Moon of Madness

So I didn’t really know too much about this game going into it. I saw the trailer and thought, oh boy a horror game. I’ve never been the biggest fan of horror or the classic ‘jump scare’ games. Not cause I scare easy, but it’s just something that doesn’t appeal to me. None the less, Moons of Madness was a game that I was really excited to get my hands on and play.

You play as Shane, a faceless character who has seemingly left home and went to Mars. After digging around his room you find a copy of a letter sent to your father revealing that you had lied about going to Mars in the first place. While you think this is your big break, your a low-level maintenance guy. Your first task is to literally turn the lights back on. You wake up from a crazy nightmare to that has been ‘biggest quake to date’ and find that some stuff around the base is starting to go a little weird. This isn’t good as you have visitors coming to visit the site. You are sent out to adjust some of the solar panels on the base to find that some damage that’s shocking, but you play it off as just part of the quake. While figuring out this issue you encounter a hallucination. Again you just move on, wrap up your job and head back to base. Here you find even more issues as the greenhouse is flooded. While fixing this you find some sort of black substance all over parts of the base. You’re told that it’s fine and not to worry, but it just keeps getting worse.

The game itself is based on puzzles and figuring out scenarios that you’re trapped in. I found myself having to hunt around the map to find the tool or object that I needed to continue onward. At times, it was easy to find my way, others I found myself just struggling and wandering around aimlessly around the map to hopefully fall into want I need and move forward. The game has the ability to give you hints on how to move forward and get your tasks done, but using that feature made it feel almost to easy at times. Going back to the puzzles themselves, they were very challenging, frustrating, and tedious at times. I found myself having to search around the map way longer than I should have. All the while on some missions you have to monitor your vital signs and oxygen intake. Every challenge just felt like busywork. It’s like when you have that substitute teacher in your fourth-grade math class with those five-page packets. She sits at the desk and watches over you like a hawk and keeps saying, ‘These are gonna get picked up at the end of class. They are for a grade!’ You know they aren’t but you do it out of necessity. These puzzles feel similar to that. You’re just running around the level and finding stuff, and when you are struggling, you feel like all progress has grown to a halt.
The actual gameplay feels somewhat weird and confusing. You can run by hold a trigger (PS4) and it doesn’t affect your heart rate outside of a spacesuit, but once in one you have been concerned about how fast your heart it. I understand it inside the suit, but I feel like I should also have to worry about it outside of the suit and in the station. At times, your character and controls fee clunky and hard to move. It feels like everything has an ever-shifting weight that makes no sense at times. There’s an early part where you have to adjust some solar panels positions and felt so hard to move them and get them just right at times. All your moves are also almost quick time events (you can’t jump freely when you want). I personally found that to be frustrating at times. I had to be right up on something to jump on, I could just be close enough. I had to be near. The game also had larger than expected loading times and moving through the menus felt like you were forcing the game to do something it had never been told to do.

Moons of Madness suffers from itself in many ways. The story is a unique one that I really enjoy and like. It had me curious from the moment that I saw/read anything about it. Once in the world though, the game gets in front of itself and hurts the overall product. I found myself losing interest and intention with it. It suffers from this feeling of being too much like a puzzle game, and not enough like an adventure. I love a good story and the end of the day. Something that can keep me wrapped up is wonderful. With Moons of Madness, it just painted itself into a corner of putting too much in. It’s a great concept, just the execution and overall final product hinder the experience and make it lackluster and at times frustrating experience.