Rock Pocket Games and Funcom have allowed me to play their Lovecraft inspired first-person horror game, Moons of Madness for the Xbox One. Moons of Madness has already been released on PC and received high praise by many before finally being released onto PlayStation 4 and Xbox One today.
In Moons of Madness, you take on the role of Shane Newhart, a lowly engineer with a level 1 security clearance working on a station on Mars. After waking from a nightmare and having to get back to work maintaining the facility, things start to go weird…and very wrong and somehow Shane’s past is involved.
Onto the game itself: Moons of Madness is heavily narrative-driven and you’re along for the ride, very much like the “Layers of Fear” games, Narcosis, and Observer, where players have to solve puzzles to continue the narration and may have to run away from danger rather than fighting it.
With what was mentioned above, as you can probably tell, the controls are pretty easy to master and are not complicated, thanks to that the game was able to focus more on the scenery and graphics which are pretty decent to look at, the Martian landscape (especially the way they did the sky) makes the Mars rover pictures come to life! The sound and music are on point but I’m still on the fence of the voice acting. Some of the actors are doing pretty good but some seem out of place.
Overall Moons of Madness is extremely enjoyable to play. There is some well-placed jump scares in this one and thankfully are not overused and the story being the main focus is what is worth the praise. The story of this game is the perfect example of what would have happened if H.P. Lovecraft lived to see the atomic age and add it to his genre.
On my scale of 5 Stars, it’s a well deserved 5!
