Game: Under The Moon
Genre: Adventure, Casual, Indie, Puzzle, Platformer
System: Steam (Windows)
Developer|Publisher: Bamya Games | The Pack Studios
Controller Support: Full
Price: US $4.99 | UK £3.99 | EU € 3,99
Release Date: December 5th, 2022
Review code provided with many thanks to The Pack Studios.
Under The Moon is a riddle game in which you play as a love-sick young man searching for the woman he fell in love with. It is honestly the weirdest game I’ve played so far this year, or perhaps in many years, and I just played Papetura for the site a couple of days ago.
The Story and Gameplay of Under The Moon
The game starts with a bunch of young kids around a campfire. Grandpa decides to tell them the story of how he fell in love with and married their grandmother. The entire game is in flashback, and we see Grandpa as a young man, telling Grandma that he’s in love with her and thinks she’s so beautiful that he’d follow her anywhere.
Forgetting entirely that looks are not a good bases for a relationship, players attempt to woo the pretty lady. She insists that she has to leave, and Grandpa decides to follow her. She says she will only love him if he solves her riddles.
This is how we get our first riddle. The game asks a short riddle, and players need to look for the object along the street where these two young lovers live. For example, the first riddle is:
In order to take a guess at the riddle, players need to run up and down this little street, looking for the object described in the riddle.
Once players find the object, a new riddle will appear. After guessing several of the riddles, they get to move onto a new level in a different country, getting them closer to their love.
This Game is So Weird
I’m not sure I can set the scene properly; it’s difficult to explain what playing this game is like. There is very strange music of people talking loudly in the background as this tiny child runs up and down the street, looking for bikes and things. He’s really, really small. Like an 8-year-old child small. So we’re led to believe that an 8-year-old has fallen in love with a pretty girl, then wandered from Russia to China to the Middle East and back again to find her. I guess.
The riddle in Under The Moon aren’t actually riddles most of the time; they are just descriptions of items, and you have to puzzle through the sometimes undecipherable wording. I am all for people making games outside of their own language; English is what sells more games and reaches the largest audience. That being said, grammatical issues usually stand out to me, though they usually don’t ruin a game unless they are particularly bad.
However, a less than stellar grasp of English in a riddle game that relies on communicating something like this to an English speaker… Well, the developers should have hired an editor of some sort.
Under The Moon’s Graphics are Perplexing
When I first opened up Under The Moon, the very first thing I noticed was the Unreal Engine 5 logo. I understand that Unreal is free for small projects, but there is no reason this couldn’t be done in Unity. Why do you need to power of Unreal for a game that looks like this?
The options menu has levels of graphics, which is pretty standard in games nowadays, but this game has the option to turn ray tracing on and off. For those who may not know, ray tracing is a method of modelling light that simulates how lighting works in real life. Instead of flat lighting, ray tracing renders millions of little algorithms that mimic real photons’ behaviour, splashing light in more realistic ways across digital surfaces. Ray tracing is CPU-intensive, but it can be used to make pretty games even more life-like and beautiful.
In Under The Moon, I’m not sure what it does.
The graphics themselves, with or without ray tracing, don’t look great. People clip through their own bodies, and there is a little bit of jank in the movements. But these are not enough to bother me; no, there’s other things that bother me much, much more.
The Riddles Aren’t Great
I don’t get most of these puzzles. The riddles are either weirdly isosteric or just the description of a random object with nothing in between.
I don’t mind someone trying hard to develop original puzzles and fudging them up every few, but this is just not really a good riddle. I’m not sure what makes a good riddle; I’d never say I was a riddle master or enthusiast, but I think I know a good one when I see one. Some of them don’t make much sense, and I’m not sure if that is the grammar or the execution.
The Gameplay Isn’t Super Fun Either
In all honesty, the part I disliked the most was the execution of the gameplay. I like the idea of having puzzles with hidden objects around as answers, but the way it was done here was just kind of annoying. In order to get one clue, you have to walk all the way down the street; then, the next will be all the way down the other side. This would have been much more fun if you had a scene in front of you and you picked objects rather than having to walk really far to them all the time.
I liked the basic ideas they came up with for Under The Moon; they were new and interesting. They just weren’t put together very well.
Conclusion
I don’t like this game. Under The Moon is in need of some honest playtesters that are looking to improve the game’s appeal. I think it could be amazing with some simple editing:
- Edit the riddles for grammar.
- Put a little more effort into the riddles that are just descriptions of objects.
- Make the roads much, much shorter.
- Worry less about ray tracing and worry more about making what is there interact well with the world.
Final Verdict: I Don’t Like it.
