Moon Mystery

My first honest reaction to Moon Mystery was surprise at how much Cosmoscouts tried to pack into what should have been a modest lunar shooter. You play as Sam, an astro-geologist stranded on the Moon after all contact with Earth goes dark, with only an AI companion called Toby for company. What starts as a creepy, oxygen-managed crawl through abandoned corridors quickly blows open into something far larger: portals, alien worlds, zero-gravity combat sections, and a conspiracy narrative about why humanity really raced to the Moon in 1969. The scope is genuinely impressive for a studio that reportedly started as one developer's after-hours project in Warsaw. The shooting is the game's clearest strength. Weapons have satisfying weight and recoil, and the credit-based economy lets you buy attachments like laser sights and suppressors, or pump skill points into perks such as double-jump, health regen, and short-burst adrenaline damage boosts. The arsenal runs from pistols and SMGs through assault rifles and a genuinely good sniper rifle, though the three different shotguns are largely useless given how many combat arenas play out at mid-to-long range. Enemy variety stays thin throughout - most foes are colour-coded robots, split between melee grunts, grenadiers, flying drones, and turrets that appear more frequently as the game progresses. The boss encounters are where the cracks really show: one particular Guardian fight drew widespread complaints for being brutally overtuned even on easy difficulty, with sluggish dodge controls making the health sponge feel punishing rather than challenging. The vehicle sections are a genuine highlight and one of the more unexpected pleasures here. Sam pilots a lunar rover, flies a spaceship, navigates a submarine through an alien ocean, and even drives an RC car to solve a pressure-plate puzzle - each vehicle changing how the world opens up. They control smoothly enough, though the third-person camera does not auto-centre, which means you are steering and manually correcting the view simultaneously. On PC with mouse and keyboard, the overall feel is noticeably better than on controller, where horizontal turn speed is painfully slow and zero-gravity sections become a genuine ordeal. Controller mapping also has a documented bug where dying mid-session scrambles inputs and forces a restart. Beyond the bugs, Moon Mystery's bigger problem is structural. It cycles through shooter, puzzle, adventure, light horror, and platformer without fully committing to any of them. Puzzle hints fire the moment you approach a problem, killing any sense of discovery. Alien hologram collectibles - which flesh out the lore once Toby translates them - cannot be revisited if missed, which is a strange design choice. Voice acting is rough, with Sam's dialogue sometimes triggering well before the relevant event appears on screen. On the plus side, the art direction punches above the budget: striking planetary landscapes, strong lighting, and an atmospheric soundtrack that shifts convincingly between quiet exploration and combat intensity. Total campaign length lands somewhere between five and ten hours depending on how thoroughly you search each level. If you bounced off Moon Mystery at launch due to performance issues, reviewers note the Xbox version that arrived in late 2025 runs considerably cleaner than the original PC release. The Steam score sits in Mixed territory, which feels about right - this is a game that earns genuine affection through ambition and visual craft even as it stumbles on polish and focus. Fans of scrappy indie shooters with a strong sense of place and a willingness to throw unexpected set-pieces at you will find enough here to enjoy. Anyone who needs tight design and consistent pacing should look elsewhere.

Alex · Scout Team

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