Lifeless Moon (XS) - Review
by Lee Mehr , posted on 06 August 2024 / 1,574 Views
Those who aren't privy to the background information of Lifeless Moon will readily glean it's a passion project on a shoe-string budget. Like its spiritual predecessor, Lifeless Planet, it's an austere Unity Engine title with many purchased assets. Scores of other indie developers like Lifeless Worlds/Stage 2 Studios have taken that route to great success before; after all, it's how each team offloads an intensive workload and smartly utilizes those pre-made items within the game that truly matters. Even after establishing these conditions however, it feels more rewarding to appreciate the behind-the-scenes work versus the game proper.
The approximate decade is the 1970s. After Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's successful mission, NASA's Apollo program continually pushes other astronauts to explore more of the Moon's surface. As our unnamed protagonist and his unnamed co-pilot venture further out from the original moon base, they stumble upon a strange portal. Both are separated in time and place on what initially appears to be the same lunar surface. Things take a turn for the stranger after reaching the top of a hill and seeing a literal Podunk town – replete with a school, radio station, and vintage diner – out in the middle of nowhere. 
It's an effective hook too. After plopping down on some nondescript lunar surface and noting some suspicious rock formations in the logbook, you're subsequently greeted by an empty Pleasantville. Naturally, you're impelled to venture around and figure out what's happening. It follows the most rudimentary game design formula: search for a key to a locked door, follow brightly-colored wires to new locations, and get new journal entries. One slight nuance is the occasional interruption by your lost partner, filling you in on certain details. Whether merely ahead of you or existing within another universe, it's initially unclear, a series of magic vines transmogrify into what's effectively a 3D recording of him or of other people.
Aside from how those magic – seemingly sentient – vines interact with you on occasion, there are hardly any other surprises in this 3D puzzle-platformer template. Once unlocked, the jetpack becomes the most common means of getting around by hopping & hovering between various platforms. The two most common puzzles are handled from two different perspectives. In third-person mode, a special green-glowing rock is nestled somewhere within the semi-open level to discover and place by the portal ring; in first-person mode, you click to points of interest and redirect laser-light sources to actuate other portals. To put it nicely: anyone remotely familiar with the genre has seen this song and dance before; to put it bluntly: it's patently generic.
Aside from the rare intriguing gameplay wrinkle, Lifeless Moon's title gives the game away. While the quasi-heuristic approach to level design could – at least – encourage a bit of innocent fun with its game systems, torpor starts developing after doing the same tasks over and over and over again; worse yet, it's not merely the repetition that gets me but also how it's executed. Sluggishly climbing up and down stairs, patronizing control notifications throughout ("to look around: look around"), blatantly spelling out certain puzzles when they're easy enough already, and other quibbles surround what's often an insipid main course.
A shame then that Lifeless Moon's narrative can't supply enough oxygen to remedy those problems. The fun of its sci-fi shlockiness quickly diminishes by its failure to grasp crucial fundamentals. Among all creative writing tips, one of the most ubiquitous is to know and maintain the best point of view (POV) for your story: first person, second person, third person, and the sub-categories within those. These can be played with too, but the advice is emphasizing that writers having a clear understanding and command of POV. From the start, there's something fundamentally at odds with having a silent protagonist while NPCs don't acknowledge it. There's also the inane narrative convenience of your partner being mostly relegated to audio/video logs despite him supposedly being a few steps ahead and seemingly on a similar path. Wouldn't it be standard protocol to regroup with each other as soon as possible?
This story mismanagement only feels more fractured when considering its detailed collectible notes. In principle, supplementary means of world-building and lore with collectibles is an incredible boon. But the key difference between this and other projects, from Alan Wake to Gone Home, is ensuring that investigation feels emotionally resonant and engaging. Here, you might watch a rather static cutscene and then get a new logbook entry describing things in much greater detail; essentially, our arbitrarily-mute protagonist has far more to say about these events which aren't conveyed in the game proper. By offloading so much about the state of this alien world, the grander conflict foisted upon you, and more to text, you're framed as an incidental errand boy with a story happening around you.
It's a shame this domino effect cascades until the disappointing ending, since the plot synopsis itself has a few things in its favor. There is genuine intrigue in seeing an old-timey town plopped onto a moon (of all places), much like the set of electrical lines leading to a town in Lifeless Planet. Even if some logic feels like Writer/Director David Board was frantically making things up as he went along, the core idea behind these supernatural events feels substantive and interesting. There's also a tangible tension between good & evil characters that deserved more screen time – and proper names for everyone. But those serviceable qualities can't sustain deeper investment because of mismanaged building blocks.
While also a mixed bag, it's harder to denigrate Moon's presentation because of the circumstances surrounding it. Another austere Unity 3D platformer on a straitened budget won't get the same leeway in 2024 as it would in 2014, but it still earns some leeway in my book. The limited technology still makes for some evocative vistas that reinforce the mysterious power unearthed by this world – even if the texture quality, lighting, etc. are low-grade. Musically, Rich Douglas' soundtrack does a lot of heavy lifting in capturing the mystery and majesty of these locales, ultimately making it the game's most consistent quality. All told, you might intuit this as a developer's side project worked on for several years, so the $12.99 asking price for a 3-hour runtime isn’t too shabby – especially with it retailing cheaper than Lifeless Planet, despite substantive inflation in the past decade.
Even when considering its limitations, Lifeless Moon feels like one small step forward and one giant leap backward from its precursor. With rare exemptions, gameplay scenarios follow a trite routine that's felt more challenging and engaging elsewhere. And while the plot on paper captures some fun sci-fi excitement conceptually, fumbling basic fundamentals leads to the story feeling confused and dull. In essence, it was running dangerously low on oxygen while playing and no useful reserves were found while watching.
Contractor by trade and writer by hobby, Lee's obnoxious criticisms have found a way to be featured across several gaming sites: N4G, VGChartz, Gaming Nexus, DarkStation, and TechRaptor! He started gaming in the mid-90s and has had the privilege in playing many games across a plethora of platforms. Reader warning: each click given to his articles only helps to inflate his Texas-sized ego. Proceed with caution.
VGChartz Verdict
4
Poor
This review is based on a digital copy of Lifeless Moon for the XS
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This one was a shame too. I never reviewed Lifeless Planet (here or elsewhere), but my general sentiments were more positive than its successor. It too was biting off more than it could chew, but at least your protagonist felt more involved in the plot. The little things like having a voice and clearer POV fundamentals made it easier to deal with the generic platforming bits.
Not 100% sure if I'd recommend for genre fans - I'd need to revisit, but maybe it's worth a shot when it goes back on sale.
