Moondrop Isle is a big puzzly game (that’s also kinda sparse and a lot about wandering around soaking up the vibes) by nine authors – it’s actually nine games (mostly in Inform, but one minigame collection in HTML/JS and one in a custom engine) which are linked together pretty seamlessly to form different regions of a connected world.
It has a lot of cool stuff in it, but it can also be kind of infuriating since a lot of the puzzle is “can I solve this puzzle now, or do I need to find more items first?” and given the size of the world, that’s often very unclear. And it’s also wildly unbalanced: in a couple places you can solve an hours-long series of puzzles …or you can just whack off a lock with bolt-cutters without thinking twice). And there are lots of places where solving an extended puzzle or getting a new tool merely removes a barrier that you’ve already been on both sides of. Which can be frustrating and anti-climactic.
I think it was also pretty rushed, and while they made a bunch of post-release fixes, it’s still definitely rough around the edges in places. But at least some of the authors are pretty open about appreciating and enjoying wacky jankiness in both gameplay and worldbuilding: some of this is probably intentional.
So this is a high level walkthrough, spoiling not the puzzles themselves, but spoiling the order (an order) in which to do them (which, tbf, is part of the puzzle). For the full experience, try it yourself. But if you find yourself frustrated by wandering around dozens and dozens of locations wondering which thing you might actually be able to solve next, this is a general sequence that’ll point you at the puzzles in a solvable order.
The island is a mostly-open octagon, a ring with connections to other locations in the middle. From the wharf where you land on the island, we’re going to start by going around clockwise to grab tools.
Go southwest a bit to the Mall entrance. Pop inside, go to the one store with the light on, grab the metal detector, come back out.
Go southwest some more, then go north to the Water Park. Grab the putter from the cabana, then loop up to the north water park entrance and figure out how to open the fire escape. Climb through the broken Hotel window and find the flashlight. Make sure you turn it on. Come back out to the Shore.
Go clockwise around the shore to the northern part of the west beach where you see a hotdog stand. Go in, grab the notebook that has a clue to the location of the bolt cutters (which we can’t get yet, but good to know).
Go southeast a bit and enter the Gardens - showing off Nils Fagerburg’s custom engine which does both parser and choice (currently you are “lightheaded and very mentally constrained” from the “otherworldly smell in the air” but it’ll open up to full parser mode eventually when you deal with the drug effects).
Wander around to the Orchard and go in the shed and down to get the wading pants. Go down again to the tunnels which consist of a small loop at the top and a larger loop below. You are where the loops join. Go clockwise around the bottom loop, take the west branch and turn the water on to get the turbine running and restore electricity to the island.
Loop back around and up into the Gardens again. Go north from the orchard to the Arcade. The Lunarcade is a confusing space with lots of blocked (and sometimes unmentioned) exits that you can unblock to open up the space. You may well want to map things here, even if you usually don’t.
You’re stuck in a two-room space: find out how to get another exit.
Note the drainpipe for later. Go east and find the exit that leads from the Magenta Hallway to the Crescent Main Floor. Enter the Fortune Teller’s Tent and hunt around until you find the shovel.
Exit the tent, go back to the Pergola and south to the Gardens, and from there east-ish back to the shore. Follow the fence around south until you find the location where the notebook described losing the bolt cutters.
This syntax is pretty fiddly, so it’s wave detector or wave detector at X (often they’re different) and then if something is there you dig repeatedly (just the bare verb) until you find the thing. Remember to actually pick up the bolt cutters; IIRC you do sometimes auto-take the thing that you dug up but not in this case so you have to do it manually.
Go back to the water park (either walk around the shore to the south entrance, or go through the golf course, whichever). Now you can cut the chains to get inside. There’s a bunch of stuff you could do here, but for now just hunt around the water park until you find the elite keycard.
Go back to the gardens and the orchard shed: the keycard will open the safe and let you eat the pill that makes you immune to the drugging pollen.
Back north from the Orchard to the Pergola in the Lunarcade. Wander around until you find Renzo (if you haven’t already) and he’ll tell you about the big meta-puzzle of the Lunarcade.
Find your way back to the Hall of Light Roof and climb the drainpipe. Explore and find your way to the Monorail System (the ninth region) and get the monorail running again.
There’s plenty of time to get back up to the train. You can go anywhere from here, but… the next biggest step toward the ending is probably the meta-puzzle in the Lunarcade. So ride the train past the gardens, the amusement park, the shopping center, the wharf, and the lagoon (only reachable by monorail, but there’s nothing here for us yet) back to the arcade.
