Shane swears and yells but there’s a crisp detachment that keeps you at arm’s length, especially once he starts giving puzzle-solving hints to the player. If the engineer dashes to the airlock after a terrifying encounter, he fumbles with the oxygen tank refiller, his helmet steams up and his heartrate spikes on his biogage.īut while such details draw you in, there’s something about the vocal performance of David Stanbra as Shane that sucks you back out of the game. That said, there are some nice touches that relate Shane’s mounting panic. Also, unlike Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, Amnesia: The Dark Descent and pretty much every Cthulhu tabletop game ever made, Shane’s fracturing mental state does not bleed into and impact the gameplay. There’s no question that what Shane and his crew are experiencing is real. One of the reasons for this is that story-wise, Moons of Madness strangely doesn’t question its protagonist’s sanity. Mouse, at the prospect of entering an ominously quiet area like you would in Tendrils and pustules, but you never freeze up, sweaty palm hovering over your You may startle, you’ll probably be repulsed by all the sticky oozing It’s just that it’s rare for the player to feel vicariously Fans absolutely have to play Moons of Madness, which is one of the strongest recent games (unlike this one) to draw inspiration from Lovecraft’s nihilistic universe.

The greatest of these is how the game’s writers – backed by the striking efforts of the artists and level designers – have managed to seamlessly combine space exploration science and the Cosmicism at the core of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. Barring a few jump scares, breathless pursuits and visceral monster encounters, the game’s pleasures are more cerebral than emotional. Times you die in an otherwise on-rails experience that shepherds you away fromĮven though its concept and visual execution will brand your memory, Moons of Madness sadly doesn’t really get under your skin. Game dial up the frustration by forcing section replays. Of Madness, although a couple of stealth sections in the second part of the Mixing chemicals in a laboratory centrifuge. Tuning radio frequencies, bypassing broken circuits in fuse boxes and even Of time working with various consoles, recalibrating solar panel alignment, With the game’s sci-fi setting, you spend a lot There’s a pleasing diversity of challenges, ranging from pattern matching to navigation trials and the puzzle-adventure tradition of investigating environments for clues that will help you access classified information and systems. Gameplay focuses on puzzle-solving as you try to quarantine the spreading “Filth” and get yourself far away from bizarre tentacled creatures now loose on the base. Not that Moons of Madness has you madly swinging a crowbar at wall-scuttling face-huggers. Towards its one of two endings, though, Moons of Madness is an engaging andĪtmospheric effort that feels like a Love(craftian) child of Half-Life and Dead Plot holes and character inconsistencies opening up.

Moons of Madness starts to disintegrate in its final few scenes, with gaping Much like the sanity of Lovecraft protagonists, Shane uncovers disturbing truths about what has really been happening on the base, as well as shocking revelations about the greatest trauma in his life. While the tetchy five-man team waits to be relieved of their duties, crucial machinery keeps breaking, power cells vanish and the group has been having collective visions of something they call The Witch.Īfter a slow burn start in which you complete a string of real-world maintenance tasks à la The Martian, the weird ramps up quickly. In this first-person game, you experience the mission through the eyes of engineer Shane Newehart and, from the start, things go wrong. A secret mission is underway to prove the Rule of Two: essentially, if just one example of alien life can be found, it means humanity isn’t an anomaly in the universe and other sentient species must exist. Loosely tied to publisher Funcom’s The Secret World, Moons of Madness transports players to a private research base (funded by the Orochi group) on the Red Planet. It’s a smart choice of setting, although in execution the game doesn’t quite live up to the promise of its clearly well-thought-out premise. It’s a term that Norwegian developers Rock Pocket Games have taken quite literally with Moons of Madness, a Lovecraft-inspired blend of horror and science fiction set on Mars about forty years from now. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos is an intricate fictional creation that ushered in the term cosmic horror.

Spanning time, space and multiple dimensions, H.P.

Moons of madness review