Whether you’re strolling across the red sand or running away from a tentacle monster, Moons of Madness always makes sure you know there’s something bigger going on. The variety in gameplay makes each chapter feel fresh and always pushes you forward, something I always appreciate in slow horror games such as this one. The puzzles specifically tend to change and evolve throughout and don’t repeat themselves too often. The game eventually breaks the Martian routine with more intricate puzzles, chase sequences, and even some stealth. Luckily, once you do, Moons of Madness picks up the pace. Everything is designed to slow you down at first, which, again, gets tiresome. Outside, you slowly hike up hills or slowly run for your life across Mars’ dunes. You’re often confined to one location where you slowly walk back and forth between the same few areas. These “extra steps” are sometimes very literal.
This attention to detail adds a layer of realism to the game, but it also gets tedious at some point. I almost killed myself countless times because I forgot to circulate the airlock before removing my helmet. These steps are all very short and trivial on their own, but they pile up. You need to press multiple buttons to move from one area to another or scan something before you can interact with it. It teaches you some basic mechanics and introduces puzzles you’ll need to master later on, but not in a particularly exciting way.Įverything you do also involves a lot of busywork and extra steps. You restore power to sections of the base, align solar panels, and fix the plumbing. You spend the first hour or so just doing the job of a space maintenance man. The story might be a “slow burner,” but it moves in the speed of light compared to the gameplay. This sense of morbid curiosity, mixed with impending doom, fits perfectly with the atmosphere Moons of Madness is going for. By the time you realize what’s happening, you’re already in too deep. The story slowly lets you in on more and more secrets, but you keep feeling you’re only scratching the surface. And the Lovecraftian bits are the best part of the game. However, we are talking about a Lovecraftian story here, so an unreliable narrator and ambiguity are part of the course. If you squint and tilt your head, you may see how all the story bits fit into place, but even then, it’s a bit of a stretch. While it’s not hard to follow what’s going on at any given moment, I couldn’t really understand how it all comes together. There’s goo that turns plants to monsters, an evil book from your childhood, ancient alien ruins, and something about the moons waking up (among many other things). Moons of Madness is a little all over the place. It’s all very confusing, and often not in a mystery-to-be-solved kind of way. To make matters worse, you can’t seem to distinguish dream from reality. Things start breaking down suddenly, black vines appear everywhere, your crew is all MIA, and someone drank all the dark roast coffee.
It doesn’t sound like the most exciting thing to do in a game (even if you do it on Mars), but things quickly go sideways, and the real horror begins. You’re a space maintenance man, is what I’m trying to say. Your job is to keep the lights on and the oxygen scrubbers scrubbing while the real scientists do the science. In Moons of Madness, you are Shane Newehart – an engineer on a secret research base on Mars.
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