Moon Mystery

Moon Mystery shoots for the stars and nearly achieves its goals. For $20, you get 5 or 6 hours of occasional fun, and a few moments of utter bewilderment

Moon Mystery has many fun locales and segments, but struggles to find its own identity among them. The gunplay is fun and fast, however, so if you can look past its flaws, you may enjoy the ride!

While the dev team behind Moon Mystery have attempted to release a big epic space adventure, they would have been much better off scaling back the game and focusing on the core gameplay loop, narrative and Q.A.

I would love to give Moon Mystery more love. However, I am hesitant to do so without knowing what lies beyond that first complete playthrough. There are also various tweaks that could be made to the game. Mostly just simple quality of life things, that I’ve covered above. Saying that, this is not a bad game at all for Cosmoscouts‘ first release. Moon Mystery is definitely deserving of the Thumb Culture Silver Award.

I get that this is an indie game and expectations need to be tempered, but given two other recent indies I’ve been playing recently, Keeper’s Toll and While We Wait Here, have more polish than this (and both cost less combined than this one as well), it’s hard to recommend Moon Mystery in its current state. It’s not bad, and there are a few stand-out moments, but nowhere near enough to make this a a game I’d recommend picking up anytime soon.