All I ever had to do when an enemy showed up was make a bee-line to the nearest door, which very quickly deflated their ability to intimidate me.

The only problem is that these portions aren’t very scary. Like many other modern horror games, Moons of Madness deprives you of weapons or other means of defending yourself to maximize the feeling of helplessness and fear when something spooky shows up. Enemy encounters are, frankly, disappointing. Soon you discover strange and unusual setbacks. Your job is simply to keep the lights on until the transport ship Cyrano arrives bringing with it a new team to take over your duties. The best of these are tied to a limited air supply mechanic where you need to refill your air tank to stay alive, and even though I never had a situation where the air supply ran dangerously low, the resupply animation is the most satisfying to look at in all of Moons of Madness thanks to its smoothness and how it sometimes changes depending on your current air level. You are Shane Newehart, a technician stationed at the Invictus and your security clearance means you are completely unaware of the existence of the mysterious signal. You can pick up mugs and fill them with coffee from the coffee machine, or reset your wristwatch with a pen, and other stuff that shows off the developers’ attention to detail. There are also several instances of showy interactivity. There are some other time-wasters like how you need to follow procedure and close space doors in the proper order, lest you suffocate, but there’s nothing interesting about this so it just becomes a simulation of a chore. Environmental puzzles often boil down to finding an item and putting into the correct slot, or rotating a machine until it’s in the proper position.

“In fact, there’s a lot of that padding happening in Moons of Madness, and it goes beyond just the scanning of stuff.

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