Indie dev Colorfiction reached out to let us know their next game has a Steam page and one on itch, and that there's a little demo should anyone want to check it out. Sure, I thought, why not? And that kind of inconsequential decision is how every horror movie begins.
Ode to a Moon is a first-person spooking simulator in which you play a photojournalist who leaves the big city to cover a thanksgiving harvest festival in the country. An eclipse is going timed to occur simultaneously with the festival, and things are going to go wrong.
This all takes place in the 1980s, which is why there are VHS scanlines liberally overlaid everywhere. I'm not sure if this is supposed to be an actual recording, or if the occasional moments of fast-forward and video jumping are purely an aesthetic choice, but it's definitely an atmospheric one. When hours pass in an instant I'm reminded of 30 Flights of Loving.
This 10-minute demo is more of a mood piece than anything, getting you to the town where the Ode to a Moon festival is taking place at the same time as an eclipse, then having everything go woogly.
Colorfiction call their game "First Person Exploration focus with light action and puzzle elements." Less prosaically, they compare it to "Myst meets Silent Hill while on a stroll trough Tarkovsky’s Zone", which sure is a tasty list of influences.
Right now it doesn't have a release date. If you want to check out the demo yourself, here's the Steam page again, and here's itch.