What's going on? That's a long, complicated question, and primary among the aforementioned game design sins is that it takes a long time to figure it out. It turns out that you're a researcher for some sort of futuristic lab that's developed a time-travel device, and you're going back into the past to poke around and learn what you can learn. This, however, is how your mission is described:
Clearance granted for immediate StreamDive. Target is local grid reference 0x1549. Temporal Reference 785278.7 UDC. We will be in phase for StreamDive at 865741.3 UDC. Dive duration not to exceed .5 units UDC (12 hours local time). Stream Capacitance field will be set for auto-recall at this time. Research unit indicates high levels of stream distortion in this zone, indicating that premature extraction may not be possible. Mission Summary: The purpose of your StreamDive is historical research. We have isolated an evacuated area to minimize potential corruption. You are to record all findings, but avoid direct contact with any inhabitants. Records from this zone are fragmentary, so any documents of historical interest should be added to your DataStore.This is called "leaving the player with more questions than answers"--what's a StreamDive? what's stream distortion? how am I supposed to record all findings? what's my DataStore? and who am I and what am I doing and why?--and while the questions do get answered, the immediate effect is along the lines of "start taking notes NOW," not the best hook. The description above certainly gets points for having the feel of real scientific gobbledygook, but I'd have traded that for a little more accessibility. Worse, however, is what follows--it seems that in your delve into the past, you can take only a limited number of tools that will help you delve into what you find (one tool that scans for anomalies, another that makes a map, another that allows interfacing with electronic devices, etc.), and you have to choose which you want to take based on, er, not much besides your own intuitions. As in, you don't know much about what's coming, and you don't know how the interactions work, and you don't even know what the game considers important (more on this later), and frankly it's an peculiar game design choice (especially because it's easy to make choices that will severely limit your interaction potential). It's all the more perplexing because there's no inherent reason that I can see why the game had to limit your tool-carrying capacity--it certainly enhances the replay potential, since it's impossible (or nearly so) to experience everything in the game with only one set of tools, but the tradeoff is likely to be frustration when the player realizes that his options are severely curtailed at move 300 because of a choice he made on move 5.
Once the exploration starts, more problems arise. One of the game's most important locations is made inaccessible fairly early on by an unforeseeable event (one that's so reminiscent of a similar device in Zork III that I took it as an homage), necessitating that the player either do what's needed in that area beforehand or prevent the blocking off by being on the spot at the right time with, suffice it to say, a rather incongruous action (necessitating a certain tool, of course). There are umpteen locked doors, each with its own key hidden in a strange and unexpected place, and while there's a tool that helps get around that problem, without that tool progress is slowed considerably. And while you eventually get a feel for the interesting things that are there to be found, and accordingly figure out which rooms are likely to hold things of note, those leads are not at all initially apparent, leading to a lot of frustrating wandering hither and yon poking at stuff.
The larger problem is that the game isn't entirely honest about what's going on--the player is essentially told at the outset that this is an exploration game, so go poke around and see what turns up, and then gets sat down at the end for a debriefing that makes it fairly clear that your character had some goals in mind. (The debriefing is made even worse by a bug that makes it hard to progress at a key point without guessing a certain response; if there was a prompt for that response, I never saw it.) To some extent, the goals dovetail with an ordinary player's curiosity, but not entirely--you're asked about details of the setting you find, even though there's no obvious reason why the details are important or why you should have noted them. The character may--indeed, should--have known about these goals all along, but he didn't share that knowledge with the player. The character remarks on some of the details as significant, to be sure, but not all of them--and trying to remember small details (or poring over a transcript) so that you can answer trivial questions makes for a deeply dissatisfying ending to the game. It's possible that that was deliberate--the game may set up a contrast between the wonder of discovery and the tedium and finickiness of the research apparatus--but I'm not sure that that was a point worth making, if so.
Ah, but the wonder of discovery--for all its failings, the game gets that part down, and the most gripping points aren't so much Big Secrets as surprises and turning points in the life of a certain family. True, the total concentration of drama or intrigue in the stuff you find is a little high--not all that much of it is as humdrum as you might expect--but I didn't mind that aspect much, if at all, and the time frame (on the verge of war) tends to bring out drama anyway. What struck me was that I believed in the characters, even though I didn't like most of them all that much; two of them in particular both had enough warts and enough intriguing layers to make me interested in learning more about them. It's a pity, in a way, that the larger background (that of the period in general) is largely told to you up front, as the main thing I enjoyed about digging into the game was piecing together what had happened to the family, and piecing together what had happened to the world in general might have been even more fascinating (though, of course, a lot more work). The writing is good throughout the game, but the best-written parts are in the first person and take the voices of the characters; call me easily persuaded, but I was convinced. I found no false notes in the voices of the characters when they set their own thoughts down on paper--some unappealing aspects, maybe, but very much true to life.
That it’s difficult to give a story/exploration-based game any sort of pace or direction is not news, of course, and I don’t blame Moments for resorting to puzzles to achieve some sort of structure, keep the game from becoming a big lump of facts. In other words, the game as presently structured does make it likely (though not necessarily guaranteed) that the player will encounter general background introductory stuff first and only later find out the grittier details, and that’s not a bad thing. At the risk of Monday-morning-quarterbacking, however, I’m not sure it was necessary to introduce quite so many obstacles--the portion of the game that closes off unexpectedly (and hence is unlikely to be found by the player until he or she knows to look for it at a certain time) might, in theory, have opened up after a certain time, or after the player learns certain facts (perhaps with something like "You take a closer look at the east wall. Sure enough, just as you read in the diary, there’s a hidden passage."). Likewise, the replay potential assured by the limited tool capacity might have been achieved by diverging paths of sorts, where alternative story branches offer different information, which would be a little less frustrating than you-see-the-opportunity-for-wondrous-insight-but-damn-you-brought-the-wrong-tool. The content of Moments is terrific, and it deserves friendlier game design.
Patience and perserverance reveal Moments to be a worthy game--well-written and well-imagined--and it’s to the author’s credit, in a way, that I wished that less patience and perseverance had been necessary. As it was, I enjoyed it enough to give it an 8.