By John Walker on January 8th, 2010 at 12:19 am.
This isn’t a Gillen Special Graphic Annotation. I swear to you those words are in the game’s opening scenes. There’s a demo out for an adventure called Green Moon. I have a challenge for you: Tell me what’s going on?
The game seems to be some sort of combination of a Myst-style adventure crossed with a hidden object game. Except rather than giving you a list of objects to find in each location, it just has locations packed with dozens of objects, and an inventory nowhere near big enough for a third of them, and puzzles from the farthest reaches of huh? Amongst the clutter of things to pick up are “clues”. I’m not sure that was enough speech marks. “”"”"clues”"”"”. Better. For instance:
It all links to various things you find – there’s another clue saying, “This cloth is made of spider silk,” written on, er, a newspaper. There’s a spider web in the basement you can pick up. And some stones in the garden? Good heavens, I don’t know. The closest thing I saw to a puzzle was a ring on the sofa that was – brilliantly – accompanied by a hand-written note reading:
It’s an odd note to leave to be sure. But you know what? I found a gem in the bedroom! Which, um, I can’t click on the ring. So how about the recipes from the book I found? Well, I found this “”"”"clue”"”"” in the kitchen (I think this new grammar is going to catch on):
Obviously there’s no need to explain that for you. So I’ll put some of the eggs from the fridge into the pot that contains tiny samples of seasonings I can’t pick up? Oh, no I won’t, they magic back into the fridge when I do that. At which point I conceded defeat.
There’s one other thing I have to share with you about this. The title bar text for the game’s site. It reads:
“The most expected release of 2009.”
This is officially the best thing ever.
(Oh, and even the game’s publishers seem to be bemused by whatever they’re publishing, with this spectacular review of the game.)
If you want to try, get the demo here. I will leave you with this one final message of wisdom, before I wander outside into the street to scream at the sky:
If 2D, instant winner!
report
Oh, it’s 2D my friend.
report
That review is fantastic!
report
“Green Moon is calling for you to complete an amazing but fine mission and make the eternal dream of humanity come true.”
i want whoever wrote that to write all of my copy.
report
Got to be Obama’s speech writer.
If not, he should be.
report
infinite diversities in interpretation amaze me.
report
I seem to recall Kieron saying something once to the effect that the best games journalism tends to be when the person is writing about something they really love. Clearly, this rule needs an addendum for our Mr. W.
report
“Anyway, do mind your every step and think twice before applying unidentified objects.”
Sage advice indeed. That review is splendid!
I guess this game requires the mentality of the South Park imagining of the Hardy Boys to complete!
report
What the shit.
report
Also: that dude in the photo looks like me in about five years time. Ye gods.
report
It’s not too late to buy square rimmed glasses!
report
Or even wash your hair.
report
Hair is for the weak.
report
Wow, the review on their site really is an exceptional piece of nonsense.
report
from the Feedback Page.
“I play it on my Nokia 6680 and my girlfriend on her Sendo X. ..When we got quarreled we compete in Rat’n'Speas and the one who is lost confess that she was not right:”
I’m guessing Chinese.
report
Check that, Ukraine.
freezing lines separate poesy and Babelfish.
report
No normal person wants to be stuck on a puzzle involving unsafe wiring. This is why all adventure games should have a Dan character.
report
My mind is all boggled, now. I can make sense of none of this, and if it weren’t for the fact that the game exists, I’d be tempted to believe it was an elaborate joke. I’m still half-wondering, as it is.
report
my lord please write more stories so that face will stop staring at me every time i load the RPS page!!!
report
” To cut the long story short, the game is sure to glue you to the screen till its outro and continue calling you for the unknown even in your dreams. Start for the inconceivable journey and face its dangers to find yourself on the Green Moon! ”
awwww
report
In the second screenshot from the bottom it looks like someones sitting down to a lovely breakfast of dog shit.
And thanks Mr. W for my first laugh of the day. It would have been even better if I wasn’t eating at the time!
report
The developers are Ukrainian, and a lot of the translation sounds like it’s been done from dictionaries (both the game and the reviews). I work with foreign students and can say that whenever they use a dictionary to look up a word, it regularly presents them with the wrong word. It’s pretty lame.
There’s a seemingly helpful forum here for anyone who’s stuck:
http://www.gamezebo.com/games/green-moon/forum/green-moon-forum-now-open
report
I’m fairly convinced this isn’t a case of being lost in translation : ) I think it may have just started lost.
report
The first clue is ice or coldness or something. I’m a genius!
Ummm… not sure about the bread crust one though.
report
‘Amazing but fine’ how bloody low are their production values? They could have paid me a free copy of the game or 50p and some buttons and I would have re-written the english in a way that was at least vaguely understandable.
report
Hey, so I grabbed the demo, fired up a walkthrough, and tried to chug through as much of it as I could in the hour I was allowed.
During that time I went to the moon, but I couldn’t breathe there, and was given ten seconds to leave again before I died. I then went into the past, to a volcano, and grabbed a bit of rock. No idea why.
I caught a mouse with a mouse-trap, though, in the single puzzle that made any sense of the roughly 30 or so I had to solve, in a sort of hideous quick-fire lesson in exactly how not to make an adventure game.
The “clues” aren’t clues, it turns out, eventually. They are – get this – magical spells. You combine various arbitrary items in a cauldron (a pair of glasses with bread dough, for example), then apply the spell to them to give you a new power, which grants you access to a new part of the game, in which you’re told you can’t go there yet and to try again later.
I have literally no idea what the story is. I have literally no idea if it’s trying to tell a story.
This is the sort of logic the game works with:
You’re told you need a good pair of shoes to go where you’re going. Where you’re going turns out to be the moon, but the game doesn’t tell you that yet. In order to do so, you have to collect a pair of horseshoes, a handful of sand, a small stone (which sometimes won’t let you click on it), and some thread. Combining these with water and a scrawled piece of magic, and then pouring the solution over a pair of old, knackered boots, gives you the sturdy footware you need.
But get this: it’s totally easy. Why? Because after the most impossibly stupid of opening half-hours, in which you must click on everything until finally a key turns up inside a clock (after you’ve been told that you’d never lose the key because it’s hidden somewhere you go every day), and you go down into the basement and find a huge book, the book tells you how to complete the game. Quite literally. It sets you twelve tasks, and gives you a step-by-step of exactly what you need to do in order to complete them. Oh, sure, there are very lightweight puzzles along the way (you need some mistletoe. But oh, look, there’s a note right there that says “hey, did you know witches used to make brooms out of mistletoe?” and there’s a broom right there as well), but other than that, it’s basically a walkthrough. Inside the game.
This is implausibly stupid.
report
Oh, also, if you play in a window, the name of the game in the bar at the top isn’t Green Moon. It’s The Playground. What the silly sausage?
report
The “review” by the publishers is truly fantastic. Quotable sentences abound, which get more funny the more you think about them, including:
“Saying without exaggeration, the developers really managed to make a go of it.”
or my favorite,
“If an original quest presupposes wandering around a decent number of locations trying to find or obtain a certain item, here you go! ”
“Though, to be frank, the idea that everything you happen to stumble upon must be used somewhere may haunt a player just for want of habit.”
“Take your ticket to the Moon in this breath-catching adventure which is going to drag you through such unpredictable places as damp prehistoric forests…”
report
Awesomeness abounds if you will but explore that review site a little further:
‘You know, every game has both positive and negative sides. But Zuma’s revenge has more pluses. I think that this game has already receommended itself as a truely worthy game and you will not be upset after purchasing it. But it is still your choice whether to buy it or not. ‘
report