Moons of Madness

If you like horror and science fiction, this is something you need to check out. The gorgeous environment with a sinister evil to it will be something you’ll enjoy. The game is short but everything is packaged nicely and it feels like you spent enough time with it. Puzzles can be somewhat difficult but the real hindrance comes with interaction with some of them. It’s a very subtle horror. You won’t be jumping from loud noises or panic running much, but you will have that looming uneasy feeling that something isn’t right. In this sense, it is an intelligent horror game that keeps your brain stimulated with puzzles while worrying about what will happen after you complete them.

Moons of Madness on Xbox One offers some fascinating slow-burn horror and nostalgic Alien-esque visuals, but it lets that down by bogging down playtime with arbitrary objectives and attempts to go much bigger than the story should be. If you are a fan of cosmic or slow-burn horror, Moons of Madness is certainly worth checking out, but it won't be forging any new fans for the genre.

The console version of Moons of Madness is not on par with the PC ones on the technical side of things, but it remains a solid narrative based adventure to enjoy.

The Lovecraftian narrative and setting of Moons of Madness have tremendous potential that, unfortunately, is not accompanied by gameplay to match.

There are moments in Moons of Madness that are fun and interesting, but they are spread pretty far apart by backtracking, menial tasks and simple puzzles. The voice acting, the environments and your characters animations are great, but the story is all over the place and after its six hour campaign it is very easy to forget.

Moons of Madness is a game of light and shadow. Its setting is superb, but it drowns in an excessively cryptic story and in a boring gameplay.

In the end, I think Moons of Madness is an ok game that could have used a little more fine tuning with both the story and the horror/survival mechanics. I would never say this is a bad game by any means, but it is most certainly a forgettable one. I feel like I have seen something like this before in multiple other games and remember them much more than I did this one. At the same time, if you’re looking for a horror game that has some interesting mechanics at times and some decent atmosphere, I would at least wait for a price drop, but would consider this if you haven’t tried it.

Moons of Madness delivers a boring experience made of long and exaggeratedly slow walks, simple puzzles and bad design choices. That's a real pity, as the base idea of a sci-fi lovecraftian horror is good and it's got very good visuals, too.