It's hard not to think of Iron Lung when first introduced to MOONROT. Each of them puts the player in the position of controlling an imprecisely built machine sent to an alien moon in a desperate search for something to bail out the last remnants of the human race. Each game's primary goal is to travel to a series of coordinates on that moon and document what you find; each game constantly displays the player's coordinates and the angle they're facing; and each moon is haunted. The major difference between the two — Iron Lung's underwater submarine versus MOONROT's on-the-ground rover — may feel entirely aesthetic at first, but comes to guide the gameplay and define the atmosphere in a major way.

Iron Lung's rusty sub descends into an ocean of blood with zero persistent visibility. The only manner by which the player can see is by taking photos through the onboard camera and waiting for them to develop. A photo of a massive skeleton shows that there were, at one point, living leviathans here. The occasional deep, resonant tones and warbling calls that reach you in the sub indicate that these leviathans do indeed still live, but real life knowledge of how well sound travels in large bodies of water can kill this horror very quickly. We can hear whales calling underwater from 1,000 miles away. And whales don't attack submarines — they actually seem to really like hanging out with them, funnily enough! But even without this knowledge, Iron Lung does struggle to scare the player, and deploys maximum smoke-and-mirrors tactics to do so. A proximity alert buzzes intermittently when the sub drifts too close to cave walls, or to imply that something is giving chase. Extra heavy on the "imply" here — it’s not like it’ll catch you. Something bangs on the back interior of the sub partway through the game. Why? Well, to scare you. So you won't get bored. What was it? I dunno. A ghost or whatever. There is something in here and there is something out there, and we’re to be afraid of their aggression, but this is only implied aggression which is never actually threatening.

I don't say all this to dog on Iron Lung. It's a short horror game with a lot of good ideas. But MOONROT is a short horror game with a lot of better and subtler ones. Not all of them shake out perfectly, and there are certainly some pacing things I'd like to see enhanced (spoiler warning when I get to those), but it's one of the most enjoyable horror experiences I've had in a while.

MOONROT's little rover is stellar. I do think it's a little too chipper for the setting (although I guess it is named HOPE, after all), but its slippery bounciness provides a lot of character, welcome jank, and a little bit of friction. Being able to see in every direction may feel like freedom at first, but the steep limitations placed on your vision create a much thicker atmosphere of dread than not being able to see at all. This game is visibly quite dark, and the monochromatic purple-black topography frequently creates paths and pitfalls that don't exist, as well as shadows that come from nothing in particular. The isometric-ish view from which the player sits creates more pointed claustrophobia than the closed-off submarine does. The rover and field-of-view are perfectly proportioned to make you slam the brakes as what turns out to be a small hill and not a bottomless pit comes into view; to feel like something could approach you from the south at any moment and you wouldn't see it until it was too late; to make everything that you see feel like something you aren’t supposed to. Where Iron Lung writes checks it can’t cash, MOONROT is content to sell good old suspense straight to the consumer.

There are three important components of the rover: the solar panels, the camera, and the antenna. The solar panels comprise the only real survival element of the game, which is needing to stay powered by finding the rare shafts of light filtering down to the moon's surface and recharge there. I had a bell-curve relationship with this mechanic: I thought it was kinda pointless, and then cool and stressful, and then kinda pointless again. A bit more on that later, but I felt that this was a pressure point that could've been expanded upon and manipulated to greater effect. The game's opening crawl — another commonality with Iron Lung, I suppose — warns that sunlight is scarce and every opportunity to recharge must be taken. This isn't true, and that's obvious pretty much immediately. The sunny areas are persistent and carefully breadcrumbed between every couple of target coordinates. What if the clouds covered these spots sometimes, and you had to sit and wait in the dark for the sun to return? How long would it take for you to lose confidence in your memory of the coordinates? What if I couldn't rely on my "gamer sense" to know exactly when and where each new sunny spot was going to be?

With that all said, the aforementioned jank of the rover and difficulty navigating the dark moon may be why this didn't go harder. I did die a couple times and found the autosave to be (perhaps overly) generous, presumably for this same reason. It's easy to see how these things could become a pain point without the developer easing up like this. And, as I mentioned with my bell-curve experience, there was a short stretch in the middle where I felt that this was appropriately stressful.

