To a Flame
Something sinister lurks beneath the town of Moth Lake, and it’s up to you to stop it. Investigate a mysterious disappearance and the swarm of high strangeness plaguing the quiet town in Sui Arts’ story-driven adventure game, Moth Lake: A Horror Story. Join Toby and his angsty teenage friends as they confront the darkness infesting their hometown and harbored within themselves.
Fright Night
Moth Lake begins with a tutorial featuring a Scream-like prologue that sets the stage for the horrors to come. It’s the night before the eclipse. Cameron, a scrawny kid recently adopted by the Yokels, now lives on their farm in the countryside. Stirred from his sleep, Cameron sees a lanky monster crawl from his closet and vanish into thin air. Then, just as the danger has passed, it emerges from under the bed, seizing him.
Cameron wakes from the nightmare and reluctantly heads to the bathroom. The game instructs players to tap and drag their finger to move Cameron around his bedroom. As Cameron approaches objects, a moth hovers above them, signaling “hotspots” that players can interact with. You must search the room for Billy, the family dog, to accompany Cameron to the bathroom.
After locating Billy, Cameron goes through the house and does his business. However, before he can return to bed, Billy is startled by the monster from the nightmare and flees.
Cameron chases after Billy, but the dog escapes into the night. The player must aid Cameron in his search for Billy by exploring the farm. Early on in their exploration, players encounter a gnarly-looking scarecrow, and after inspection, it gives chase. With the monstrous scarecrow in hot pursuit, Cameron remains determined to find Billy.
Players must juggle hiding from the scarecrow by tapping and dragging downward behind objects while continuing their exploration of the farm. Eventually, you’ll discover a well on the property. Cameron convinces himself that Billy is inside and locates a bucket to lower down. As Cameron approaches the well, the scarecrow returns. The player must choose between fleeing into the woods or jumping into the well. A choice-dependent cutscene rolls and the game fades to black.
Hearts of Darkness
Moth Lake resumes in Professor Chrysalis’ classroom at the town’s high school. Professor Chrysalis gives a lecture on Spartan society, and our protagonists ignore him completely. Toby, Bruno and Ellie discuss the sudden departure of the town’s animals. Bruno reveals that his hamsters killed themselves trying to escape. Perturbed by their interruptive conversation, Chrysalis quizzes and chastises the group. Toby asks to be excused and wanders off to the bathroom. Unfortunately, it’s locked, and the key is hidden in the janitor’s desk drawer.
On his way to retrieve the key, Toby experiences hallucinations of bloody doorways, the ghost of his brother and Eldritch creatures roaming the halls. With key in hand, he flees the janitor’s room and takes refuge in the bathroom. As Toby begins to wash his face in the sink, he stares into the mirror and Moth Lake’s first trauma-induced puzzle appears.
Puzzles pop up in Moth Lake when characters face traumatic circumstances. Solving these puzzles serves as a metaphor for the characters working through their personal traumas and anxieties. Most of these puzzles focus on unlocking complex mechanisms to reveal a silhouette of the trauma’s source. Revealing the source temporarily frees the character and allows the player to continue.
After completing this initial puzzle, players watch as Toby interacts with a crowd of popular girls who have infiltrated the boy’s bathroom during his episode. Alba, Toby’s crush, discloses to her friends that she’s pregnant, and they ask if her boyfriend continues to abuse her. She makes excuses, but Toby interrupts.
Her friends chastise Toby for speaking to her, but Alba shuts them down. Corey, Alba’s abusive boyfriend, walks in and confronts Toby, accusing him of trying to steal his girlfriend. Players face their second decision—fight Corey or ignore him altogether. Toby eventually escapes the fight, fleeing the school to his friend Murray’s house.
The Losers
At this point in the game, Toby and the rest of his friends link up and decide to investigate Cameron’s disappearance. They discover that, historically, kids bearing the mark of the moth go missing within their town. In order to survive, players will need to use the characters’ unique skillset to unlock areas. Well, all except for Scrapper. Comically, his skillset entry reads ‘completely useless.’
Ellie identifies the game’s hotspots—interactive areas of the map that appear as downward-pointing arrows. Toby serves as the team’s brute force, while Bruno brings his speed. Murray climbs objects, and Alba, who joins the group later in the game, is very agile. Most of the time, players use a single character’s skills to traverse a level. However, that’s not always the case. Later game levels require players to use all six characters’ abilities to solve environmental puzzles to advance.
Moth Lake also requires players to manage the moods of its characters through narrative choices. If a player chooses incorrectly, specific characters’ moods will suffer, making them less friendly and cooperative. Different moods also unlock hidden scenes and plot points, which offer players tons of replayability, including six different endings. Players must also manage their characters’ health meters to survive.
Should a character’s health begin to drop, chugging an energy drink restores it a bit. During my playthroughs, I encountered energy drinks frequently enough that I never struggled with maintaining my party’s health. That said, players shouldn’t worry too much about failing. Game overs send you back to the same spot where you died, as the game saves automatically. Honestly, this made the game such a joy to play, especially in later levels when deaths occur more frequently.
Total Eclipse
One might think that spending an entire narrative-driven game in the presence of trauma-ridden teenagers might be a total drag, but not so with Moth Lake. At times, the characters can verge on slightly obnoxious, but in a cheeky, knowing sort of way. Those instances also serve to build personality for members of the group (mostly Murray and Scrapper). Playing Moth Lake often felt akin to watching a 2000’s horror flick—angsty (often to the point of camp), observant, sometimes heartfelt and unapologetically gory.
The alternative background music also lends itself nicely to this aesthetic. Even the game’s color palette borrows heavily from the green, blue and yellow tints overlaying the cinematic scenes of that decade. As a result, the beautifully animated 2.5D world of Moth Lake feels grim and dangerous, tainted with the invading darkness.
From the mundane to the Lovecraftian, there’s no shortage of danger in Moth Lake. As you can imagine, things get bloody pretty often. Yet, Moth Lake never gets overly gratuitous with its violence. Yes, there are buckets of the stuff, but it always felt in service of the story. As someone who refuses to watch the Saw and Hellraiser movies, I’m happy to report that this stays well under that gore threshold. I should mention, however, that multiple instances of suicide are on display as Ellie contends with the trauma of her brother’s death.
Additionally, Alba must also face her anxieties in a Cronenbergian baby stage which left me particularly unsettled. I also found the final stages of the game particularly gruesome. Be aware that Eldritch terrors wreak havoc, gobbling people up in gory ways. I recommend prospective players peep the trailer, as it accurately reflects what gore may come.
Final Girls
While Moth Lake’s overarching narrative feels a smidge predictable, it kept me on the edge of my seat. The dialogue always felt fresh and realistic, which lent authenticity and believability to the game’s world. It also kept me invested, hoping against the stacked odds that Toby and his crew would make it out alive. It often felt as if I were playing a Stephen King novel, partially because of the slight, general similarities between the game’s plot and the novel IT.
Moth Lake’s puzzles, while sometimes slightly unintuitive, provided plenty of respite from the grotesque monsters lurking beyond their safe haven. Should players like myself get stuck on a particular chapter or task, Sui Arts offers a walkthrough via the main menu. When tapped, the link takes players to a time-stamped YouTube video providing directions correlating to the exact moment within the game. Never before have I experienced such a sophisticated synchronized hint system from an indie mobile game, which left me truly impressed.
Without a doubt, Moth Lake is one of the best iPhone games I’ve played. The game’s moody narrative, classic horror influences and challenging puzzles promise fans of horror and indie mobile games a terrifyingly good time.
