In Space Punk Moon Tour, you play a teen from a troubled family who’s trying to rendezvous with a friend on the moon for a concert, and perhaps more importantly, trying to remember and come to terms with experiences from her past. It’s an ambitious idea. I was interested enough to try to power through the game, but ultimately was defeated.
The game is divided into a series of setpieces. You can’t advance until you’ve accomplished at least some minimal set of tasks in each location. Some material seems to be optional. In theory this is helpful, preventing you from getting locked out, but in practice it didn’t work out that way for me.
The implementation is very weak. I don’t know anything about the inner workings of Quest, but it seems that in many cases, things in SPMT are not really implemented at all. The parser is apparently just looking for exact phrases. It makes for a frustrating experience.
On the other hand, way too many things are sort-of-implemented, and 80% of them are useless. This is the first room:
It’s overwhelming, and almost every room is like this. The descriptions and interfaces on these items generally don’t change with context. That package of pads, for example – you need to pack it before you can leave home. Fine. Later on, if you try to get that same package, the game still asks if you want to pack it, and thereby blocks you from doing anything else with it.
On the plus side, SPMT is accompanied by many crude but charming illustrations, some of them partly animated, and it features a number of sound effects as well. A lot of effort went into this.
After two hours of play, I wasn’t sure how far along I was. I tried one particular action repeatedly and immediately received a losing ending that suggested that I had done something wrong back in the first 15 minutes of play. I won’t be revisiting it unless there’s a walkthrough.