While the top game publishers and developers tend to churn out crowd-pleasing but less pioneering titles, there is also a growing cadre of independent developers and small teams who are pushing the boundaries in the industry and sometimes scoring big successes. The fact that tools like Unity as well as graphic engines like Unreal Engine 5 are increasingly easy to use also helps to open things up to new developers who are just learning how to make great games.
For example, on the role-playing side, titles made with the RPG Maker toolset are all the rage. Save State columnist Vincent Mahoney recently covered one called Flowstone Saga that combined, of all things, Tetris and RPGs. And there are lots of other great examples on Steam, mostly thanks to the RPG Maker tools.
Outside of RPGs, however, there are fewer indie titles. Most game tools, while getting easier to use, still require a good deal of programming skill and experience. That is what makes Moon Mystery so special. It’s a shooter and adventure game with several advanced elements like drivable vehicles and some well-presented and challenging puzzles. And while it’s not by any means a AAA game, there are a lot of things in it that approach that level of excellence. It’s created by a small team called Cosmoscouts, that is mostly comprised of a single main developer and a few others who help out in their free time while holding down other jobs, which is something they proudly say on loading screens and on their Steam pages.
The adventure starts off with players taking on the role of the lone survivor of a mission to the moon. In this alternate history, humanity has put lots of permanent structures on the moon including the base where players are staying. As the player, your mission seems to be to collect some mysterious glowing blue rocks scattered around the moon. By finding notebooks and other clues scattered around the base, you learn that you originally had a partner with you, but he got sick from exposure to those same blue rocks and had to be evacuated, leaving you alone at the base with just a robotic companion driven by artificial intelligence.
Your robotic companion is a fun character to interact with. One of the early activities you can do is play ball with him, where you try to toss a baseball-sized sphere past him while he acts as a goalie. He’s not too great at sports apparently, so beating him at that was easy. However, he is also advanced enough so that he can download his AI into your environmental suit’s helmet and travel with you as you adventure outside the base like a kind of generic Cortana from Halo. That smart move gives your main character someone to talk with instead of just musing about stuff he finds and talking to himself.
The environment for Moon Mystery looks amazing. You can even bump up the graphics to display in 4K resolution. There is also the illusion of an open world, which is nice, although in truth you are generally confined to set areas. But Moon Mystery does a better job of hiding that fact than most titles. Things you can interact with in the environment even highlight when you get close, which generally makes it easy to locate important items or clues. There is also a heads-up display that adds map markers, so you won’t ever get lost trying to find objectives.
It won’t take long before you find a weapon, in this case a pistol to start out, and have to use it. The gunplay in Moon Mystery is not spectacular but works fine enough. When coupled with different environments like the low gravity of the moon, some of the firefights were every bit as enjoyable as the ones I had in Starfield. That said, the weapons themselves are pretty generic, and I never really got a feel for weapon performance like I did in a title like Stalker 2. Also, the enemy variety is limited mostly to robots who are pretty big bullet sponges. For whatever reason, you can headshot the robots for extra damage, but even so, it will take a lot of bullets to put them down. Thankfully Moon Mystery is not stingy with distributing resources.
In addition to just being able to wander around on foot, there are also vehicles in Moon Mystery, which was surprising to find in an indie title. Over the course of the full adventure, players will be able to drive lunar modules and cars, pilot a spacecraft and even navigate underwater using a submarine. The vehicle sequences are not exactly perfect in terms of physics but do add quite a bit of excitement to the overall Moon Mystery gameplay.
In terms of the story, the first part of the mystery is why Earth has stopped communicating with you, and why your pickup team is over a week late. But it quickly spirals to become much more than that. You will be visiting other places beyond the moon and unraveling a mystery that could very well save Earth and the universe.
If there is any Achillies heel for Moon Mystery, it’s the voice acting. It’s not very good, especially when the main character tries to express emotion, and it comes out really wrong and overly stilted. None of the support characters’ voices are any better. I understand that many indie developers try and save money by either reading dialogue lines themselves or having their friends do it, but that normally drags down the quality of the experience. One only needs to look at a title like Baldur’s Gate 3 to see how talented voice actors can bring characters to life. But even actors who are new to video game voices, and thus command lower rates, would likely be preferable to trying to run lines in-house. It’s not an expense that should be side-stepped as Moon Mystery unfortunately demonstrates.
Moon Mystery is fun to play and is downright amazing considering the small team that created it. For just under $20 on Steam, it’s a decent value too. It will be interesting to see what developer Cosmoscouts does next with all the experience they earned making this. While Moon Mystery probably won’t be burning up the Steam charts, it’s a solid first effort from an indie developer, and it’s more than worth playing.