The Moonstone Equation

As someone who's a fan of information-based games, especially ones where there are hidden languages to discover, this game sounded perfect for me. Unfortunately, not only did the game not live up to those expectations, but it's also a completely unplayable, bug-ridden mess.

In terms of the core mechanics, you're exploring the world and solving puzzles. The exploration is fine, but while the world is fairly small, it eventually becomes annoying to traverse due to the lack of fast travel and shortcuts. Some of the puzzles are pretty good, though they can feel a bit repetetive or trial and error-y sometimes. Unfortunately, while I expected from the game's pitch which mentioned the scientific method to have to do a lot of experimentation to figure out the game's rules, they were simpler than I expected, and so there was not as much discovery as I hoped for.

The game sort of has a story, which you mostly just figure out by reading character's various notes in computer terminals (well, at least if they're not entirely broken). But unfortunately from what I've gathered at least, the story isn't all too interesting, and the writing is TERRIBLE. Lots of grammatical errors, things that just sound awkward or overly simplified and so on. Characters you speak to have very limited dialogue, and even worse, they are for some reason tied to the real life day/night cycle? I have no idea why this is the case, as it only serves to remove this mechanic at night without a real benefit (at least that I've found so far). And due to the computer terminals being completely broken (every other line just doesn't render... how do you fuck this up?) I had to create an external program which hacks into the game's memory and reads the raw bytes to even interact with this part of the game at all.

In terms of the game's language, while I haven't done much with it, the game just... gives you the translation for nearly every word at a certain point. Which is super strange, because if you wanted this to be an interesting puzzle, it just... isn't. It seems that all you're intended to do is manually find every word in the chart of words you're given, which is boring and tedious due to the small interface in the computer terminal (which you need to hack the game to even view, anyway). I'm going to try and purposefully restrict my viewing of the words the game gives you to only the Moonstone Equation itself and a few other things and see if the rest is deducable from context, if so, then you can at least turn this into a neat puzzle by purposefully playing it in this way. We'll see.

Overall, I think I know how to beat the game now and am just slowly going through the various puzzles, with mixed feelings about them. But overall, the game has been nothing but a dissapointment, with shitty writing, constant bugs, and an overall lack of focus with regard to the game's mechanics put together. I'll probably still end up finishing the game and will update this review if there seems to be any interesting endgame content.

I haven't completed the game, and have mixed feelings about the game so far.
* I like the puzzles which is the main focus of the game, and from what Ive seen so far very Sokoban like with other mechanics keep it fresh and exciting to solve. Love it!
* The real time correlation to night / day in game is very interesting!
* Navigating the labs / town - it's fun to explore the unknown, but not having a built in map in this metroidvania style game makes it unnecessarily difficult. And making my own map as I go makes it mildly easier, and have found certain areas are not so easy to map out manually.
* The terminals - both cool and annoying - everything in the game has a purpose right? the journal entries while short I don't see the purpose that they serve so far.
* Game Progression - this is a player comfort more than anything; I have multiple objectives that I have found and written down on a notepad, but not seeing a tracker in game which would be nice to have.
* Collectibles - The game does track quantity of collectibles and items that you need, but doesn't track what specific combination that you have acquired so far which I understand to be relevant for parts of the late game.

Overall I recommend The Moonstone Equation for the vibe and puzzles, it's a delight to play for that! There are a couple game features that it's missing that would make for a even better play experience.

This game looks like it has a lot going for it and a lot of potential. But the developer has basically abandoned it even though there are game-breaking bugs stopping people making any progress. He has admitted on Twitter that he is done with it and it sounds like he has no plans to fix anything. Such a shame.

