Moon-House Technician

When I was a kid I went through a phase where Howard Pyle was one of my favorite authors. A turn-of-the-century writer and illustrator, he wrote charmingly old-fashioned books about Robin Hood and King Arthur that delighted eleven year old me with their ornate prose and classic narratives. My tastes have since moved on, but The Moon-house Technician confirms that I still get the appeal; it’s based on one of his stories that I never read, about a boy who spends a year on the moon getting into various fairy-tale adventures, and while I’m not sure if any of the writing comes directly from Pyle or if it’s just inspired by him, either way I enjoyed it quite a lot. Here’s a bit where the game’s main character – who’s similarly taken to the moon-house after the plot of the original story has wrapped up – helps earn his keep by polishing stars and setting them back in the sky:

"You sit on the wooden bench and pick up the first star, rubbing it with the lamb’s-wool. As you rub the star it grows brighter and brighter until it throbs with light as if alive. You repeat this process with the remaining stars before casting them into the sky."

Everything about the game has this sort of Victorian Stardew Valley vibe; your companions, for example, are an initially taciturn but eventually simpatico moon-angel, the man in the moon himself, who’s got a beardy raconteur vibe, and a beautiful lady who teaches you alongside some other children every Saturday. And the major progression tracker involves obtaining illustrated playing cards from this trio; the ASCII art is more 1980s than 1880s but it’s a wholesome pastime nonetheless, and each gives you a short excerpt from the original Pyle story too.

There is a downside, though, which is that Moon-house Technician is Stardew Valleyish in more ways than one. There are no puzzles to speak of here; the gameplay is just a menu-based time-allocation simulator, as you step through a full year on the moon one day at a time with your only goal to collect all of the aforementioned cards. Admittedly, each month is only a week, but what is there to do over those 96 days? Well, you earn $5 a day polishing the stars, which always gives you the same text quoted above, along with a little tune that takes five seconds or so to play to completion (the delay ceases being charming and starts being painful at about day four). You can talk to the moon-angel to try to win him over, though it only takes five months before he thaws and gives you a free card, and isn’t ever a voluble conversationalist. You can visit the main in the moon, giving you a couple sentences of rotating flavor text and the opportunity to buy a card, though I’d bought him out by month nine. You can look out a window at the stars, though that again just leads to a single bit of unchanging text and also regularly would crash the game for me. And every Saturday you can have a lesson with the beautiful lady; those only start repeating at month ten.

The gameplay is very grindy, in other words, with most of the interesting bits feeling like they’re references to the fun things that happened to the protagonist of the original story rather than anything that you get to experience yourself. Mostly you’re just doing the same thing over and over again, with a couple of sentences of new flavor text and maybe some fine but unspectacular ASCII art the only rewards on offer. The game does end with a nice coda allowing you to reflect on your time on the moon, but getting to that point is the definition of drudgery: Moon-house Technician is ten minutes of lovely writing stretched across forty-five minutes of dreary incrementalist gameplay, with not much in the way of narrative motivation and a frankly ugly presentation (it’s a Pythonesque text window that lacks word-wrapping). I’d rather just read Pyle’s lush prose and look at his Pre-Raphaelite illustrations; I appreciate the game for reminding me of how much I enjoy him, but any shine it’s got is from his reflected light.