What is MirrorMoon EP? Good question. It’s a game where you diddle with switches on a dashboard, go to planets, walk around them and then leave. This is not a flippant description, it’s actually quite accurate, but let’s go a bit in-depth here so as to give the game fair time. Let’s be clear though, I could probably wrap the review up in this one paragraph.
To merely say “I don’t get this game” would be insufficient. It first insinuates blame on me for not understanding, but it also insinuates that there’s something to get. MirrorMoon EP’s advertised “big mystery” might just be that there isn’t one, and that the game’s whole premise is to send you on a wild goose chase for a payoff that literally doesn’t exist.
You begin the game in front of an array of computer panels floating in space. Through a little deduction you’ll quickly learn to press red buttons until the whole array activates and lights up, ready to use. You eventually learn that you can land on a planet by oddly inserting a floppy disk-looking object into a player. Side A, it says. And so you’re plunged down onto your first planet, a reddish planet with a moon looming nearby.
Looking at the moon, it appears to have markers on it, and through some exploration of the planet you’re on, it won’t be difficult to learn that this moon is actually more like a map than an actual body unto itself (hence “MirrorMoon”).
On the planet are a small handful of what I can best describe as being “ghost buildings”… transparent structures, sometimes with no purpose and sometimes housing geometric shapes that, when collected, lock on to your handheld tool. These additions only persist for the planet you’re on, and allow you to manipulate the “moon map”. In this way, you can see points of interest and how they might be found. At least on the initial red planet there was even a piece that allowed you to shoot markers at the moon, and they would appear at the same position on the planet.
Controlling yourself when you’re on a planet is weird. You have no control over your viewing angle; you can’t look up or down. You can turn left or right and walk forward or back, but because your angle is locked, you’ll always be looking at a little bit of ground in front of you and a huge chunk of space above.
When you’re sufficiently ready, you can hit Escape twice to return to your dashboard. From there, a little further diddling made me learn that you can scroll and rotate the galaxy map, and there’s a lever for traveling to the planet that is in the center of that screen.
When you try to go to a new planet, it keeps taking you to the same red planet over and over. After even more fiddling, I learned that you have to flip the disk-looking thing over to Side B in order to travel to other planets, whereas Side A seems to always be the original red planet.
I need to take a second here to address something. I’m doing my best to describe the game, but to you, reader, this probably seems maddeningly chaotic and abstract. Well, it is, and probably on purpose. But let’s carry on.
Traveling to different planets seems to have no real purpose. Not all planets have the same map manipulation tools laying around, some have no useful buildings at all, and some have plenty of both but still no purpose to being there. Indeed, MirrorMoon EP is an exercise in how many times you can do the exact same thing with no payoff, no indication of progress, and yet keep on doing it. For me that was about 3 hours. 3 solid hours traveling from planet to planet, giving the game an extremely fair chance to wow me. Every time I’m met with a differently-colored planet, an assortment of ghost buildings, sometimes the ability to manipulate the moon map, and ultimately shrugging and leaving the planet. I’ve visited around 20 planets and it’s just the same thing every time.
I also occasionally flip to Side A and check back on what I’m calling the “hub planet” but nothing there ever changes either. Sometimes on a planet I’ll find a little white ball, and when I touch it, it makes a promising reward-ish noise and takes me off the planet back to my “ship”, but nothing actually happens as a result of it. These balls aren’t on most planets and so the implication might be special in some way. But, it doesn’t matter, does it? After all, collecting them doesn’t do anything. Exploring planets doesn’t do anything. Nothing does anything.
Visually the game is pleasant. It uses faceted polygons to convey an abstract space, like what you might see if you were traveling through outer space in a vibrant dream. The music can range from calming to creepy. There’s an atmosphere here without a doubt, but with no game to go along with it, it’s utterly pointless.
There’s a smarmy term people made up for games like MirrorMoon EP: “2deep4u”. What this describes is a game that has no goal, interactivity, immersion, isn’t fun, isn’t compelling, isn’t really anything but an art showcase with controls attached to it… but it’s just because “it’s too deep for you, you don’t get it, man.” I can’t help but feel like this game is the embodiment of the term.
I love games that don’t spell things out for you, but I feel like this game has nothing to spell out anyways. It lacks description only because there’s nothing to describe, and its only mystery is in finding out there is no mystery. The EP stands for “Extended Play”, but I can’t imagine what this game consisted of before it was extended. Whatever “nothing minus nothing” is. I guess nothing. It also must be mentioned that this game bills itself as a puzzle game, and even touts multiplayer and co-op support. Not only was there not a single puzzle in my entire play time, but the multiplayer allegedly comes in the form of players naming planets (though I was never given the option to do this), and those planet names being retrieved for your game via the internet. It’s not multiplayer, It’s not co-op, and it has no puzzles.
In closing, I’m all for games as art, and I’ve been moved to tears by games in the past, but there comes a time when one must rip the rug out from under people who are so far up their own backsides that they honestly think they can get away with selling a game where nothing happens for $10 and even call it a game, let alone lying about its features right on the store page. Consider this me ripping the rug out from under Santa Ragione.
