Main cast: David Stanbra (Shane Newehart), Christopher Swindle (Declan and Lukas), and Mona Marshall (Cynthia Newehart, Witch, Inna, and Josie)
Developer: Rock Pocket Games
Cosmic horror in Mars? Count me in!
In this one, I play Shane Newehart, an engineer among the crew hired by the Weyland… er, Orochi corporation to man a base in Mars. Unfortunately, soon things go really wrong, as everyone and everything becomes infected by… things… that result in tentacles and tendrils shooting up anywhere and everywhere. Oh, and there are monsters with tentacles and tendrils too. There’s also what is likely a sinister apparition, called the Witch, telegraphing plot points to Shane, when he’s not running around doing collection tasks for the other crew members and solving puzzles in what is basically one big-ass maze.
The long delayed Moons of Madness only came to be released after the publisher Funcom picked it up from the limbo it was in, which likely explains why the graphics look rather dated for something released in 2019. Oddly enough, the game isn’t optimized despite looking like something that can run smoothly on my toaster of a PC; it stalls a few times while I am playing. This is an annoyance because, as the game goes on and on, I become increasingly bored by the whole thing. Needing to redo these boring things because the game stalls is like having a drill bore into my head.
You see, this game predates Death Stranding by just a few weeks as the ultimate walking simulator. Shane has to walk a lot. He will also be scrambling, dashing, jumping down a lot, but you get the idea. There are puzzles to solve, which breaks the tedium a bit, but these puzzles aren’t much of a challenge. They are either easy to solve or involve boring hunt-for-things stuff that necessitate, yes, more walking around. Walking a lot is fine if the scenery were nice – which it isn’t here, it’s pretty dated-looking and monotonous – or my character were walking to some place interesting, but I just end up feeling like I’m stuck in a very uninteresting wild goose chase.
Worse, the voice acting is bland for the most part because every character seems to have only one mode of emotion throughout the whole game. Even when they are supposed to terrified, angry, or being torn to shreds by monsters, they all sound bored and desperate for a smoke. It gets worse: Shane has this obnoxious tendency to vocalize what I am making the character do, often stating the obvious in that out-of-place “I’m bored but I’ll do a half-ass job at pretending I’m chirpy!” manner that I find myself wishing that I can pick up a screwdriver and jam it into my character’s throat so that he can just shut the hell up. The constant prattling from the annoying crew mates is bad enough, but Shane’s one-dimensional, pointless babble gets on my nerves in the worst way after the one hour mark.
The story isn’t even interesting. The premise could be, but the actual story is composed of unimaginative clichés of tentacles, tendrils, vagina maw monsters, and more of these things over and over. Come on, there is more to cosmic horror than a surfeit of these overdone things! Visually, the monsters aren’t memorable either, as they look vaguely like every other monster in other formulaic survival horror games in the market.
Oh, the story requires Shane to be an idiot. There is no way I can stop him from being a colossal moron, so by the end of the game, I’m just glad that this tedious, unimaginative, aurally excruciating game is over and done with. This one is a cosmic horror experience, alright, but in ways the developer never originally imagined it to be.
