“Moons of Madness” combines classic Lovecraft works with a first-person excursion to Mars. The title is now also available for consoles.
What ended in a catastrophe in “Doom” on Mars doesn’t work any better in “Moons of Madness” either. While you slip into the skin of the engineer Shane Newehart, who takes care of the space station, you are actually just waiting for the transfer, which should soon arrive with the transport ship Cyrano. But more and more systems of the station seem to fail and there is nowhere to see anything from the release team and the colleagues present stir up rumors to shudder.
Soon strange and terrible visions begin to appear and the player inevitably wonders: Is this real or am I crazy? While the tentacles slowly creep into the field of view, one tries to explore the station and to bridge the time until the spaceship arrives. But the despair is growing.
Many nice side jobs
The plot of “Moons of Madness” was very solidly transplanted into the futuristic environment. They are classic horror and mystery elements that work just as well in the dark hallways of the space station or on the surface of Mars as they do in the foggy alleys of the original Lovecraft locations. It is also great that the game does not save even with secondary details. You can learn more from the plot in notes, pictures and files.
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The gameplay is very linear, but the player is also given some freedom. So you don’t have to go strictly from one place to the destination, but you can also read through logbooks, prepare food and drinks with the machines on board the station or even use toys lying around and have other fun.
A large part of the simulation
Even with mission tasks, the game does not save on details. For example, if you have to leave the space station in space, you first have to put on your helmet, adjust the pressure in a decompression chamber and prepare the equipment for an outdoor walk. At this moment, the mystery adventure title swings to a large extent in the simulation, but it never plays out lengthily. In contrast, great attention was paid to details.
In the horror aspect, “Moons of Madness” also uses the fine blade. The game offers a mix of predefined jump scares, but also skilfully creeps over everyday life at the Mars station. Sometimes a strange structure flickers in a reflection, sometimes something barely noticeable scurries past the space station. And the events multiply in no time at all, because entire parts of the space station suddenly seem to have become home to horrifying creatures.
We cannot fight back
Unlike the “Doom Guy”, our engineer naturally has neither combat experience nor an arsenal of weapons. Therefore, in almost every situation, it is important to first pull out and look for a hiding place. In exceptional cases we are allowed to defend ourselves with weapons, but usually running away is the order of the day. It is a pity that some monster encounters with quicktime events are processed. A more dynamic gameplay like in “Alien isolation“would have put the crown on the game.
Horror game Moons of Madness is here
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It is nice how deep the game tries to immerse itself in the psyche. If you read notes and logs from colleagues diligently, you will find yourself in the past of your colleague to solve puzzles, which in turn can unlock new areas on the space station through new knowledge of mechanics and physics. These are great leaps in time, but they only work if you also take notes of the residents of the station.
No shock moment is imposed
Even if “Moons of Madness” is very linear, the second or third round of play should not necessarily be the same as the first. This is because the game also lets the player discover the shock moments. If you turn in a corridor, you may come across a wobbly tentacle that you would not have found without the detour. There are many such moments and they ensure that the game also has a high replay value.
The puzzles are mostly logical and not too demanding, but sometimes very cumbersome. Especially when items have to be collected and combined, the somewhat fiddly control causes problems because the screen points should be hit absolutely exactly. Too bad, because apart from that, the controls of the title have been hit to the point and are really fun. Which, however, is over after about eight to ten hours of play.
Much right, little wrong
Even if “Moons of Madness” is an unusual horror title, the makers of Rock Pocket Games and Dreamloop Games did a lot right. However, a fairer distribution of the checkpoints would have been desirable in order not to have to repeat long passages in the event of game deaths. Also graphically there is no high gloss and sometimes quite clunky textures, but this does much less fun.
The sound effects and the many game details that provide background information are really atmospheric. The speech can also be heard. The highlight, however, is how skillfully the classic Lovecraft myth could be settled in the single player game on Mars. Whether you like “Moons of Madness” depends very much on your preference. However, if you like to be subtly scary and don’t shy away from reading through long background stories, you have a really good adventure at hand with the game.
