Far too slow....
Reviews for "MOON"
The music and sounds were good, but the medals and gameplay were not. The plot could have been a fairly good one but it was given too little space to grow and became a random, unexplained kind of rush to the ending.
I think to make this better, you could begin by having made it more of a interactive novel of sorts, this would take away the thoughts of it being a game which is where lots of the dislike is coming from. Secondly I would get rid of medals, unless there is some kind of skill based achievement they should only have a place when completing something.
If you were to make this into more of a visual novel, utilizing the sounds and music, along with giving the plot plenty of time to roll out and form, then I believe you could make a great experience.
Eh....okay. I like your art and the mood but it's not much of a game. And I guess you mostly wanted to tell a story with that, and it's cool...but for whatever reason it didn't work for me. I would have given it three stars but I'm not all that interested in getting all the medals. Not a bad effort, but in the Art as Games category you need to do something to spice it up a bit.
I don't mind slow moving games If I'm drawn in by them, but even with the bit of background story I really didn't care that much about John.
Hope this was helpful, I'm not trying to be mean - and I wish I could better describe where this 'game' falls flat.
This is a poorly written game with passable art.
In fact, it's probably a bit much calling it a game, since there is no way to lose and only a couple of ways to even interact with the environment, which comes down to simply pressing the key it tells you to or clicking the mouse at the right place. Even story heavy games should make an attempt at including gameplay, otherwise it might as well not be a game at all.
The one playable aspect (walking left and right) isn't even done well because the player character walks excruciatingly slow. Caution and suspense don't have to partner with tedium.
I also managed to moonwalk (pun, haha) by pressing both arrow keys at once in the room with the emergency call button and it sort of moved the screen past the scenery a little bit. Can't replicate it in the next few rooms though.
Since gameplay clearly isn't the focus of this submission, let's talk about the story. While "lone space man gets scared" is quite the cliche, I'd consider it forgivable if the plot was solid enough. Unfortunately this one isn't. There's little explanation as to just what is actually happening even by the end. Was it a hallucination? Was it paranormal, or alien? It's left completely open-ended, but rather than leaving the player to ponder at the end it seems more like the author didn't really know what it should be himself.
I'll assume it WAS a hallucination, since that looks like the best explanation to me. If that's what you were going for, there was not nearly enough reason to think our protagonist was insane enough from being alone to become a psycho in only a few days' time. He seems briefly wistful for his family at the beginning, but that's about it. How can a man go from sort of sad to schizophrenic in such a short period? A good character would gradually develop a paranoid personality, not just suddenly start seeing his bloody doppelganger. The doppelganger also spouts a load of nonsense about "the truth" and John's "destiny". Is the truth that John is a crazy son of a bitch?
Also, isn't it a bit strange that just one guy was on the moon anyway? That's a big base for one person. It has an infirmary an everything. Is that so he can stand at his own bedside when he gets the space flu? And it seems expensive for there to be a panic button to summon an emergency rescue team any time the astronaut feels unsafe. It would be easier to just have the rescue team on base.
While I'm on the subject of what a backwards moon base this is, why does it have a self-destruct button? What could possibly warrant the destruction of the base when there is only one person on the entire moon??
The dialogue is pretty terrible too. The English isn't great and it makes the whole affair seem almost comical, or at least it would if the lazy E.T. one-two walking animation wasn't already funny enough. It was also pretty silly how medals kept popping up every three seconds just for progressing the plot.
"Oh my god, who are you!?"
- Medal unlocked: Who are you? -
Might as well throw in a medal for the next line, too.
"What do you see in the reflection of the mirror?"
Well, I guess there's already one called "The Mirror".
Hey, it's not all bad though. The art and presentation are pretty nice, even if it's unnecessarily pixelated. I might even say that a lot of people rated it higher than it deserved based entirely on the artwork making it seem better in general. I also thought it was neat how you switched to the rescuer's perspective at the end. Those things save it from being a 1.
A game with great potential thwarted by poor writing and lack of any real player involvement. The psychological aspects of the game were vaguely intriguing, but the incredibly poor dialogue writing and laughable walk animation killed any real tension.
And nothing undermines what should be a genuinely creepy moment with a MEDAL GET every five seconds.
Good sound design, though.