Moons Of Madness will haunt this Halloween

The sci-fi first-person spooker Moons Of Madness has reemerged from its dark development cave after a year scratching runes into the wall with splintered fingernails, now aiming to launch around Halloween 2019. And it's also now quietly tied into the spooky-ooky stories of The Secret World, thanks to finding a publisher in the form of Funcom. Observe, a new trailer hinting at spookies including someone with more tentacles than a biped could reasonably require.

Made by Rock Pocket Games, Moons Of Madness is a first-person horror game blending hard sci-fi Martian exploration with squishy, squirming, writhing horror. There you are, out doing Marsbase stuff for a megacorp investigating a strange signal, when oh no! monsties! Are you crazy in the coconut and in need of a final frontier psychiatrist, or are spacehorrors out to get you? Possibly both!

Funcom say that "after [they] came onboard, the two Norwegian studios got together and took the initial concept to new heights through expanded gameplay and scope to fully realise the potential of the bone-chilling story." And that lets them do things like have us play as an employee of the Orochi Group, the mysterious megacorp who had their fingers in all sorts of squirming pies across The Secret World. The connections seem to be more familiar flavour than a full-on sequel or continuation or a story from the MMORPG, in the same way that Funcom's The Park and Hide And Shriek tied into the fictional horrorverse but didn't require going in with knowledge of it.

Moons Of Madness is due to launch close to Halloween this year. The game's site doesn't mention any specific stores, which at this point does have me half-expecting another Epic Games Store exclusive. I've dropped Funcom a line to ask, out of curiosity, but haven't heard back yet.

Update: Funcom tell me stores are "TBD".