Moon Mystery Review - A Puzzling Mess
I was optimistic as I started downloading Moon Mystery from Steam. I had not heard anything about it but the visuals and gameplay in the trailer had me enthusiastic to jump into this gorgeous-looking space adventure. Unfortunately, while there are moments that live up to the look and appeal of the trailer, Moon Mystery is a journey comprising short bursts of combat with a few puzzles and a whole lot of slow trudging through alien worlds.
First things first, I want to acknowledge that a very small team developed Moon Mystery. What started as a one-man solo development expanded into a small full-time development team, and while I find myself wanting to cushion my criticisms because of the difficulties of creating a video game of this scope, at the end of the day, when a developer is releasing their game as a paid product it has to be open to valid criticisms of the content contained within.
Set in a not-so-distant future, Moon Mystery puts you in the shoes of Sam, an astronaut currently stationed alone on a lunar base. A strange dream leads him to an abandoned lunar outpost where he encounters an alien robot, kickstarting a journey in which he travels to different planets through wormhole technology developed by these robotic aliens. Don’t ask me what they are called, I don’t think the game ever told me. As you journey through the worlds you have to find and “destroy” the alien blue pillars before jumping into another wormhole and repeating the process. Why do I need to destroy these pillars? And why does the destroying aspect feel more like sabotage and turn-off than actual destruction? These questions may or may not have been answered initially in one of the bland conversations with the A.I. robot located back on my lunar base, but even though there are info pickups that provide small snippets of background info, their content is sparse and borderline useless, more akin to entries in an alien robots diary than providing useful world-building information and context.
Graphically the game is a bit of a mixed bag. The guns and the hands of the protagonist look great, and I want to make special mention of the space backgrounds, the parts where you can see the black hole in the sky and the vibrant colours of the underwater section you traverse with a submarine. There are only a few different variants of enemies and while it is clear they are robots, there is nothing that makes them pop and stand out to the player.
Despite being marketed as a first-person shooter, the combat encounters are sparse. You will spend most of your time trudging through the game levels, occasionally encountering an environmental puzzle to overcome and a handful of enemies to fight through. The occasional fight involves more enemies or a greater challenge, but these instances are few and far between and are not enough to break up the monotony of the regular gameplay loop. I also found it strange that the developers insisted on putting vehicle sections into almost every level. While they could be utilised to change up the gameplay loop and add to the game, the controls and gameplay elements involved with the vehicles are just so basic that it feels more like a chore to complete these sections.
To cap everything off there are more than a few bugs that will plague your playthrough. I am a fan of using a controller when playing any games on my PC, but I soon found that upon my death, when Moon Mystery reloaded my left stick was suddenly controlling where I looked and the right stick did nothing. This issue is only fixed by reloading a previous save, which is restricted to set-point auto-saves, meaning there was a good chance I would lose progress for no reason. There were also instances where the guns in my loadout would duplicate or when your A.I. robot translates the alien tablets scattered throughout the game and repeats the same lines twice. It was even more surprising when his voice kept coming through after I had turned all the sound sliders down to zero. There are also a lot of other small things like grammar and spelling that would normally be picked up during the Q.A. process. Some of these can be put down to translation and localisation issues, but when the buttons the game tells you to use in the menus aren’t the buttons you need to press to accomplish your goals, it is indicative of serious oversights.
While the dev team behind Moon Mystery have attempted to release a big epic space adventure, they would have been much better off scaling back the game and focusing on the core gameplay loop, narrative and Q.A. It may not be the price of a full game, but right now I would have a hard time recommending it, it needs some serious work from the devs before I could do that.
Moon Mystery was reviewed on PC with code kindly supplied by the publisher.
