The Moonstone Equation

I've been looking for a game like this for a long time and I love that I found it! The puzzles in this game can be quite hard, but still remain very intuitive. Apart from the puzzles, the lore in the game is extensive and even though it is optional to discover everything, I would highly recommend looking into the language and the "programming". For me it was also very satisfying to get achievements that apparently almost nobody else found. There are however some bugs in the game, which will hopefully be removed in future updates. I will black the next part out, because they contain the specific bugs, so the developer will hopefully see them: [spoiler] 1. When first going to the moon, if you jump down too fast, the conversation with Cyrus bugs out and you get softlocked. In general, some of the conversations are a bit buggy. 2. I have found Pembrooke, but I never got the achievement. 3. In the underworks Interface world, there is a place where you can jump into water and get softlocked. 4. Also, and this is of course not really a bug, I sometimes feel the platforming is unnecessarily tight. You can barely make a jump where you go up two blocks and right/left two blocks. If this would be slightly less tight, some of the platforming would feel less frustrating. [/spoiler] Overall though, I would definitely recommend this game to people that like spending a long time on difficult puzzles and lore. I don't think the game is for everyone, but it should definitely be better known than it is.

Both puzzle and open-ended exploration games demand patience to be appreciated, and the requirement is all the greater if the genres are combined. The Moonstone Equation, however, seems deliberately designed to tax the player's tolerance for tedium as much as possible. What fun there is to be had is locked behind a wall of boredom, of content seemingly not intended even by the developer to be engaging. The game simply lacks a map and fast-travel, two staples of open-ended exploration in video games. These sound like bad things, and they are, but the game's world is mercifully small and simple to navigate. Indeed, were the actual activity of traversing the game's world fun, it might benefit the experience for the player to be forced to internalize the world's structure. However, the game's world is simply devoid of any form of engaging activities. The game's bona-fide puzzles, first of all, are entirely sequestered away from the rest of the world behind special portals scattered throughout the world. Getting from point A to point B almost never requires any kind of puzzle-solving, and what puzzle-solving is required for locomotion seems deliberately pared down from the game's own more serious offerings. This game features player physics that could, theoretically, serve as the foundation for some form of platforming challenge, but in my time playing this was mostly absent. You are expected to jump over pits, etc., but "platforming" in this game is entirely between stationary platforms with no mobile obstacles. It's mostly trivially easy, but some jumps require relatively precise timing to get the full distance necessary to progress. As I played, I found myself more frequently undone by misjudgments of the player character's jumping capabilities than by timing, though neither was satisfying as a cause for punishment. Compounding this is the fact that the game punishes you mainly by forcing you to loop back around through an empty environment; while the game has a reset feature that teleports the player back to the most-recently used door, the advantage is often dubious. The world isn't massive, but there's ample space that the player must navigate and traverse in the ways I described above in order to find their objectives. As a result, the game simply feels like a timesink; so much time is spent mindlessly wandering. The game world isn't a terribly compelling place to just wander around in, either. There's a run-down town, some sewers, a laboratory complex, and some caves; all of these locales are exactly as boring as they could possibly be. The game does manage to conjure up some good atmosphere in the puzzle rooms, but these are the places where atmosphere is least needed. The story and lore are severely hampered by robotic writing, often-awkward grammar and the fact that much of it is locked behind terminals that needlessly force the player to navigate a special interface to look at what is essentially a bulletin board. The "bona fide" puzzles themselves are all based on a very small set of mechanics that don't really get used in very interesting ways. You slide special blocks around, and if two blocks adorned with matching symbols come into contact, both disappear. Sometimes the player must use conveyor devices to transport the blocks. Most puzzles involve eliminating a given number of blocks in a particular room to get past a gate. They can be enjoyable, admittedly, even if the mechanics are simple, but it's far from enough justify the tedium necessary to reach them, let alone in a game you're expected to pay money to play. I didn't finish the game, but I've fully activated six interface rooms and I have zero indication from the game that it's going to get any better. I've already spent $10 on this game, I don't need to give it any more of my time. Feel free to let me know if the game suddenly turns amazing midway through.

good game

Love the game, hate the puzzle placement