Go down, fend off the seagulls until they give up, open the shutters blocking passage to the east/west of the lounge, and do the other obvious thing here.
Now you can go through the long process of finding the letters enabling you to climb the sign so you can get to the special games up in the VIP lounge. There’s another prize redemption machine up there which sells a scope that will allow you to decipher unreadable glyphs (and Magic Eye posters, oddly enough) around the island.
Once you finally have the scope, now you can go around the island and find the seven domes and look at their glyphs with the scope to gain the mysterious knowledge which will allow you to gain a new perspective at the end of the game. The Fortune Teller doesn’t have one (it does have auxiliary clues to accessing the dome in the rec center, but you’re probably just going to get the answer to that puzzle rather than solving it yourself, so eh), and the Hotel is the final location so its dome is where you end the game rather than clues.
In no particular order, except maybe easiest first, and you’re already at the Arcade:
- Arcade - Just take the elevator all the way up: you’ve probably found this one already.
- Tunnels - if you’ve mapped the tunnels, you know where this is. A little spur off the north-east side of the big loop.
- Monorail - Tedious, because you have to wait for the train, but ride it to the Skyview Lagoon and work your way across to the dome.
- Gardens - In the top of the greenhouse.
- Mall - There’s a puzzle in the bookstore that gives you access to the dome. You’re probably supposed to go around finding all the Magic Eye posters and looking at them with the scope, but a bunch of them are obviously guessable and it tells you when you’ve gotten each step right so you can take a guess or two at the rest.
- Shore - once you get the power on, there will be two series of mysterious kiosks to solve. The first set starts back by the wharf, at the eastern mall entrance. These go north and west around the edge of the island, and teach you a mysterious language. The second set starts just past them, on the other side of the inlet at the north of the island, and goes west and south. It starts with some really fun English word-manipulation puzzles (the final one of these is the best puzzle in the whole game, IMO) and ends with a fiendish puzzle rearranging a phrase in the Moondrop puzzle language that the first set taught you. If you follow the instructions you gain from the final kiosk, you’ll get an item that will let you access the dome at the north-west corner of the island, up on the cliff. It may look broken, but you don’t have to fix it, the glyphs are still there.
- Moonlight Meadow - This is one of those places where there is a reeeally long puzzle chain, or you can just bypass the whole thing and go straight there. If you beat the golf course (which is a random-chance minigame; figure out which club to use on which stroke of which hole to give you the best chance, and then try it repeatedly until you get lucky; also the visibility is terrible and you have to type a bunch of extra commands to find out where your ball landed) then you get the combination to the padlock of the scratched locker on the east side of the water park. THIS gives you the headset for the audio tour, and then you can go into the river under the water park and figure out how to turn the water on and power up half the water features at a time and listen to them to figure out a frankly fiendish puzzle which I’m not sure most people even CAN solve (although note that the Fortune Teller has four additional clues) …or you can find the final statue of Ursa Minor and listen to that recording which just tells you the solution. You do have to figure out how to get to the roof of the clubhouse where the dome is, though.
Once you’ve done all this, you’re ready to go solve the hotel. There’s a great deduction puzzle in the lower section to get the elevator going so you can get past the tree blocking the fourth floor (my second-favorite puzzle in the game, after the final English kiosk puzzle). No part of the main progression requires guessing, but there is lots of optional stuff to guess at. Then you take the elevator up, figure out how to explore all the other floors (including the fourth floor which is full of tree) and then figure out the dreamlike memory tree sequence.
That’ll give you the password to the dome at the top of the hotel and you can go through a sequence of untangling and assembling the strange statements from all the domes to answer some questions and ascend and gain a new perspective (no really, you have a new item in your inventory called “a new perspective.” It’s hard to explain). You probably want to save before attempting this sequence, as it enforces a delay before you can try again, which is annoying.
There’s way more to explore around the island, of course. The shore has a whole bunch of random wildlife to look at. The tunnels has a very eerie puzzle that’s completely cosmetic AFAICT but is pretty fun, you can name all the guinea pigs, there’s one thing people found which depends on the real-world phase of the moon, which is echoed in the in-game moon, there are at least three movie reels that you can find and play in the theater, you can guess-and-force everyone’s lockers in the hotel and some of them have random bits of junk, etc. etc. etc.
I’ve spent some time happily solving the kiosks, and the fifth western one that I figured was in no language I was familiar with!