Green Moon, or an odd game that could have been a hidden gem. Lacks polish is what defines it better.
The good: it's somehow fun, you'll mix items together to make potions, you'll cast spells, bend time and space and rewrite history.
Now the bad - and there's a lot! The sounds are awful, music is almost inexistent. The magic transitions are a bit long considering you'll see them like a trillion times. Scrolling thru the inventory is a bit of a hassle and you do feel like a walking general store. Moving around is also a hassle, you click 4 small buttons located around your game screen. But what really kills the game is the total lack of directions, specially at the beginning: you're thrown into a house without knowing what to do at all, so the game starts basically as an escape game. But there's a ton of objects to pick, yet they're all useless as you first have to get to the basement and ultimately to a book which will open up the gameplay dramatically and finally give a meaning to the gazillion items to pick... The player SHOULD be guided direclty toward the basement thru hints or something, instead of being left alone wandering thru a couple of screens, picking up stuff for nothing. They could implement a story telling to do that, to flesh it out a bit. That lack of directions is constant through out the game and you WILL be forced to go look for a walkthrough online to make it out. Pathetic. The first part of the game where you make potions was indeed fun but afterward you're left with a dozen of time and space places, with a trillion items that can all be picked up; and that makes a LOT of possibilities. At one point you'll simply follow the online walkthrough line by line because you will be totally lost... And even so you'll be wandering how the hell you were supposed to guess this or that!
Another thing I really didn't like was the mini games. They're well done but they're way too long and cannot be skipped. Yes, we're in the 21st century and this game have unskippable mini-games! Amazing. And they're so long, uhhh: the fishing game took me half an hour! Yup, thirty minutes! I almost fell asleep from boredom. Why did I have to fish so many fishes that I could feed an army of cats?! That was useless. The shooting one was way shorter but dreadfull - mostly because you clearly don't want to miss it and be forced to restart it - and thank God I made it from the first time otherwise I would have eaten my monitor.
The other problem is the 'originality': yes the time & space travelling seems original but not at all in HOGs where it's become common practice, to the point where it's becoming a meme. I played like 50 HOGs games that used time & space travelling as game and story mechanics and I'm pretty sure there's a hundred of other ones I didn't get my paws on yet. The best HOG that used that time travelling trick is a very old one - now a cult classic - called The Mushroom Age; which they seemed to have ripped off but whatever. And same thing goes for casting spells and making potions, dozens of games used that already. Green Moon feels like a yet another rehash, trying to reinvent the wheel but failing at even making it round. Why play Green Moon when there's dozens of games out there that do the same thing but do it better, with a story ark, characters and no inventory management hassle?
I already played 3 hours and didn't even finish it but half of the play time was lost in endless mini games and being lost wondering what to do. So no, I won't be finishing it and no, I do not recommend it unless it undergoes a severe rework/patching. Green Moon as it is now is the Green Stench of the Moon.