It's a bare bones block pusher..?
The block puzzles aren't very good, and they reset themselves regularly. There's no undo either? Lots of wasted time.
You're 'rewarded' for solving them thoroughly, but you can't check which ones you've solved (or if they are solvable at all).
The environment itself... exists. You simply run around expansive areas wondering what you're supposed to be doing. The characters also exist, they say words...
Everything looks nice, though!
The music is... drone? I think that's the genre. It's very loud and clips like crazy. That might be part of the aesthetic, but it feels really out of place.
It's buggy, too. Some areas have really messed up collision, especially the boxes, which the entire game is made of. I got soft-locked once when interacting with a door. The arcade games don't obey in-game volume settings.
Dunno, there's clearly a lot of effort put into it, but it comes up short pretty much everywhere besides the art.

This game is not well known enough; it is a must have for people who love both logic and language puzzles.

This game offers an amazing puzzle solving experience. It is not easy to figure out what you are supposed to be doing, and the game can be frustrating until you find your first red doors and gold doors . Furthermore, the platforming controls can be clunky, with several frustratingly difficult jumps. Also, there are occasional bugs and crashes (the game is mostly a one-man labor of love). However, if you can get past these downsides, the offers amazing logical puzzles, a whole fictional language which you do NOT need to decode yourself, together with puzzles based around understanding the writings in surprising ways, and even a very clever hacking game.

It took me three tries to get into this game. The first two times, I got super lost, both in a "I don't know where to go" sense, because the world can get very dark and confusing, and in a "I don't know what to do sense," because I had not discovered the thing to do that opens up the main part of the game. After both failed starts, I put down the game for several months. Only after I saw a streamer (Jonathon Blow) play the game, and see him figure out the thing I was stuck on, did I start the game for the third time, and play it to completion with zeal.

Once you get into it, however, the game is very impressive in its puzzle design. You will find yourself thinking in this ancient alien language, writing down symbols on pages of scratch work and then hunting for them in the world, and pondering the secrets of the universe. The "ah-ha!" moments in this game are spectacular, and by the end of the game you will see these abstract blocks in a new light.

There are a lot of obvious comparisons to Fez, but the Moonstone Equation is much better. Fez did have cool history and lore, but it was not fun to decode Fez's codes, just a lot of work. Also, Fez's basic puzzles were way to easy. The Moonstone Equation has a little less lore, but much higher quality logical puzzles, and the language meta-puzzle in Moonstone is actually accessible and hinted at well.

My advice is to buy this game right now. If you find yourself getting super stuck and frustrated, leave a comment on this review and I will personally give you a hint.

...man. I don't like writing negative reviews for one-man dev indie projects, especially ones that aren't even, like... bad, just... I don't quite -get- this game I guess. The basic puzzles themselves are very generic block pushing puzzles with not really any unique twists on the mechanics - the first block puzzle looks no different from the last. There's also pathfinding puzzles to unlock a few doors but they are so quick and there are so few they're almost not worth mentioning. Past that, there's a (fairly small) game world to explore that has a decent amount tucked away in it but never feels too expansive... except there's no map to navigate it, and the map is basically two halves connected by one area each way (and there's a spot in the "loop" that's one-way and forces you go to all the way back through the entire loop, without fast travel...) But it's not really satisfying to explore, or all that interesting. The game is populated with a dozen or so characters, none of which have any personality whatsoever and none of which really need to be interacted with to "complete the game". There are interactions you -can- do and achievements related to these, but none of it is something you're incentivized to do. And there's an entire language system which, again, you have no incentive to interact with. The full translations for the language are kept in one room you don't have to go to to complete the game and if desired I guess you could go around translating all the text found in the interface rooms, but... why? I don't have any incentive to do so, so I didn't bother.

