If you thought the base camp was claustrophobic, think again, and if you think you will get to drive the Myrcat vehicle across the terrains of Mars, you can also think again. I'm not going to lie: a couple of times I forgot to either put on my helmet, or refill my oxygen, and the results led to frantic moments of brilliance where I had to think fast and react to the consequences of my own stupidity.
You close the airlock, put on a helmet, fill your tank with oxygen, shift the atmosphere and then you're free to leave. Suiting up is a task that you may have seen in the movies and always thought, “I could do that, I could walk on Mars.” Moons of Madness calls for an ultra-strict and realistic depiction of a martian-walk thanks to a specific sequence of events being required before you can get going. Some of the first tasks are very tutorial-esque and rudimentary in requiring you to find tools to use on specific areas to further your exploration of the base, but, rather brilliantly and much to my surprise, you very quickly get to suit up and step outside and set foot on the martian soil. As you can imagine, things immediately take a turn for the worse and as a result, you are tasked with a variety of what sound like mundane tasks, but actually build for relatively taxing puzzles. You are Shane Newehart and you are tasked with simply maintaining the Trailblazer Alpha Mars base until a new crew come to take over. The problem is that with how clinical the initial environments are, anything out of place stands out like a sore thumb, and it feels as though you are being spoon-fed these clues and being pointed in the direction of the next thing to check out. Your inquisitiveness quickly unearths the reality that something is not quite right with everything onboard with references to "The Witch" scattered around on post-it notes and readable objects, of which there are many. The controls are atypically FPS-feeling, which is ideal as this level of interaction lends itself fantastically well in building a feasible world for you to investigate and become at home with. It’s a living breathing environment crammed with incredible levels of details and items you can interact with.
Everything from the communal spaces to the gym and even the kitchen areas are fully fleshed out. Overall it's a strong, well-fitted vision and in my honest opinion, it's very, very impressive to explore. There is a very USCSS Nostromo or Weylan Yutani vibe to the interiors, everything is highly reminiscent of the futuristic space dwellings design conjured up in the late ‘70s by conceptual artist Ron Cobb. I wasn't ready for such intense saturation of highly detailed objects and spaces. Moons of Madness shocked me with its dashing high fidelity environments. In my mind, this is clearly more than a faint hommage to Aliens when Ripley is rescued from a 57-year sleep by a deep space salvage crew and finds herself waking up to an uber-sterile environment, then during a horrendous event, she wakes up again only to realise that it was just a terribly realistic dream. This sequence quickly reveals itself to be a dream, or rather nightmare, and breaks itself to reveal that you are indeed where you thought you were, but the jump-scare flashes of ghosts, the goopy tentacles that have strangled and muddied the whiter than white corridors and the events you just experienced haven't happened yet. The game sets the scene with you waking up to some garbled chatter on the intercom coming from the "Manticore Research Group.” It’s disorienting, it's desolate, it's dark and the clinical, starkly lit environments pave the way for demonstrating that everything is not as it seems. I now believe I was more than at least half correct in my first assumptions. Was he escaping the clutches of evil or inversely reaching out to touch it, like an effigy of God? My first thoughts that fizzed around my head at the fore were that this would be a space-centred horror title with some form of enigmatic twist and that the game would inevitably spiral into some sort of fantastical creature-based atmospheric garbage. Moons of Madness is Rock Pocket Games' stab at delivering a tangible Lovecraftian game with survival horror elements, and the promo material made me think it would be an interesting mash-up of first-person puzzler and jump-scare moments, infused within a finely told story.īooting up, I was immediately met with a screen that depicted an astronaut and some form of tentacled beasty. The digital format, like the written word, lends itself incredibly well to his much-acclaimed "weird fiction" narratives, building incredibly stylised worlds that seamlessly blend ultra-realism with layered science-fiction fantasy horror. If he had been around to witness them, I think H.P.