Lifeless Moon Review: A Haunting Sci-Fi Experience Sent Straight To The Moon

2014's Lifeless Planet plunged players into a science fiction action-adventure world where you play as a lone astronaut stranded on a planet once populated by different lifeforms. Your team's mission was a catastrophic failure as you had to navigate on a "lifeless planet" with no way of contacting or reaching home while investigating how the planet became a space wasteland.

Lifeless Moon is the follow-up to Lifeless Planet, as this time, you and a fellow astronaut embark on another eerie space mission to the Moon that ends in catastrophe. This time, you stumble into an even larger mystery as you have to explore and uncover clues by completing puzzles, deciphering clues, and cryptic messages to learn the truth of a major conspiracy on the lunar planet.

Lifeless Moon Review: Overview

As explained, Lifeless Moon is the spiritual successor to Lifeless Planet, in which, this time, you play as a faceless and voiceless astronaut who was part of a lunar expedition along with another astronaut. After landing within a crater on the Moon and your fellow astronaut appearing somewhat disembodied at times, he relays some valuable information and thoughts over the comms.

What has been made public is that Lifeless Planet will feature more puzzles than Lifeless Planet but are less intricate for players to solve. Nevertheless, it does take some brain power to solve them, so the difficulty would be moderate but do take time to complete them as some puzzles are similar, making it slightly easier to finish.

Exploring each location on the Moon requires you to find portal rings that are activated using energy rocks and, at times, a photograph to amplify or charge the energy rocks to open the portal. This will serve as your main travel system, but opening the portals is a puzzle, as you'll have to determine the pattern to activate them and trigger the portal's opening.

As you're stuck on the Moon, movement is quite limited as you can walk and jump at near-zero gravity. Luckily, there are no health or stamina meters or in-game deaths, but if you fall or miss a jump, it will respawn you to your last known location.

Lifeless Moon Review: Gameplay

The game starts by placing your character in the center of a crater on a moon as you'll have to figure your way out of the crater, but when interacting with an anomaly, you'll get transported to a random location on the Moon. While you only have a little equipment to work with for most of your gameplay until a certain point in the story, where you'll obtain a jetpack, the game immensely expands on the narrative and mechanics from Lifeless Planet.

To help you uncover the mysteries of what occurred on the Moon, you'll have to explore each area in search of clues that range from audio logs, documents, diary entries, and your mission objectives. These will help you traverse the environments of your current location, solve the various puzzles you will encounter, and understand the narrative through the diary entries, specifically from each scientist involved in the previous mission from Lifeless Planet.

The game features plenty of puzzles that take some extended time to solve, and while most of the clues are often in front of you, other puzzles call for you to step back and look at them from a different perspective. Additionally, these puzzles help develop the world-building environments, which contribute to the overall narrative and give life, vibrancy, and despair to the area you're investigating.

The ambiance and music are distinctly atmospheric, and the dialogue provided by the talented voice actors complements the area you're exploring and the puzzles you're attempting to solve. Together, it will leave you mesmerized and enlightened as you progress with the story.

Lifeless Moon Review: Mechanics & UI Issues

However, a few things hindered my gameplay experience, which boils down to the mechanics itself. Firstly, the puzzles, despite being more present in Lifeless Moon compared to Lifeless Planet, are challenging at times, which for non-puzzle gamers, can frustrate them at times.

Even for myself, I spent around 5-8 minutes attempting to solve one puzzle, in which the clues can be staring at you, but the game explicitly doesn't state this, as no hints are provided. The UI is extremely minimalist, with no map indicators or any geographical points that could help give you a sense of direction, which had me relying on my wits to keep exploring until I discovered something new.

Additionally, while you'll be alerted to new Inventory items and notes added to your logbook occasionally, keeping track of the mission objectives was hidden in your logbook and not on your screen. Meaning that now and then, you'll have to check the logbook to view what your current or next mission objective might be, which can be tedious at times, and the objectives can be somewhat vague in descriptions to help you understand what to do next.

Lifeless Moon Review: Final Verdict

Despite some criticisms regarding gameplay and UI issues, the well-written narrative and the gorgeous music guide you on a surreal adventure on the Moon in which the events that occur have plenty of meaning to the overall story. While specific plot points are pretty bizarre, it doesn't take away from what's occurring and why each scientist had done what they've done, which you'll have to investigate.

The game is relatively short, as I have completed it in four hours with only 52% of the Achievements unlocked, meaning a replay for some of the chapters will be required to get all the Achievements. However, the game's narrative could've benefited from more time, but the puzzles have a good challenge to them, and the environments are varied yet unique each time you step and enter from a portal.

Nevertheless, for what it offers: plenty of otherworldly environments, a philosophical yet somber approach to narrative, atmospheric musical compositions, and moderately challenging puzzles from an independent studio, Lifeless Moon is an impressive follow-up that will have you in your thoughts long after it ends and it's for a reason, a fair 3/5 is the final verdict!

Lifeless Moon is available on PC via Steam, with plans for its console release to arrive soon.