| Grey Moon: The Hand of Darkness | |
| by Frahhamn | |
| Alcritas’ Review | |
Grey Moon: The Hand of Darkness, by Frahhamn (anschauung@juno.com), shows unmistakable signs of inspiration from the Spiderweb’s Exile (and Avernum) series. In fact, the scenario would do Jeff Vogel proud — technically very well done, with constant and largely pointless combat, topped off by quite a few logic puzzles that don’t seem to have any logical justification.
The plot of Grey Moon is never all that sketched out, but seems to involve some sort of Tardis-like time machine, than enables you to travel into the future, and fight off a hoard of undead. I’m sure there’s probably something more there, somewhere, but it never came across clearly to me, which is a fault in and of itself.
Graphically, Grey Moon makes an early mark, by replacing all the default terrain with “darkened” default terrain. This is effective — for about five minutes. As the entire scenario runs under this cloud, it quickly becomes part of the background. A much more effective use would have been to save the darkened terrain for some special segment, to highlight the effects. Apart from the terrain, Grey Moon uses several new monster graphics, which vary from good (the new Ghouls) to bland (the blacked and whited out Ghouls), and several new item graphics, none of which is of vital importance, or aesthetically remarkable.
Grey Moon is technically flawless, as far as I could tell. There’s nothing overwhelming remarkable, along the lines of a Doom Moon II, for example, but there’s also no bugs to speak of.
Puzzles are present, but nearly all suffer from lack of justification. Those that did not mind such things in the Exile series should not mind them here. Personally, I think they detract from the scenario.
The most prevalent factor in Grey Moon, however, is the constant and meaningless combat. In this aspect, Grey Moon is more like the Exile series than any other. Hack several undead. Open a door. Find another room with nothing in it but several undead. Hack them. Open a door. Find another room.... The cycles repeats endlessly, and it harms the quality of the scenario immensely. There’s no real justification for the constant combat, and although undead need less justification than other monsters, it still presents a plot hole. More importantly, it robs the scenario of most of its playability and enjoyability. Hack fests have been done in spades, there’s no reason to play through another. Although there is some nice touches of personality interjected into the scenario here and there — an undead shrine for example — there aren’t enough to make hacking through legions of unliving worthwhile.
The technical prowess shown in Grey Moon holds out hope for future scenarios designed by the author. This one, however, can easily be passed up.
My score — 6
— Alcritas