Now then, the main gameplay loop. You need to collect trigger stones and data blocks and take them to interface rooms to turn on a terminal on the moon. Okay. Trigger stones are pretty reasonable to get. Find artifact rooms, solve a simple puzzle, done. Data blocks are not really indicated anywhere in the game other than one NPC room and even then there's not really any indication that I can find, other than a room on the moon containing data block locks, that tells you which data blocks are valid or not. Oh, also, there are places on the map where it looks like you -could- make data blocks, but you can't. Two hours of my 9 hour play time came from trying to solve puzzles in places where there was no puzzle to solve, because ??? I don't know, the puzzle design in this game is just sloppy like that. The cool part is going to an interface room, having to solve a puzzle to get to the interface, and then not having both the trigger stone and CORRECT (read: each data block only works in one specific place - good luck!) data block, well, now you have to backtrack to find them. Also, it's very easy to get stuck in interface rooms and have to reload, which will reset the puzzle, too. Because puzzles just reset a lot in this game! Enjoy redoing the same puzzles over and over again because you flubbed a jump with the very primitive platforming controls the game has! Anyways once you've wasted enough time roaming around the map to activate all 12 interfaces you gotta go to the moon and do a very disorienting "match the shapes" puzzle where three of the twelve tiles are all but identical and the required solution involves figuring out which three and then brute forcing all combinations until the solution is accepted.

I just... this game's a mess, man. It feels half-baked, overstuffed with a bunch of ideas and mechanics that it doesn't make good use of, wrapped around a core gameplay loop that isn't that engaging and is only challenging when it presents a puzzle setup that is literally not a puzzle meant to be solved - all the -actual- puzzles I solved in 5 minutes or so at most, which I guess should've been a sign that the ones I couldn't solve weren't puzzles at all, but... again, not indicated! I respect the attempt and there are... ideas here, for sure, again, nothing here is outright awful, just kind of mediocre as a baseline, but man, I just didn't end up enjoying this very much.

Oh and the music gets reeeally annoying really fast but whatever I can mute the game audio.

Anyways if you want a really great exploration/block pushing hybrid go check out full bore, one of the best puzzle games out there for my money. Uhh. Yeah.

Love the game, hate the puzzle placement

Both puzzle and open-ended exploration games demand patience to be appreciated, and the requirement is all the greater if the genres are combined. The Moonstone Equation, however, seems deliberately designed to tax the player's tolerance for tedium as much as possible. What fun there is to be had is locked behind a wall of boredom, of content seemingly not intended even by the developer to be engaging.
The game simply lacks a map and fast-travel, two staples of open-ended exploration in video games. These sound like bad things, and they are, but the game's world is mercifully small and simple to navigate. Indeed, were the actual activity of traversing the game's world fun, it might benefit the experience for the player to be forced to internalize the world's structure.
However, the game's world is simply devoid of any form of engaging activities. The game's bona-fide puzzles, first of all, are entirely sequestered away from the rest of the world behind special portals scattered throughout the world. Getting from point A to point B almost never requires any kind of puzzle-solving, and what puzzle-solving is required for locomotion seems deliberately pared down from the game's own more serious offerings.
This game features player physics that could, theoretically, serve as the foundation for some form of platforming challenge, but in my time playing this was mostly absent. You are expected to jump over pits, etc., but "platforming" in this game is entirely between stationary platforms with no mobile obstacles. It's mostly trivially easy, but some jumps require relatively precise timing to get the full distance necessary to progress. As I played, I found myself more frequently undone by misjudgments of the player character's jumping capabilities than by timing, though neither was satisfying as a cause for punishment. Compounding this is the fact that the game punishes you mainly by forcing you to loop back around through an empty environment; while the game has a reset feature that teleports the player back to the most-recently used door, the advantage is often dubious.
The world isn't massive, but there's ample space that the player must navigate and traverse in the ways I described above in order to find their objectives. As a result, the game simply feels like a timesink; so much time is spent mindlessly wandering. The game world isn't a terribly compelling place to just wander around in, either. There's a run-down town, some sewers, a laboratory complex, and some caves; all of these locales are exactly as boring as they could possibly be. The game does manage to conjure up some good atmosphere in the puzzle rooms, but these are the places where atmosphere is least needed. The story and lore are severely hampered by robotic writing, often-awkward grammar and the fact that much of it is locked behind terminals that needlessly force the player to navigate a special interface to look at what is essentially a bulletin board.
The "bona fide" puzzles themselves are all based on a very small set of mechanics that don't really get used in very interesting ways. You slide special blocks around, and if two blocks adorned with matching symbols come into contact, both disappear. Sometimes the player must use conveyor devices to transport the blocks. Most puzzles involve eliminating a given number of blocks in a particular room to get past a gate. They can be enjoyable, admittedly, even if the mechanics are simple, but it's far from enough justify the tedium necessary to reach them, let alone in a game you're expected to pay money to play.
I didn't finish the game, but I've fully activated six interface rooms and I have zero indication from the game that it's going to get any better. I've already spent $10 on this game, I don't need to give it any more of my time. Feel free to let me know if the game suddenly turns amazing midway through.

