The Moonstone Equation

Basically you're plopped down in the world that has a bunch of: "Hanging plot threads", "some platforming", "a bunch of investigation", and "puzzles". Where you then go about doing whatever you want, in what seems to be any order you want (as you discover it). It's nice and relaxing to play. Haven't ran into any enemies, and haven't ran into anything that forces a panic/rush. Will probably want to keep your cellphone camera around, and a notepad since there are hints scattered all about the world and in conversation since investigation does matter.

The Moonstone Equation is a puzzle/collect-a-thon platformer along the lines of Fez, but about the spirit of research. There are quite a lot of puzzle rooms, but the overall design of the game makes no point aggravating. At any given point in time there are always many different puzzles to go between, in an open map that has few linear restrictions. The puzzles themselves are pleasantly refreshing because none require you to hunt for the most complex series of moves that need to mentally be laid out beforehand. Instead, everything is meant to require a basic idea for the solution to be clear and fast. There is not much of a story, but rather a series of world and theme-building elements that run separate to the puzzles. That said, there are quite a few puzzle-like revelations that arise from them to keep things interesting enough. The world itself is designed to be iconic enough to never get lost, which is special for how big it all is. My favorite aspect of The Moonstone Equation is how well-paced the gameplay is for being so open and having puzzles so satisfying.

This game has a lot of depth but gives you freedom to play it as you wish. You can focus only on solving puzzles and get to the end without exploring the story or solving any mystery. But you can explore the story by reading notes and interacting with NPCs; you can hack the computer system to learn other peoples secrets; you can find and play minigames; and finally you can study and decode the moonstone equation. But the main part are the puzzles and they are designed well. They vary in difficulty and most of them forces you to learn a new concept or trick. And I haven't notices any copy-paste puzzles, each one is unique. Also the game doesn't tell you what to do and finding out what is your goal is part of the game. I have to mention the music. It's so good I wish to have full soundtrack just to listen while reading or working. It's a perfect relaxation/concentration type of music. For now I leave the game in the background - just for songs. This is not game for everyone. There is no score to keep you play, story is simple as well as interaction with NPCs, quests you have to find and keep track by yourself and they are not mandatory. The only thing that keeps you play is your curiosity - if you have one you will be obsessed with the game. I recommend the game to all curious minds. But only those curious enough will solve The Moonstone Equation.

The Moonstone Equation is one of my favorite game of 2018. It's an awesome puzzle-platformer with a cute cast of caracters, and great puzzles. It can be a bit daunting at first, because the world is quite large, and there's nothing to hold your hand (which is actually why I wrote a guide :)). What's really great is that the more you play; the more you uncover the lore; the more you get to know the caracters; the more you enjoy the game. There's a LOT of content that can easily be missed if you only focus on the puzzles, but what makes this game awesome is precisely the fact that you can take a break from the puzzles, and just enjoy chatting with everybody (or reading their emails). I strongly recommend this game. It's beautifully crafted, the music is relaxing, it's challenging but in a good way. So let's see if you can unravel the mystery of the moonstone equation!

