Nowadays the gaming industry is full of great games inspired by the Lovecraftian world, and often some very successful ones come out.
Not for nothing the genre horror and lovecraft now go hand in hand in the gaming industry, in fact there are many games that have taken inspiration from them, such as Bloodborne e The Sinkin City.
The Funcom team, with Moons of madness, will take us to Mars on an adventure that will be more of a movie than a video game.
Discover with us what it has to offer
A waking nightmare
We will play the protagonist Shane Newahart, an engineer from the space exploration company Orochi su Mars, found himself in a monstrous vision of the space station in which he lives.
The game introduces us to the story through scenes full of action but of short term, which immediately make the player understand that something is wrong inside the station. We will be greeted by tentacles, disturbing songs and by a person who apparently holds a grudge against us.
From here on we will explore the base of Mars and at the same time we will search for the hidden meaning behind ours nightmares, but it won't be that easy.
The stories proposed by Moons of Madness are disconnected between them, making the narrative little fluid and intuitive. We expected more from this point of view given the short duration of the game.
The plot is made up of quick and short episodes with no real correlation between them: family dramas, clones and more never coming to a conclusion.
Not even i backlog/lore inside the computers scattered around the map will help close the circle or add more details, thus leaving a narrative with too many holes.
Cumbersome
In addition to the problems with the storyline that has its ups and downs, the gameplay.
The main mechanic present will be tied to a simple one scanner which will help us analyze the surrounding area and access the various machines present in the station.
Once connected to a device, we will have one of many puzzles present as: mathematical problems or various pipes to be connected, finding ourselves in the complex with puzzles trivial e discounted, which will never give a real sense of challenge to the player.
In addition to scanning with the various puzzles, we will also have environmental puzzles limited to the mere search for an object or the simple rotation of a machine, which we will have to return to the correct position in order to continue.
Due to this the gameplay will turn out woody over time due to the presence of many repetitive and unnecessary procedures in the long run, such as closing doors in space to avoid suffocation.
A note of merit goes to the cure quite manic of the details, starting from the animations such as that of filling the air tank, which can often have changes based on the atmosphere that surrounds us.
A fictitious fear
Like many other games, we will come deprived of weapons and anything else to defend ourselves thus increasing the feeling of fear and helplessness when we find ourselves face to face with something monstrous.
The enemies will prove themselves disappointing, often limiting themselves to trivial jump scares or simple encounters lasting a few seconds, which will never be able to really cause disquiet like the setting of some areas.
Moon of madness despite its simplicity, it fails to guarantee a pleasant gaming experience, also due to the very cumbersome and repetitive movements.
With a not very dynamic gameplay and with puzzles that are too predictable and unstructured, thus resulting overall as an opportunity lost by the developers.
