Under The Moon looks very much like someone’s first game. The low-poly style looks worse than the classic Synty Studios assets, it’s poorly optimised, suffers from screen tearing, poor UI, bugs, poor game design, and limited gameplay.
It opens with a cutscene which runs in low framerate, with voice acting that sounds robotic (maybe even using a computerised voice), then you see a cat clipping through the house roof, it moves horizontally instead of following the surface, then you are into the game.
The aim of the game is to solve riddles by finding the correct object in the scene. Each level features one long street (it can look like there are branching streets but you just hit an invisible wall). It’s very tedious to move from one end to the other due to the length and slow movement speed. I think it could have been improved by allowing you to teleport from one side to the other like old games allow you to do like Pac-Man. An organic design could have just had the roads in a square so you can just continuously follow the path to loop around.
Each riddle pops up in a dialog box, and some of these can feature spelling/grammar errors. Then it’s up to you to guess. Many were decent riddles, but some near the end were very cryptic. You just walk up to an object and press a button and there’s no penalty for getting it wrong. Therefore you can just keep tapping the button near objects in hope that you get it. There’s no feedback to show what you are selecting and when certain objects are small, it’s hard to work out what they are. So you might think “I hope that is a tomato”. Then since the game is poorly made, you wonder if it is a bug that it isn’t responding to your selection since there is no feedback for a wrong answer or if nothing even is in range. There was one clue where the answer was a coffin, but there were several coffins in the area, and only one of them seemed to trigger.
Once you solve several riddles, you have completed the level, but instead of the next one starting, it makes you run all the way to the right to reach the end of the level. There are maybe 5 levels with different themes: Coast, Egypt, China, ice, village, but the layout is the same; just one long road. The levels feature lots of people randomly moving about so at least there’s some detail.
I found that a few of the default controls didn’t work, but after remapping the controller; it worked fine.
I think the tutorial text instructed that it picks a selection of riddles, so if you wanted to replay it, you will get new challenges; but I definitely couldn’t be bothered verifying that.
The credits seemed to cut out early, which is an appropriate ending to the game.