I really wanted to recommend this game. A ton of work has gone into it, and it plays really well...

Until you get about halfway or more through, at which point you realize that you need to wander around the map aimlessly, hoping to stumble upon the spots that you need to be in.

And because there's no map and no fast travel, and the connections between areas seem almost random, finding things is quite painful.

Reading the forums, I realize there's something I haven't done, but since I don't know how to get back there, or if I *did* go there that it'd actually start happening, I've not a lot of interest in trying.

The only other thing I know to do involves wandering around, looking for the right areas to collect something, and hoping I recognize them for what they are. I've not a lot of interest in that, either.

I've been looking for a game like this for a long time and I love that I found it! The puzzles in this game can be quite hard, but still remain very intuitive. Apart from the puzzles, the lore in the game is extensive and even though it is optional to discover everything, I would highly recommend looking into the language and the "programming".
For me it was also very satisfying to get achievements that apparently almost nobody else found.

There are however some bugs in the game, which will hopefully be removed in future updates. I will black the next part out, because they contain the specific bugs, so the developer will hopefully see them:
1. When first going to the moon, if you jump down too fast, the conversation with Cyrus bugs out and you get softlocked. In general, some of the conversations are a bit buggy. 2. I have found Pembrooke, but I never got the achievement. 3. In the underworks Interface world, there is a place where you can jump into water and get softlocked. 4. Also, and this is of course not really a bug, I sometimes feel the platforming is unnecessarily tight. You can barely make a jump where you go up two blocks and right/left two blocks. If this would be slightly less tight, some of the platforming would feel less frustrating.

Overall though, I would definitely recommend this game to people that like spending a long time on difficult puzzles and lore. I don't think the game is for everyone, but it should definitely be better known than it is.

Thanks r/Fez.
Proof that solo-devved games can still be amazing.

Pros:
AMAZING Atmosphere and Story
Difficult Puzzles
Nice Music

Cons:
oh my god these puzzles are hard

I can't believe I haven't reviewed this game yet! The Moonstone Equation is a pretty incredible game and honestly should be far better-known than it is. It has a feeling of the world having an incredible amount of depth and lots of secrets to find and lore to uncover. It also has some really nice puzzles based mostly on simple block-pushing mechanics that you can do surprisingly much with. These puzzles are pretty much the perfect difficulty IMO, not too easy but not too frustratingly difficult. But if you solve all of these and want more to do there's another layer of much more obscure puzzles to solve as well. My one gripe with the game are a couple of minor bugs (such as a lagging camera at times) that don't nearly ruin the experince, and a lot of backtracking at times, but the world is interconnected enough to not make this too tedious. I very much recommend this game for fans of any puzzle/exploration games.

Beautiful game, amazing achievement.

The Moonstone Equation is one of my favorite game of 2018. It's an awesome puzzle-platformer with a cute cast of caracters, and great puzzles. It can be a bit daunting at first, because the world is quite large, and there's nothing to hold your hand (which is actually why I wrote a guide :)).

What's really great is that the more you play; the more you uncover the lore; the more you get to know the caracters; the more you enjoy the game. There's a LOT of content that can easily be missed if you only focus on the puzzles, but what makes this game awesome is precisely the fact that you can take a break from the puzzles, and just enjoy chatting with everybody (or reading their emails).

