Lifeless Moon Preview
Lifeless Moon from Stage 2 Studios is less a sequel and more of a spiritual followup to their 2014 game, Lifeless Planet. This is a puzzle-platforming adventure that, at least at the start, takes place on our Moon.
Stage 2 Studio gave COGconnected a sneak preview of the game, including the first two levels. The game takes place in the era of Apollo astronauts. You play the game from a third-person over-the-shoulder POV and start inside a moon crater where your first mission is to find your fellow astronaut.
It’s a little disconcerting to see your character zip across the moon’s surface in his space suit. I’ve seen too many Apollo moon walks where astronauts bound about in the moon’s lower gravity in a near-slow-motion style. However, it’s a concession gladly taken as it speeds up traveling around the moon.
In the preview build, the only control method available is the keyboard. You use the arrow characters to move and the space bar to interact with objects. To keep track of your progress, a notebook is accessed by pressing the ‘N’ key. As you move about the world, you’ll be picking up notes that build up the story.
Lifeless Moon – Successor to Lifeless Planet
Once you find your partner, your next quest is to find a way out of the crater. With that accomplished, you notice a light in the distance and travel toward it. What you discover is right out of Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles. It’s a portion of a downtown section of a small American town. There’s a diner, a radio station, a garage, a school, and portions of other structures.
This orphaned town presents more puzzles for you to discover. These new puzzles also introduce the inventory system. As well, you will find logs, notes, and other clues that detail what happened to this town. You will also discover what happened to the citizens unfortunate enough to have been present when this event happened.
There is also the mystery of how the town came to be moved to the moon. Also, there are hints of advanced technology and a far greater mystery and puzzles for you to discover and solve. The preview ends here, but from the trailer, we can speculate that a journey to other locations, other places in time, and other dimensions await players.
You can also expect to gain new abilities to facilitate puzzle-solving and platforming. From the trailer, you can see that one of these functions will be the use of a jetpack. A necessity given the broken rules of physics on display.
Kickstarter Passion Project
Lifeless Moon is a Kickstarter-funded game created by a small team. The game will launch on PC, on August 10, 2023. From there, releases to console platforms are expected to follow. This is a passion project that looks poised to not only reward fans of Lifeless Planet but to entice new gamers to enter this new journey.
Thank you for keeping it locked on COGconnected.
