Big ol’ oozy tentacles are coming soon to a red planet near you.
On Wednesday, publisher Funcom revealed 12 new minutes of gameplay footage from Rock Pocket Games’ upcoming sci-fi horror game, Moons of Madness. The horror walking sim is targeting a “Halloween season” release date.
The extended trailer begins with protagonist, Shane Newhart, waking up to pitch black. He gets out of bed and starts exploring a martian base, which seems to be suffering a power outage. He picks up a crowbar and a headlamp and encounters sickly black ooze (think the Typhons from Prey) as he cautiously paces through the station’s darkened hallways, prying open doors.
There’s a lot of prying doors open in this trailer, the point of which, I assume, is to show off the game’s gorgeous skin textures. Seriously, look at these beauties:
Then there’s a creepy moment when a mysterious, ethereal woman beckons Shane to blow out the candles on a birthday cake sitting on an ichor-drenched desk, surrounded by ichor-caked balloons. Then the woman jump-scare attacks Shane, greasy Grudge hair framing her pasty face, and our hero wakes up in his bed, on a normal day on the surface of Mars.
The rest of the demo follows Shane as he talks to Orson, a quippy coworker, who, via future phone, wakes him up and walks him through his day. Life in the station is crisp, clean and impressively rendered, but Shane soon discovers that his nightmare is coming true. The trailer culminates with the reveal that Lovecraftian horror has indeed come to their base.
Moons of Madness — whose name seems to be a sci-fi riff on Lovecraft’s short story, “At the Mountains of Madness” — wasn’t on my radar before this demo. But, after 12 minutes of gameplay, I’m excited to see more of those very pretty hands around Halloween.