I strongly recommend this game. It's beautifully crafted, the music is relaxing, it's challenging but in a good way.

So let's see if you can unravel the mystery of the moonstone equation!

Where do I start...

You play as a scientist named Alice, who just arrives to the hilltop research facility. The intro was very short and straight to the point, giving you only curiosity (and a 4th wall breaking to the media lol). After you run into a mysterious character called Cyrus, you're left alone to discover what to do next, and there is a lot. From block puzzles, an evolving story, "decipherable" language, and... well... I don't want to spoil anything... so I'll just go with curiosity.

This game is a masterpiece in its art, sound, puzzles, dialog, and its own language. Even though I 99.9~% "completed" it, I'm left wondering what I can do next, and there is still a lot. Happy digging :)

This game has a lot of depth but gives you freedom to play it as you wish.

You can focus only on solving puzzles and get to the end without exploring the story or solving any mystery.

But you can explore the story by reading notes and interacting with NPCs;
you can hack the computer system to learn other peoples secrets;
you can find and play minigames;
and finally you can study and decode the moonstone equation.

But the main part are the puzzles and they are designed well.
They vary in difficulty and most of them forces you to learn a new concept or trick.
And I haven't notices any copy-paste puzzles, each one is unique.

Also the game doesn't tell you what to do and finding out what is your goal is part of the game.

I have to mention the music.
It's so good I wish to have full soundtrack just to listen while reading or working.
It's a perfect relaxation/concentration type of music.
For now I leave the game in the background - just for songs.

This is not game for everyone.
There is no score to keep you play, story is simple as well as interaction with NPCs, quests you have to find and keep track by yourself and they are not mandatory.
The only thing that keeps you play is your curiosity - if you have one you will be obsessed with the game.

I recommend the game to all curious minds.
But only those curious enough will solve The Moonstone Equation.

It's an adventure/puzzle/2D platforming voyage of discovery that sees you attempt to figure out the mysterious Moonstone Equation. The pixel art graphics are great, the music is truly great, the puzzles range from simple to tricky to quite fiendish in places and just when you think you've figured it all out, there's something more.

After the initial helping hand, you're left alone to get on with it. You do have a journal with notes to look at for some small hints here and there but the game doesn't hand-walk you through, you have to figure it out yourself and it's all the better for it.

Highly recommended!

The Moonstone Equation is a puzzle/collect-a-thon platformer along the lines of Fez, but about the spirit of research.

There are quite a lot of puzzle rooms, but the overall design of the game makes no point aggravating. At any given point in time there are always many different puzzles to go between, in an open map that has few linear restrictions. The puzzles themselves are pleasantly refreshing because none require you to hunt for the most complex series of moves that need to mentally be laid out beforehand. Instead, everything is meant to require a basic idea for the solution to be clear and fast.

There is not much of a story, but rather a series of world and theme-building elements that run separate to the puzzles. That said, there are quite a few puzzle-like revelations that arise from them to keep things interesting enough. The world itself is designed to be iconic enough to never get lost, which is special for how big it all is.

My favorite aspect of The Moonstone Equation is how well-paced the gameplay is for being so open and having puzzles so satisfying.

Basically you're plopped down in the world that has a bunch of: "Hanging plot threads", "some platforming", "a bunch of investigation", and "puzzles". Where you then go about doing whatever you want, in what seems to be any order you want (as you discover it).

It's nice and relaxing to play. Haven't ran into any enemies, and haven't ran into anything that forces a panic/rush. Will probably want to keep your cellphone camera around, and a notepad since there are hints scattered all about the world and in conversation since investigation does matter.

I like it so far... seems a bit different from games I've been playing lately. The graphics are excellent and absolutely love the music. Controls seem fine and no real gameplay issues other than it crashing a few times when I'd try to quit (but it still saved in those cases). Seems to be a game where you solve various puzzles at your own pace while trying to uncover the bigger story, but i'm still not entirely sure what I'm supposed to be doing (which seems like all part of the fun) so can't really say much for sure yet.