Moon Logic by Lancelot
Flavor: A humorous riff on Zork, with metacommentary
Playtime: 48 minutes
As a person who has never played Zork, I’m probably not the ideal audience to say, understand the references in this game. I did not let that stop me.
I got a huge kick out of the format. There’s sort of a parser game being played in the left pane, and Roger and Wilco are providing commentary in the right pane. They make jokes and dispense occasional hints. It’s the first time I recall seeing this in a way that’s purely lighthearted (i.e., I recall similar commentary in LAKE Adventure, but sadder and more wistful). I like to imagine that Roger and Wilco have / will play many other games together before and after my time with them.
The right pane isn’t exactly a parser, either. It’s a choice-based interface simulating a parser, where there’s a maximum of four buttons available at a time, each corresponding to a different parser comment (e.g., TAKE, DROP, GO . . .). The game will decided for itself the object of each action–i.e., will decide what you drop (it seems like the options are usually cycled through in a preset loop). In some ways this makes the game easier, because the game must always offer you the correct option, but I did enjoy the sort of “action management” layer, where if you want to say, DROP something, but DROP is not a listed option, you need to exhaust other commands so that they go away, without messing up your game state, until DROP is available.
A highlight was the writing, which I found quite funny.
I also appreciated that the game shipped with a pretty detailed invisiclues style hints document (although the author seemed to have some disdain for walkthroughs, which I don’t share). And I could tell there had been quite a bit of thought to make sure the game was winnable (and I appreciated that the axe was not added to my struggles with dropping things)
All that said, I had a kind of unusual arc to my experience, where at first I was really vibing, but at a certain point I got tired of trying to read through the increasing visual clutter and fairly quickly transitioned into hmm, perhaps my experience with this game will be ending soon. (A few minutes later, I looked for and found the option to turn off the visual effects, which got me through the game. I’d be curious if anyone completed the game without turning them off—they were really intrusive.) I think this game slightly overstayed its welcome with me, based on the difficulty of reading the text, plus the high level of friction from the “need to loop back through everything” aspect to the gameplay, but ymmv.
Selected quote: