The Moon Sliver

To celebrate Halloween in my own personal way, I decided to drop 3 bucks on the Steam Halloween sale and pick up The Moon Sliver.

It was a fun, and a little creepy, 29 minutes.

This is another of the increasingly popular style of first-person games that has the player explore an environment, and piece together a narrative from the junk lying around. Similar to Dear Esther, Gone Home, Penumbra (minus the puzzles), or Amnesia (minus the pant-crapping level of terror, and horrifically disfigured monsters).

I can't say a whole lot about a game that took just under 30 minutes to complete, despite the hour the game advised I set aside to complete the game in one shot, as there is no save feature to the game. The interesting mechanic The Moon Sliver adds is a finite flashlight battery that needs to be charged at power stations scattered through out the small deserted settlement you are exploring. The story is an interesting mystery to piece together that implies a greater back story, as though we are seeing just the final few days of a much larger tale which seems to begin with the end of the world, the loss of all modern knowledge (except for flash light related technologies, and instant battery recharging), and four survivors getting increasingly bored and depressed over the whole "everyone on earth appears to be dead" thing. The music, environmental effects, and a well timed horrible monster sound at one point, all make for a fun little deserted settlement to explore with a slight creepy vibe. Though at one point, whilst exploring a complex maze of tunnels with scant few charging stations, I did begin to worry what would happen if I were to get stuck in this maze sans-flashlight with only the really cool shifting gloom visual effect as my companion. The end of the game, while pretty ambiguous in my opinion did leave me delighted. A delight that increased as I gleaned from the credits that The Moon Sliver seems to have been made entirely using free textures, sounds effects (and possibly music?), and a game engine. This is a really good example of what (appears to me to be) a single developer with good vision and not a little ambition can accomplish.

My only legitimate complaint (other than the length) is the text presentation looked unpolished and was slightly off putting for me. That very small complaint aside I feel like the roughly 9 cents per game play minute was well worth it. While composing this I went and pain a small amount to download David Szymanski's previous game, Fingerbones.

I downloaded Fingerbones here

But this is the link to the game I've been talking about: The Moon Sliver