Moon Logic

Well well well, if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions. A couple of years ago, I reviewed the author’s debut game, One King to Loot Them All, and at the close of a positive writeup I noted in passing that I prefer prose in the sword-and-sorcery genre to be “a little zestier” than what was on offer. So I can’t help but feel that one bit of Moon Logic – a purposefully-painful game originally destined for the Really Bad IF Jam before it broke scope and containment – is singling out me in particular. You see, this is a Zork pastiche one of whose main features is that alongside the main game window, there’s a frame where two voices on the player’s shoulder (Roger and Wilco, natch) comment on the action, crack dumb jokes, and gurn and grin in the most distracting manner as they refuse. to. shut. up. Come back, One King, all is forgiven!

In fairness, while the commentary is often (intentionally) painful, it’s also incredibly helpful, typically spelling out the next steps you need to take. This is perhaps a bit intrusive, but I found it a godsend given the game’s other gimmick: in a parody of intrusive “AI” assistance functions, this by-the-numbers Zork parody doesn’t use a parser interface, but rather a one-click choice-based one where you select the action, and the game infers the appropriate noun based on that. Of course “appropriate” is a lie, as the rules undergirding all this guarantee that the obviously useful action will only happen at the end (if at all). You can’t easily go a particular direction – opening and closing doors will determine where you wind up when you blindly stab the “go” button. Similarly, if you need to drop an item to progress, it’s going to be the last thing to go after you start pounding “drop” (and then you’ll have to press “take” a bunch of times again to retrieve all your junk). Oh, and you don’t get access to all the actions at once; using a verb will usually remove it from the screen, so you need to add some pointless actions in the middle to get it back.

As a result, knowing what you’re supposed to be doing makes sense – the challenge is actually the how. This does mean that you can largely blow past the moon-logic (drink!) that governs many of the puzzles – it doesn’t really matter why eating guano gives you super strength, you’re just told that it does, so good luck wrestling with the sack to try to get it out of its hiding place. And the game does a good job of mixing things up; just as I was feeling like I’d gotten the hang of the interface, some new annoying challenge would be thrown my way, usually with a clever gag (and groaningly-painful commentary from Roger and Wilco) accompanying it. These are all pretty much drawn from Zork, but with fun twists – I especially enjoyed how the joke around taking the giant pile of leaves, as well as how it’s redeployed given its role in many players’ approach to the maze of twisty little passages, all alike (though of course implementing the solution was laborious in the extreme).

Make no mistake, the humor here is very broad – here’s a representative sample:

[Wilco] Yes! We’ve got ourselves a lunch and a… wait, what happened to the clove of garlic?
[Roger] Maybe the vampire bat overcame its aversion to garlic and ate it?
[Wilco] Leaving a bat dropping in return. You may have a point there.

But it wouldn’t fit the brief of making Bad IF to have actually good jokes (albeit in fairness the giant pile of treasure you loot at the end did legitimately make me giggle a few times). Similarly, complaining that the interface is terrible would miss the point: yeah, it’s frustrating, but working out the rules governing its behavior isn’t too complex, and is reasonably satisfying. I can’t exactly recommend Moon Logic, unless you liked when a big kid would make you play the “stop hitting yourself” game on the playground. But if you’re in the mood for such a thing, you could do a lot worse. Just please, no need for zestiness next time.