These brief sections where you find yourself running from an often tentacled monstrosity are by far the most memorable and intense sections of your time on Mars. There are also a variety of alien horrors you’ll unwillingly come across on your mission, and with no combat capabilities, fleeing is your only option. From sinister messages scrawled on walls, to shadows moving in the corners of your vision, you and Shane will constantly feel like you’re in a situation of great peril. When Moons of Madness starts to amp up the fear, it becomes a genuinely unnerving experience.

The puzzles blocking your progress through the Mars base are serviceable enough, if a little uninspired: following coloured pipes redirecting steam, and finding passwords are all tasks you’ll have accomplished countless times in other games, but they serve as a decent way to get you from one scary moment to another. The scanner also serves as a useful multi-tool to connect to any systems that need your attention.

You’ll spend the majority of your time checking emails, finding new security cards, and using your handy scanner to analyse anything unusual. Moons of Madness is an exploration game with puzzles and investigation much more prominent than any action sequences. Day-to-day life on Mars involves repairing solar panels, traveling in a space buggy, and very little human contact outside of conversations through your headset. Working life for Shane predictably takes a turn for the worse, as Lovecraftian tentacles haunt his dreams and then his reality. You play as Shane Newehart, a low level engineer stationed on the Invictus Mars base. Moons of Madness is one of those few and far, set on a Mars research base with some tentacle based problems. After we tragically lost the Dead Space series, scary experiences outside of our planet’s atmosphere became few and far between. There simply aren’t enough horror games with a Sci-Fi setting.The isolation of space, coupled with a horrific monster or two, never ceases to get the blood pumping.

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