MOONROT

I wanted to like this game, because the premise is super interesting - there's so much you can do with a lonely moon rover photographing creepy space rocks. But the execution just does not hold up. Controls are ROUGH, and it may be by design, piloting a moon rover isn't *easy* exactly, but the turning just felt abysmal and had me careening into cliffs and off of craters several times. The only real "punishment" is getting sent back to the last sunlight checkpoint, which isn't awful, but some of the anomaly locations are VERY far from these points so you lose a lot of time if you crash. The atmosphere was good and creepy, for the most part, but my frustration with the controls unfortunately shattered any buildup attempted. A couple peeks of an alien, some anomalous structures, some weird sounds, all good stuff but nothing incredibly scary. This is going to sound unfair. I love this whole game genre of "isolated and lost trying to find anomalies while the scares ramp up to absurdity", but the concept deserves iteration, not imitation. While only being relatively an hour-or-shorter, Moonrot is just Iron Lung but Again. It doesn't bring anything new to the concept outside of being in space instead of underwater. It needed something more to make it stand out better. Not terrible, but not amazing. I would like to see more and better from the developer, for sure, as like I said, there's some interesting stuff here!