Moving on to the rest of the rover, the camera and radio antenna are how you collect data from the moon and progress. I adore the camera. The crispy-crunchy "PONPH!" sound of the flash bulb is perfect, as is the flash itself: bright enough to be helpful, but fading quickly enough to leave you feeling vulnerable. The camera combined with the field-of-view is where the game can really shine, leaving things just dark enough to need to be illuminated by the camera, or just out of the player's view to require the camera to see them at all. If anything, I wish this was done a little more. That much is a sentiment I can extend to the antenna, which feels a little underbaked. There are some really fun ideas for it; namely, that the antenna is attached to the back of the rover, compared to the camera on the front, which requires you to carefully reverse into position to capture signals. Likewise, you have to remain still to do so. While this all creates some good tension here and there, it never went quite far enough to justify its inclusion to me. Maybe it's because the signals themselves aren't particularly compelling or scary to listen to. I wish there was more in the way of half-unintelligible sounds and speech, or more three-dimensional, building action, but it mostly sounded like a lot of staticy whatever. There were also some random points of interest which were not themselves target sites which I had hoped to hear signals from or get some other "reward" for finding, like a scary little Easter egg photo.

Overall, my negatives for MOONROT are all "there should have been more of this" — a great problem to have. I loved my time with the game and hope that developer Bee Braun, not at all known for horror, does more in the future. You can get it on itch or Steam.

I have some more to say about some pacing things to do with the ending. For both MOONROT and Iron Lung, this is your

SPOILER WARNING

The ending stretch of the game is the synthesis of my little complaints. This is absolutely the most visually interesting area, where the game fulfills the latent promise of spectactle that dropping onto an alien moon gives. But I found the leadup to it to be a bit awkward from a pacing standpoint. The name of the final target site (The Anomaly) sends a very clear message that this is the finale, and you are not coming back. However, following the coordinates directly from the previous target site is futile, which is really, really unfortunate. Heading due east towards The Anomaly, the player finds themselves in the lowest visibility zone yet. Although the terrain is mostly flat, there's a thick, purple fog blanketing the area, and zero ambient light whatsoever. Although it's not always necessary, this darkness encourages the player to use the camera flash to safely traverse the dark, even though it can only illuminate a few meters in front of the rover (and only for a split second) at a time. The prior site is also close and on a direct enough path from the most recent sunbeam that, all charged up, I felt encouraged to go on a full descent into madness run and operate with total disregard for anything but the end goal. There was never a return trip planned, anyways. But it's not up there! You have to go back to the sunbeam and take a totally different, much safer, and more clearly lit route. Given the nature of the ending, which includes the removal of a couple HUD elements, I'd be all for a total failure of the HUD conveniently allowing the player to continue on as if the battery is full to ensure that this final stretch really feels like a final stretch — uncomfortably and improbably long. As it is, it sets itself up as another standard trip to a coordinate, while the name of the target site and descent itself make it obvious that this is it. I wanted that tension drawn out even more.

MOONROT also makes the mistake of totally releasing that tension at the very end when it isn't that kind of game, nor that kind of story. Because Iron Lung struggles to create real horror, its ending is punctuated by a jumpscare of a giant, silly-looking fish busting into the back of the submarine. MOONROT does something somewhat similar right as it cuts to the end crawl, which I was disappointed to see. I enjoyed the brief, intense flash of fear as a Thing dropped down from the ceiling and lunged at the rover, but was then met with a real sense of dissatisfaction. I was afraid of these entities when I had seen them earlier, but I wasn't exactly under the impression that they were hunting me. I don't even know what they are. I was afraid of The Anomaly, but I don't know what that is, either. That uncertainty is more powerful than them acting as regular ole evil aliens. If this is a story of futile desperation, where HOPE is killed, then I would want its death to be as slow, excruciating, and unknowable as the proposed extinction of humanity which bookends the game's simple narrative. Does it spin its wheels until it runs out of battery, grasping for purchase in the mysteriously slick and fleshy caverns of The Anomaly? Does a sinkhole open up beneath it on its way to the surface in what may or may not be a freak accident? Do these Things uncaringly pick it apart or keep it captive for eternity? I don't know, but the period at the end of this game's sentence was a bit of a disappointing one, especially for how well it seemed to understand itself for the rest of its runtime.