Mooncrash!

In the very first IF review I wrote after coming back from a 15-year hiatus, I talked about the alienating associations anime tends to have for me – I know, this is a me thing, it’s obviously an incredibly successful medium with aesthetic resonance for untold millions of people! But nonetheless, while I can recognize the reasons why over-busy narratives involving sexy people with nonstandard eye and hair colors and histrionic science-fantasy apocalpyses can be lots of fun, I confess the appeal is somewhat lost on me; less “anime BS (laudatory)” than “anime BS (derogatory)”, to adopt a kids-these-days idiom I do enjoy.

Mooncrash!,if you couldn’t tell from that intro, is very much working in this tradition. In a world due to end any minute, you’re a second-tier hero who gets to team up with the A-listers due to the fact that the world is ending any minute now. The mechanics of this are initially obfuscated, but by exploring the four paths the game offers (each corresponding to one of the four superheroes you can work alongside) it’s clear it involves armies of demons and dragons, and the plans to forestall it involve constructing magitech devices to allow some people to survive the end of the world, stealing a biological WMD from an infernal vault, or possibly just creating a magical simulation into which to escape. And after you run through each of them (there’s a death-and-rebirth thing going on that enables you to toggle between branches, as well as retain your combat skills and achievements across lives) there’s a culminating vignette where you can choose which strategy to save the day you want to throw your weight behind.

It’s a relatively simple setup, but Mooncrash! is maximalist in its storytelling – most actions you take produce long passages of text, dense with proper nouns and action and exposition. When the conflicts it describes are straightforward, this lends a pleasant over-the-topness to proceedings:

"The wind whips around you as you soar through the air, and you grip the red scales of the dragon below you for dear life. Below you, a battle rages on a bridge made of solid hard-light. Your allies, The Dawn Legion of Leont, do battle against the forces of Izalith, The Dread Horde. Twisted forms, demonic and devilish alike, clash against the shining armor of your brethren."

You can practically hear the death metal!

The prose can get bogged down when the action quiets down, though. One of the four branches is an extended conversation with the wizard who’s created the magical simulation I mentioned above – this involves them going into their overcomplicated backstory (they’re a refugee from another reality that collapsed in a crisis similar to the one yours is currently undergoing), their romantic entanglements, the reasons why they created their tower headquarters where and how they did, the nature of the alternate world they’ve built, how it could be used as a cheat code to escape the apocalypse… Again, I can see how those with a taste for this stuff would lap it up, but I found it dragged.

Other sections have more involved gameplay, though. The combat one is straightforward and does require some repetition to grind your skills to the necessary level, but it’s hard to go wrong skewering monsters. There’s a medium-dry-goods one where you solve some very simple object-based puzzles to prepare the ingredients for a sorcerous construction project. And the last involves either a conversation puzzle or a maze, before the endgame puts all the pieces together. They’re mostly pretty basic in terms of challenge, but they all have some time pressure to keep the player on their toes, and can be repeated as many times as needed (plus even failed attempts will typically give you an achievement, which is a motivating touch).

I’m unconvinced that a parser-based interface was the best fit for this game, though. Many sections play out in a primarily or exclusively choice-based mode, with the game prompting you to type CHOOSE (keyword) at some important points; I’d have rather just been able to click on an appropriate link, and a choice-based interface would have made some of the longer chunks of text go down smoother, too. Mooncrash! also doesn’t do much to take advantage of the affordances the parser offers – the object manipulation section spells out exactly what you need to do, for example, and the game is generally underimplemented, leading to unintentional comedy like this:

DANGEROUS PATHOGEN - DO NOT OPEN WITHOUT ALPHA-PLAN AUTHORIZATION

CORROSIVE SUBSTANCE - DO NOT REMOVE FROM CONTAINMENT FIELD BEFORE DEPLOYMENT

REPENT, YE WHO WOULD SEEK THE POWER OF THE BAD BLOOD

Staring at the pitch black vial sends a shiver down your spine. You look away on instinct. You get the sense that a single drop of this vile liquid could kill you instantly. Thankfully, the vial is sealed shut, and not a single smudge of the stuff has reached the outside.

x blood

You see nothing special about Bad Blood.

For all these complaints, though, there are definitely clever touches to Mooncrash! – I particularly liked the way a particular endgame challenge manipulated the choices available to you to mirror a mental assault, and the game is chock full of nonstandard, ambitious elements like this (I haven’t even mentioned the extended personality test that opens the game – it’s kind of pointless since the protagonist is a cipher, and while it shunts you to one of the four branches, you eventually need to play all of them. But I kind of love the ridiculous juxtaposition of a melodramatic Götterdämmerung with an OKCupid quiz, as well as the fact that the answers to “what kind of a person are you?” are basically three flavors of “I’m kind of a jerk” plus “I’m a jerk but I hide it”). Mooncrash! is identifiably a first parser game, with some of the lack of polish that implies, but it’s clearly been well-tested to smooth out bugs, and includes a bunch of customized systems that go way beyond what most rookie authors dare to bite off. And while as I said the specific subgenre it inhabits isn’t one I have much native affinity for, I think its emulation of said subgenre’s aesthetics is spot on, reflecting careful, intentional writing and design. So this is definitely an author to watch; even if Mooncrash! isn’t especially my speed, it’s still an impressive debut.