The beginning of the game is set in a nightmare as you explore the base in absolute darkness with a flickering flashlight, but once that's over and things go back to "normal," the game's still working to subtly gaslight you. The primary thrust of Moons of Madness's style of horror is to play on the fear of going insane. There are forces on Mars that humans aren't equipped to understand (I was careful to establish, in a conversation with the game's creative director, that the game is "Lovecraftian," rather than a straight-up Lovecraft adaptation), and he's about to run straight into them. However, Newehart's been having nightmares, and he's not alone in that. The opening minutes of the game are straight-up hard science fiction, inspired by recent works such as "The Martian," with Newehart and company going about the day-to-day business of staying alive on an experimental, temperamental off-world colony. As far as the rest of Earth is concerned, Newehart and his co-workers are actually on assignment in an undersea base in the Marianas Trench, but they're actually stuck together in a small colony construct millions of kilometers away on the Martian surface. You play Moons as Shane Newehart, a new father and contract employee. If you're familiar with The Secret World, you'll see a lot of shout-outs in the game, like how your character works for the Orochi Group, but Moons of Madness is a stand-alone project. Like Conan Chop Chop, however, Moons of Madness was already in production before Funcom got involved as the publisher. A first-person horror game from Norwegian studio Rock Pocket Games, Moons of Madness is nominally set in the same universe as Funcom's The Secret World MMORPG, but set more than 50 years in the future. Moons of Madness is another entry in that "don't go to Mars" sub-sub-genre. It's just a question of what, why, and by whom.
Ever since Doom (and probably the original version of Total Recall), we've all been operating on the pop-cultural assumption that we're going to get up there only to discover that there's a reason the planet was so trashed in the first place. A fundamental part of the video game medium is predicated on the idea that Martian colonization probably isn't going to work out that well for us.