Review for Moons of madness. Game for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, the video game was released on 21/03/2020 The version for PC came out on 24/03/2020 The version for PlayStation 4 came out on 24/03/2020
Starting this review with a quote would have been logical and perhaps a little obvious but it is not with logic and predictability that we want to address the analysis of Moons of Madness, the horror-supernatural adventure from Rock Pocket Games and Funcom that we tested on PC.
We know that there is no logic without madness, so let's start from narrative hinge to untangle the complexity of this title.
After the arrival of a mysterious signal from Mars, Orochi, a multi-million dollar company interested in the potential scientific advances of the discovery, begins the construction of Trailblazer Alpha, an outpost on the red planet to establish the origin and meaning of the signal. You will find yourself dressing in the astronautic suits of Shane Newehart, a technician on the Trailblazer Alpha whose only role, thanks to his complete ignorance of the company's big plans, is to keep everything at the maximum state of operation while waiting for Cyrano, the spaceship with the crew on board ready to relieve him and buddies.
Right from the start, however, Shane is not having an easy time with recurring nightmares and strange presences that seem to appear in front of him around the station.
Moons of Madness leaves no time to time and the initial normalcy phase to which the Rock Pocket Games guys want us to get used is really very short, an attempt that fails precisely in function of a precipitousness of events which does not allow us to breathe ordinariness before throwing us into horror. Unfortunately, the intentional sense of clautrophobia that was intended to establish in the player misses the mark due to a cumbersome that unfortunately is reflected in many of the technical aspects of the title.
The horror is literally around the corner, for Shane and for us, and soon we will find ourselves making our way through nightmares, primeval terrors echoing Lovecraft in the atmosphere and contents, and alien hybrid species out of control: yes, if at first glance they seem to you. little overlapping elements you can easily guess what is the second flaw in Moons of Madness, the attempt to juggle too many balls at once.
The narrative plot of the title is not incredibly difficult to follow, but it is particularly chaotic at an exhibition level, so much so that we think that it already was at the concept level and that what came out of it is only the most unfortunately reliable manifestation: there are many narrative branches of Moons of Madness, some even peek out of nowhere from the third act, but don't try to find answers very original in its ending: there won't be any.
Moons of Madness had set out to make you experience the horror, loneliness and desolation of a semi-abandoned Martian base and in part it is a goal achieved: among haunted greenhouses, out of use control towers and underground patrolled by entities outside the natural understanding, we confess that you will often feel a discomfort even just to open a door or turn on the flashlight to shed light on the darkness that awaits you a palm from your nose; the feel is all there and is perhaps the most successful feature of this title, only steeped in the worlds' extensive lore Lovecraft that Moons of Madness says to draw on.
It is precisely the literary material relating tocosmic horror what allows the title to do more center, containing and contents that remain to obsess you well beyond the playing time so as to obscure, during the formulation of this review, the memory of the "rest". Environmental storytelling misses the Lovecraftian leap and does its duty without inspiration: the game environment, even analyzed with hindsight, is incredibly restricted, not in a way that is justified by the intentional claustrophobia of which above, and results in 3-4 environments that begin to be tight already after the first hours of this descent in the horror of about 10-12 hours.
Moons of Madness is keenly aware of its implied status of walking simulator and the interaction with the environment that follows is really minimal: hacking terminals, opening doors and running away / avoiding enemies are the basic triad of game verbs and there is no fundamental evolution; cute environmental puzzles, but very few and far from each other.
An applause must be made for the total absence of UI, essentiality that contributes to a greater immersion in the game context and that almost elevates the sporadic jump-scares that Moons of Madness seems to want to use, according to what could objectively seem a trivial attempt to "win easy". On a technical level, we have noticed several drops in framerate in the intermission cutscenes and three situations in which the dialogue was interrupted by just one cutscene but without ever being taken up again, an annoying detail since it took place in the middle of two rather central "sprawls" in the plot.
The bipolarity of intent of Moons of Madness becomes more evident as the adventure progresses: if on the one hand every action is "heavy", cumbersome, cumbersome, the evolution and character definition of the characters, the aspect that perhaps most deserved (and needed) gravitas, is here too outlined, never managing to trigger that voluntary suspension of disbelief that a first-person game, especially a horror, should expect and make standard. If we find ourselves dying in one of the many ways that the title grants us, we will have to reload the check point and wait a good ten seconds before returning, a small detail, of course, but which breaks even more the already fragile boundaries of "magic circle"Game.
Moons of Madness was a promising game in concept but perhaps it lacks excessive ambition, somatic manifestation of a difference between "wanted" and "realized" that only now, once the game is out, is perceived, too much. Far from calling it a bad game, it has only part of the narrative force on its side, honestly all source of the universe created by Lovecraft, and some design choices (UI in particular) that lift it slightly, from the crowd. We advise you to give it a chance only if you are a fan of the concept of "cosmic horror" expressed in Lovecraft's narrative: if not, it would be better if you spend your money elsewhere.
► Moons of Madness is a Puzzle-Adventure type game developed by Funcom Rock Pocket Games and published by Funcom for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, the video game was released on 21/03/2020 The version for PC came out on 24/03/2020 The version for PlayStation 4 came out on 24/03/2020
