever mechanic and fits the game quite well. Newehart wears a comms device on his wrist which can be used to access computer systems remotely, so sometimes the puzzle you have to solve is right there on your wrist. The way some of the puzzles work is smart, too. On occasion, these puzzles can lead to some pixel hunting that feels frustrating, but for the most part, they are engaging and I wish that the set up was similar to the puzzle-horror game Year Walk, where the formula was for you to solve a puzzle and then have something jump out and scare you. There are a lot of moments when the goal is to (and I quote Matt Damon’s character in The Martian), “science the sh*t out of this.” There’s always a broken-down generator or a malfunctioning radio tower that needs to be solved with pipe puzzles, power balancing equations, or something similar. Through a first-person perspective, the game is largely about solving puzzles, which is a good setup for a space adventure. And that doesn’t even cover the exposition, which leans heavily on fleshing out the world through dry documents and logs, none of which really hooked me. In the 5-7 hour game, there isn’t enough time for all these story beats, so they all end up cannibalizing from each other until you don’t care about any of them. There’s a familial story about Shane’s relationship with his mother. There are questions about the dangers of humanity’s thirst for knowledge and a desire to play god. There are elements of corporate greed and worker exploitation. With a much larger game, there might have been room to explore everything Rock Pocket wants to cover. That description might seem a little vague and it’s hard to summarize because the plot often spirals out in different directions. Soon those dreams become a reality as a series of events cause Shane’s expedition to become a mission of survival. Shane is being haunted by strange dreams, which sometimes become waking nightmares where he’s haunted by a feminine tormentor. You play as Shane Newehart, the seemingly least-intelligent member of an expedition to Mars. ![]() Add on pacing issues and bad voice acting, and Moons of Madness dissolves into a bit of a mess. The controls slow and cumbersome, which is good when you’re working on a puzzle or exploring a room, but occasionally the game will lurch into clumsy action sequences, which are betrayed by such mechanics. And that same issue is true of the gameplay. That’s not a bad instinct Lovecraft’s idea of fearing the unknown works well in space, which is the ultimate unknown, but the game often finds itself running off on tangents that don’t fit thematically. It’s trying to marry the space-horror of something like Dead Space with the incomprehensible horrors of Lovecraft. Moons of Madness is a first-person horror puzzle game that has a lot of other elements nipping at its edges, begging for more attention.
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