...man. I don't like writing negative reviews for one-man dev indie projects, especially ones that aren't even, like... bad, just... I don't quite -get- this game I guess. The basic puzzles themselves are very generic block pushing puzzles with not really any unique twists on the mechanics - the first block puzzle looks no different from the last. There's also pathfinding puzzles to unlock a few doors but they are so quick and there are so few they're almost not worth mentioning. Past that, there's a (fairly small) game world to explore that has a decent amount tucked away in it but never feels too expansive... except there's no map to navigate it, and the map is basically two halves connected by one area each way (and there's a spot in the "loop" that's one-way and forces you go to all the way back through the entire loop, without fast travel...) But it's not really satisfying to explore, or all that interesting. The game is populated with a dozen or so characters, none of which have any personality whatsoever and none of which really need to be interacted with to "complete the game". There are interactions you -can- do and achievements related to these, but none of it is something you're incentivized to do. And there's an entire language system which, again, you have no incentive to interact with. The full translations for the language are kept in one room you don't have to go to to complete the game and if desired I guess you could go around translating all the text found in the interface rooms, but... why? I don't have any incentive to do so, so I didn't bother. Now then, the main gameplay loop. You need to collect trigger stones and data blocks and take them to interface rooms to turn on a terminal on the moon. Okay. Trigger stones are pretty reasonable to get. Find artifact rooms, solve a simple puzzle, done. Data blocks are not really indicated anywhere in the game other than one NPC room and even then there's not really any indication that I can find, other than a room on the moon containing data block locks, that tells you which data blocks are valid or not. Oh, also, there are places on the map where it looks like you -could- make data blocks, but you can't. Two hours of my 9 hour play time came from trying to solve puzzles in places where there was no puzzle to solve, because ??? I don't know, the puzzle design in this game is just sloppy like that. The cool part is going to an interface room, having to solve a puzzle to get to the interface, and then not having both the trigger stone and CORRECT (read: each data block only works in one specific place - good luck!) data block, well, now you have to backtrack to find them. Also, it's very easy to get stuck in interface rooms and have to reload, which will reset the puzzle, too. Because puzzles just reset a lot in this game! Enjoy redoing the same puzzles over and over again because you flubbed a jump with the very primitive platforming controls the game has! Anyways once you've wasted enough time roaming around the map to activate all 12 interfaces you gotta go to the moon and do a very disorienting "match the shapes" puzzle where three of the twelve tiles are all but identical and the required solution involves figuring out which three and then brute forcing all combinations until the solution is accepted. I just... this game's a mess, man. It feels half-baked, overstuffed with a bunch of ideas and mechanics that it doesn't make good use of, wrapped around a core gameplay loop that isn't that engaging and is only challenging when it presents a puzzle setup that is literally not a puzzle meant to be solved - all the -actual- puzzles I solved in 5 minutes or so at most, which I guess should've been a sign that the ones I couldn't solve weren't puzzles at all, but... again, not indicated! I respect the attempt and there are... ideas here, for sure, again, nothing here is outright awful, just kind of mediocre as a baseline, but man, I just didn't end up enjoying this very much. Oh and the music gets reeeally annoying really fast but whatever I can mute the game audio. Anyways if you want a really great exploration/block pushing hybrid go check out full bore, one of the best puzzle games out there for my money. Uhh. Yeah.

I can't believe I haven't reviewed this game yet! The Moonstone Equation is a pretty incredible game and honestly should be far better-known than it is. It has a feeling of the world having an incredible amount of depth and lots of secrets to find and lore to uncover. It also has some really nice puzzles based mostly on simple block-pushing mechanics that you can do surprisingly much with. These puzzles are pretty much the perfect difficulty IMO, not too easy but not too frustratingly difficult. But if you solve all of these and want more to do there's another layer of much more obscure puzzles to solve as well. My one gripe with the game are a couple of minor bugs (such as a lagging camera at times) that don't nearly ruin the experince, and a lot of backtracking at times, but the world is interconnected enough to not make this too tedious. I very much recommend this game for fans of any puzzle/exploration games.

I really like this game. And I definitely want to recommand this game to my friends. The feeling this game gived me is a some how similar to FEZ, which makes me enjoying this game from begining to ending. Exploring large world filled with puzzles, lacking of instruction, elusive symbol language... together give player a special exploring experience. But I must say this game isn't for player. Only those who would like to devote themselves to the studying of the moonstone equation and decrypting a symbol based language will obtain the true meaning of this game.

I really wanted to recommend this game. A ton of work has gone into it, and it plays really well... Until you get about halfway or more through, at which point you realize that you need to wander around the map aimlessly, hoping to stumble upon the spots that you need to be in. And because there's no map and no fast travel, and the connections between areas seem almost random, finding things is quite painful. Reading the forums, I realize there's something I haven't done, but since I don't know how to get back there, or if I *did* go there that it'd actually start happening, I've not a lot of interest in trying. The only other thing I know to do involves wandering around, looking for the right areas to collect something, and hoping I recognize them for what they are. I've not a lot of interest in that, either.

I like it so far... seems a bit different from games I've been playing lately. The graphics are excellent and absolutely love the music. Controls seem fine and no real gameplay issues other than it crashing a few times when I'd try to quit (but it still saved in those cases). Seems to be a game where you solve various puzzles at your own pace while trying to uncover the bigger story, but i'm still not entirely sure what I'm supposed to be doing (which seems like all part of the fun) so can't really say much for sure yet.

This game looks like it has a lot going for it and a lot of potential. But the developer has basically abandoned it even though there are game-breaking bugs stopping people making any progress. He has admitted on Twitter that he is done with it and it sounds like he has no plans to fix anything. Such a shame.