Moons of Madness

I went into Moons of Madness expecting a walking sim dressed up in a Lovecraft costume. What I got was something a little more interesting and a lot more frustrating than that. You play as Shane Newhart, a mechanical engineer stationed at a secret Martian research base run by a corporation that is, predictably, not acting in humanity's best interest. The opening hour is genuinely excellent: repairing solar arrays, managing oxygen tanks with a refill animation that changes based on how depleted your suit actually is, resetting a wrist device with a pen. The level of tactile fidelity in these maintenance routines is rare, and for a while the game earns its premise entirely on the strength of making routine feel extraordinary. The structure is split roughly into two halves. The first builds atmosphere through exploration, terminal logs, and radio chatter with a co-worker named Declan, while the second escalates into stealth sections, chase sequences, nightmare dream corridors, and creature encounters involving things like mutated plant-monstrosities and Shoggoth-adjacent horrors. Gameplay-wise, you get environmental puzzles, some light stealth, QTE-flavored chase segments, and a handful of surreal set-piece levels with their own one-off rules. The chase sequences are actually more forgiving than the genre average, the route is always clear and the things chasing you move slowly enough that deaths feel avoidable rather than arbitrary. The puzzles are a mixed bag: some click well with the environment's internal logic, others are obtuse enough to break the tension entirely. The problems stack up in the second act. The story, delivered largely through optional terminal logs and radio dialogue, has a coherence problem: critical context can be missed entirely, yet the characters somehow proceed as if you caught every beat. By the end, the motivations blur and the Lovecraftian escalation, while visually committed, starts leaning on tropes rather than earning its dread. The Mars base itself is a meticulously designed space, but the game is completely linear, with the rover self-driving between areas and almost no side content to pull you off the main path. For players who read every terminal and soak up lore, the world-building holds up. For anyone moving at pace, gaps in the narrative start to show. What keeps Moons of Madness worth discussing is that its greatest strength is genuinely great: the art direction and environmental authenticity are exceptional for a game of this size. The modular corridors, the spacesuit design, the red-dirt Martian exteriors lit with an alien quality that makes even mundane tasks feel unsettling, Rock Pocket Games built a space that is a genuine pleasure to inhabit, even when the game surrounding it is creaking. Running time is somewhere between five and eight hours depending on how much you explore, and it does not overstay that window. If you can accept that the atmosphere is the product and the gameplay exists mostly to pace it, there is a genuinely solid short horror experience here.

Alex · Scout Team

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