Moons of Madness release date revealed

Moons of Madness is part Cthulhu-on-Mars, part exploration of mental illness, and it's coming to PC on October 22. The release date was unveiled with a new trailer, above, featuring flickering lights and tentacled horrors.

I'm curious to see how it blends these terrors with its story of a family battling mental illness: James was encouraged by what he played in 2017, but a lot has changed since then, most notably the setting. Developer Rock Pocket's publishing deal with Funcom has moved the game in The Secret World's universe, where Lovecraft-style horrors are real. Hopefully it's retained some of the subtleties James felt in his demo.

Moment-to-moment, James said it played a bit like "Gone Home with gadgets and hallucinations". The 12 minutes of gameplay the team showed off in July reminded me a little of the early stages of Alien: Isolation—as main character Shane you're exploring a detailed space station, speaking to other characters over your headset and swapping between well-lit and eerily dark spaces. I like the look of the environments, and I hope these moments of downtime continue when the horror ramps up.

The Steam page is here.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.