Moons of Madness is a horror game from Funco, makers of the MMORPG Secret World Legends. Moons takes places narratively in the same world as SWL and tells the story of a space station on Mars being torn apart by Lovecraftian horrors. While the puzzles and plot won't leave much of a lasting impression, Moons of Madness is a well-paced game that respects your time and delivers a constant stream of arousingly macabre sights to see.
Technobabble And Forbidden Languages
While The Secret World typically plays more in the urban fantasy space of Lovecraftian horror with detectives and cults, Moons of Madness leans hard into the cosmic side of cosmic horror. So much so, that aside from some lore documents you can read and a couple trippy "dream sequences," there isn't much that even makes Moons a Lovecraft story until quite late in the game. It's much closer to a Prometheus or Life in its tale of naive scientists studying dangerous aliens creatures we don't understand.
As you make your way deeper into the space station in an effort to defeat the tentacle-vines that are slowly destroying the facility, you'll encounter the expected tropes from both Lovecraftian and paranormal horror. There are plenty of jump scares, a couple chase sequences, and plenty of spooky shadows at the corner of your vision to keep you tense and apprehensive as you explore.
The story is relatively straightforward as far as cosmic horror narratives go. I found a number of plot points ended up being loose threads even after scouring the space station for all the emails and bits of lore I could find. I couldn't help feeling that I was missing the bigger picture by not being a Secret World player. I got the gist of it as a Lovecraft fan, but there are a number of references to the Secret World that seem to go beyond enhancing the experience and drift into more required reading.
Cosmic horror is the most difficult horror genre to nail in gaming. Creating the sense of building dread that defines the genre is inherently difficult because of the ontological line between player and character. A character slowly losing their mind doesn't necessarily make the player lose their mind, even sympathetically, like a jump scare can affect both player and character in parallel. Very few games that try to tackle Lovecraft succeed. Bloodborne does because every inch of that world has gone mad, and when you really get immersed in that game, it has a real, measurable effect on your state of mind. I don't think Moons of Madness really nails Lovecraftian horror. Too often it leans into jump scares and tired horror tropes instead of digging into the meat of psychological horror. By the time things start to get really, truly weird, it's over.
Finding Keys, Pressing Buttons
Despite picking up a crowbar at the beginning of the game, there's no combat in Moons of Madness. You progress through the game by solving puzzles. Unfortunately, the puzzles aren't particularly unique or interesting. There's your standard "find a series of keys for a lock," a handful of pattern puzzles, and yes, connect-the-pipe puzzles.
Quick tangent here. Enough connect-the-pipe puzzles, alright? When Marvel's Spider-Man had connect-the-pipe puzzles in Doc Oc's lab last year, I thought for sure there would be an online revolt for this lazy puzzle design and that would be the end of them. Somehow, we seem to have more than ever this year. In the last month, I played Groundhogs Day, Bradwell Conspiracy, Asgard's Wrath, and now this, and they all have these godforsaken connect-the-pipe puzzles. It's lazy. Enough!
The puzzles feel less like gameplay and more like roadblocks to the story, which is kind of a lot of build-up to nothing. The final-ish puzzle you solve is a pattern matcher that, again, relies on a lore understanding of Secret World to make sense story-wise because the mechanism really comes out of nowhere.
In Their House On Mars, Dead Dreamers Make Spooky Trees
Not to contradict myself (which would actually be fitting for a Lovecraft game review), but the ambiguity with which Moons handles its story is probably it's greatest strength. It doesn't exactly come right out and say what's going on. It's intriguing, possibly even alluring. Piercing through the vale is what always gets people into trouble in these stories; the pursuit of knowledge, true knowledge, is a dangerous road to walk. I'm intrigued by the elements at play in Moons of Madness, the blending of techno-sci-fi and cosmic horror, and a world where Doom's UAC meets a wholly different kind of demon, one that attacks your mind.
I'd like to see another entry or two in this brand of horror before I decide if it has legs or not. I've already installed Secret World Legends, though. So if nothing else I've said about the game sticks, that should tell you that I didn't hate it.
A PC review code for Moons of Madness was provided to TheGamer for this review. Moons of Madness is available for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.
Moons of Madness