If he had been around to witness them, I think H.P. Lovecraft would have adored videogames. 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. 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.

Booting up, I was immediately met with a screen that depicted an astronaut and some form of tentacled beasty. 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. I now believe I was more than at least half correct in my first assumptions.

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. 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. 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. Moons of Madness shocked me with its dashing high fidelity environments. I wasn't ready for such intense saturation of highly detailed objects and spaces. 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. Overall it's a strong, well-fitted vision and in my honest opinion, it's very, very impressive to explore. Everything from the communal spaces to the gym and even the kitchen areas are fully fleshed out. It’s a living breathing environment crammed with incredible levels of details and items you can interact with. 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. 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 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.

You are Shane Newehart and you are tasked with simply maintaining the Trailblazer Alpha Mars base until a new crew come to take over. 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. 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. 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. You close the airlock, put on a helmet, fill your tank with oxygen, shift the atmosphere and then you're free to leave. 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. It's unforgiving and it's exciting. 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. It’s just used as a method to launch cutscenes, and as a station to refill your O2 tank, which I thought was particularly disappointing given the scale of the environment outside.

Once you have mastered the basics, you are assigned tasks such as powering up solar masts or retrieving data or objects from other smaller base camps. Throughout, you have the psychological time crunch of your oxygen slowly depleting on a gauge inside your helmet on the right side, and you have a health meter reading out your vitality should you stumble off a ledge and take a large fall on the left side. You have a digital assistant on your left wrist that allows you to scan and interface with wireless technology so using this is vital in powering up items that are out of reach, or manipulating tech that needs your interaction. The solar masts need twisting and rotating to get the perfect pitch-to-yaw combination to capture enough energy to charge your mast. I initially had issues with this as it was largely unexplained that you could rotate along the Y-axis, so my pro-tip is this: do not neglect the pitch! Once this task was completed a new task emerges on your HUD, which leads to another and another. It's exploration at its finest, but the pacing is exceptionally slow. At points, I had to double-check that L2 was indeed the button to "run,” it's more of a power walk at best and barely speeds up your navigation at all. It reminded me of the game Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, where you couldn't do anything but amble along, gawping at the beautiful scenery at a snail's pace, until you figured out that you had to hold R2 to build up momentum. Except here, you never build up enough speed to effectively "sprint.” The sound design, graphics and scenery in Moons of Madness are similarly perfect in portraying the landscapes and their desolate, sparse, and dusty atmospheres, with every piece of foley sounding absolutely solid and believable. It’s just a shame about your movement speed and the inability to explore outside the confines of your immediate tasks as it detracts heavily from your enjoyment of the brilliance of the game’s sensory design.

Having restored power, and investigated a few oddities you venture into a greenhouse area that you have accidentally flooded. This causes you to slink through the futuristic-looking neon-lit offices and lab spaces, eventually funnelling you into the ventilation shafts to search for water machine component parts, wading through water in what feels like possibly another nod to the Alien franchise. It's never a bad thing though, to emulate your heroes, and thankfully for MOM this is mostly where the ideas diverge. You discover that a Xenobotanist named Inna Volkova has been experimenting on plants and bred some kind of hybrid creature that has escaped and taken over Volkova almost entirely. The plant roots are tentacle-like, you can see the game transitioning into its cosmic horror form and it is actually surprisingly compelling. Throughout the complex you discover clues towards what happened here, you find eviscerated bodies welded to the walls, which, although it again alludes to how H.R Giger's Star Beasts entombed their hosts into the walls ready for the chest bursters to explode forth, it's done slightly differently to demonstrate the slow creeping death that has ingressed within the clinical spaces.

The following sequence of puzzles and events then leads to a QTE boss fight that feels like it's been cut and pasted from an entirely different game altogether, perhaps even from a game like House of the Dead 2 or 3. It's a very odd fusion to find QTEs in a first-person puzzler, but it's not terrible! I quite enjoyed the sequence, it added a little pep to the pace and led to more of the story leaching out to the fore, as everything onboard the space station gets decidedly overgrown with undulating tentacles and black pulsating slime. This aesthetic and battle with a known colleague of Shane's also neatly juxtaposes his psychological battles which manifests later on when you're transported to his childhood basement to solve more base-related puzzles and dig deeper into "The Witch" and her historical grip over the protagonist thanks to his links to the Necronomicon at an early age. Now I'm no genius, but I called one of the big twists within seconds of learning about Shane’s childhood. There was, however, no user satisfaction in figuring this out. Instead, I was simply left feeling disappointed that I had deduced this detail too quickly and I was pretty annoyed that there were no real bigger twists to come.

As is typical for most of these types of games, your character has a scar on his hands that glows ominously when he needs to be agitated. This is a handy mechanic if you'll pardon the pun, as the only body part you see of Shane’s are his hands. A purple aura indicates you can perform some chilling psychokinetic ability, which in this case is strictly limited to purple orbs, which need to be powered up and moved to a final conduit, to move a serpentine rock-beast out of your path, all the while being lunged at by creepy astronaut ghost zombies. It's relatively repetitive in these sections and the level of ease is astounding considering the tasks that came before this section. I was quite sure that this game could have been, should have been, would have been better simply as a quick paced first-person shooter, if you just were granted more freedom and weapons. This first tool you obtained in the game was an orange crow-bar straight out of Half-Life and it did cross my mind that it was a cheeky nod or at least a precursor to me getting some super-cool space tech weaponry, but alas no. Even the QTE battles would have made a little more sense had the game feature weapons and some enemies to blast.

Moons of Madness is split into 3 chapters, each with 6-7 sub-stages. The presentation of each of these stages is done in such a way that when you enter a new area or revisit an existing area but with another purpose, you simply get a chapter title overlaid to the level as you enter it. It's not that this is a bad way of presenting each stage, but unfortunately, it's not a very memorable method. Parts of the narrative see you hunting down keycards to gain access to higher tier sectors of the installation, which gives everything a Resident Evil feel, and it's a great device to deploy, but it’s too linear and too funnelled to make it feel like you truly discovered something, or you truly found a missing item to further your journey. As mentioned before the levels essentially span an increasingly decrepit clinical to viscerate textured space station, the hazy detached hopelessly suffocating surface of Mars, and this quirky supernatural network of caves that are clad with the wooden illusion of an eclectic grimy victorian looking hallways with it's stereotypical Art Neuvo styled organic wallpaper, vintage-looking up-lighters and lighting fixtures, and large oil paintings adorning the walls. The latter environment clearly referencing themes of misanthropy, and the fragility of sanity, depicting the literal journey through the main character’s psyche, but still showing in elements of space horror to connect it all together. The problem is that it is just not involving enough to draw you in and connect with your character. I felt no emotion towards anything that happened, which I found oddly distracting. It took me roughly 8 hours to get through to the end, and to be quite honest I don't feel like I have missed anything, or need to see anything again. While it was fun the first time around, I am not inspired enough to ever endure a second playthrough.

Moons of Madness filled a gap. It wasn't the main feature, it was more a bridge between games for me. It promised heaps and superficially delivers exquisite visuals, a sound albeit disconnected story, and solid atmosphere. However, there was very little in terms of a tangible emotional journey. Half the time I felt disconnected from the character's narrative while bouncing around, looking at mountains of things to read or things to discover. Though it is extremely linear and slow-paced, there is a neat concept flowing through it—I just wish there was more freedom to explore the wider areas. It's a superb setting for a Lovecraftian romp, with some truly technical feeling puzzles that get taxing at points; however, there just isn't enough going on along the way to pad out its sparseness.