Would have been better as a movie
No doubt about that Moons of Madness is an ambitious project. It's a Lovecraftian horror set in space, served as an improbable mix of a walking simulator and survival horror. And while it delivers an atmospheric, artistically competent cosmic horror, it pretty much fails as a game.
Technological giant Orochi have a secret base on Mars where they're conducting research not even all of the staff (and especially our hero, Shane Newehart), know the true nature of. Working on something great is cool, of course, until things go horribly wrong. Soon, Shane starts to doubt the nature of reality itself.
First the good stuff: the story and the artistic direction. Apart from the starting point (that someone could make a research base on Mars without the rest of the world noticing), the plot is good and both the magnitude of what the hero is facing and how much is at stake is being revealed bit by bit, or perhaps layer by layer. And the evil is totally Lovecraftian, as in creepy, weird, hard to grasp but scary. You get malevolent semi-plant entities, you get something horrible moving just below the surface of the Martian sands, and the authors can make a motionless standing astronaut in a space suit look really horrifying just through its pose. Of course, there are jump scares, too, but I think the game is strongest in confined spaces. The biggest fear comes when you need to pass close to something that may or may not be a threat, and you just don't know what can happen.
Now the bad: the game part, as Moons of Madness seem to use the worst of both worlds of their chosen walking simulator / survival horror genre combination.
The authors primarily want to tell the story, and the interaction often feels like an afterthought. "And then the story goes like this and this." - "Alright, so where's the player input?" - "Player input? Ah, player input! Errrhm, urrrk, a mini game, perhaps?" And so you end up with a lot of stuff that doesn't question the fabric of reality but feels fabricated. Like a set of photographs where the hero says to himself, "Hm, these timestamps could be important." So later, you have to pin the photographs to a corkboard in chronological order for something Cthulhish to happen. Like, really? Or wandering through a basement until you look at four different objects from certain angles, which triggers another Cthulhish response. Like, really really? Or mini games where the biggest challenge is to figure out what is actually expected of you. Often, I felt it would have been better to just let the story go on and continue from one scripted event to the next (like, e.g., in Firewatch).
As for the survival horror part, it consists mainly in the corridorish linearity where you just have to keep dying in the action sequences until you discover the only path that the authors decided would save your hero for the moment. Especially near the end, where restarting from the last checkpoint includes rewatching several unskippable cutscenes over and over again, I thought, "A bit more fear and a bit less frustration, please!"
When playing, I thought many times that the story would work better as a movie than as a game. And I definitely thought that about the ending(s). It doesn't feel like you went from a decision to a decision on your part and this final one crowns the story but rather like it all just happened to you.
For story and art, I'd give the game four very strong stars. For gameplay, it's one star only. So I'm torn between two and three stars overall, but two feels like below average junk. And Moons of Madness definitely isn't junk. It's an ambitious project that has its strengths but just took too many wrong design turns along the way. I'm leaving the game regretting that it hasn't fulfilled its potential.