I’ll say one thing for the storytelling in Moebius – it’s cleverly structured such that the full extent of how brain-punchingly stupid it is comes too far in, such that it has to be considered a spoiler. Cunning.
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You mostly play as the ludicrously named Malachi Rector [...], a New York-based British antiques expert with a purported IQ of 170, a photographic memory, and the personality of a spoilt turd. This is a man – and I promise this is true – whose psychology is based on his mother’s being eaten by a lion in front of him when he was a child.
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It also manages to throw a new twist on inventory puzzle horror. While there are still idiotic random-on-random nonsenses, like using the florist putty on the window pole to retrieve the hook from the bottom of the river (no, I swear), here they double-down on the stupid by refusing to let you pick up objects before their abstract purpose has become a need. Yes, in some ways it’s more realistic that someone wouldn’t pick up the scissors in the kitchen before they knew they needed to cut something. But when almost every item’s eventual use is so disingenuous, it makes the process utterly agonising. So many times I thought I’d reached a dead end, because a tiny object Rector said he didn’t need five screens ago was then deemed vital for an undeclared purpose. Even worse, it does this with locations too. One puzzle near the end of the game required magically knowing Malachi would now go into a bar in a city in another state that he had adamantly refused to enter at every other point in the game, including only moments earlier in the same chapter.