Claire de Lune Reviews

I'm going to start and say that Spencer Cannon as John, and David Autovino as Arturo killed it. They did a fantastic job reading for their parts, with the pathos and silliness of their respective roles. Their dialog is the best written part of the game. And that's about where the praise ends. Here's how the game goes. You start off as a concerned dad in a space ship with your surly teenage daughter. For some reason, your ship's AI thinks it is a good reason to traverse restricted space and then somehow you are pulled down to the planet (this will never be addressed again). You put your daughter in the escape pod, and you ride out the ship crash by removing the AI's security shackles. You crash. Your daughter crashes. You get a puzzle gun to solve maneuvering based puzzles. You can make a cube, a boost pad (trampoline), push, and pull objects from other pads... and of course these can only be put on certain surfaces. I cannot overstate how many times you are going to die leaping across gorges and being SLIGHTLY too high to survive the hit, or you miss the cube, or the cube's spawn in time is slightly delayed so it pushes you off course. Seriously. You will see LOADING... a lot. Arturo, the AI, can fix your ship without your help. And if you hadn't sent Claire off in the escape pod, she'd be with you and you two could just sit there and wait. When safety equipment fails, it fails to fail-safe. Which means your daughter is badly injured in the crash and there's a log that says she was taken by medivac to a nearby facility. When you get there and adventure through it, you find out that it's full of mad scientists, the patients (held prisoner) have escaped and fled the planet, and there's a hostile AI that has no compunction about killing. Or hacking your AI buddy, Arturo. If you aren't using the puzzle gun, you're doing the most basic mind teasers: logic puzzles, hexagons with matching sides, tracing your way through a maze. John will comment on what you should do, and Arturo will just tell you over and over until you completely lose agency. You're just doing what you're told and nodding along. The plot, like the gameplay, is completely lost by this point. Still, it's egregious that the game takes the puzzle gun away from you. John gives it up, as if he's giving up a part of his shady past, ready to move on. And then the only living human you've found turns out to be a mad scientist and the last 10 minutes gives you a pulse rifle and turns the final level into a shooting gallery. It's completely counter to the plot, character development, and the game to this point. I mean, I was ticked at the physics puzzles but way to rob yourself of an ending. By this point, Arturo and the hostile AI have merged, you have a fist fight with the doctor, and you finally see Claire. Unconscious and paralyzed and apparently she's been heavily experimented on... but that seems unlikely since she's still wearing her only set of clothes. Maybe the mad scientist is a liar. In the end, you're teleported back to your ship and Claire isn't moving and the merged AI says if you remove its security programming, it will help. Some color blobs swim around, Claire's eyes open, she gasps, and the game ends. There should have been more to say about the human/AI relationship, as it's the only real one in the game. There should have been something between father and daughter. There should have been some sort of explanation for the jail break, other than that a few doctors and the patients were working together and sabotaged a science experiment for cover. Who is this mad scientist? Why does he get away with it? Where is his characterization? What the hell caused our ship to get sucked down to the planet? Wouldn't recommend. The puzzles are not good, the physics/platforming part is underdeveloped, and the story themes and beats needed more elaboration. This game would have been better as a visual novel or walking simulator, because then there would have been more of the ideas and less of the jank gameplay.