11/10/25
Hunt a Killer - The Moon Summit Mystery
Last time, at Moon Summit: grad student Toby Mendia fell victim to a bear attack during an expedition to search for the elusive 'Ghost Lynx.' His friend contacts your detective agency in her search for the truth behind his death, as she rightfully believes that what happened to him was no accident.
Through our documents and the evidence trail, we discovered that Toby was stabbed pre-bear, found the killer's path back from the murder scene, and eliminated our first suspect.
Our story hooks? Numerous.
Warring personal interests? All over the place.
Toby? God damn, not at all the bumbling kid everyone but Ricci described him as.
Today, we tucked in to finish the mystery, eagerly awaiting our anticipated puzzles and the end to this messy story in the Alaskan wilderness.
I believe last time I mentioned that some of the box conclusions felt a bit easy. The story tasks a bit thin, especially if you consider that folks would have been waiting a month between installments on release.
Episode 4 I think exemplified this.
There is very little in this box that really tells you anything new. The purpose of it is to eliminate another suspect, and you get more insight into Emma via one of her journal pages, and Lillian by one of hers, but you really don't learn anything you didn't already know aha.
We did learn one thing at this point.
The prop in this box is Toby's wallet. I'd said last time that they felt more like fluff than evidence to further your mystery, and this one finally made me question that. Because I did a very normal thing and opened up the wallet to find the little slip of paper in there luring Toby to what would be his murder site. This was delightful. I'd wanted the physical props to be relevant, and one was at last!
I wouldn't notice until later, when we were wrapping up the final box, that we'd missed a couple clues hidden in/on the earlier box items.
Really, who puts a password on the inner tag of a beanie? I guess I'm glad it wasn't crucial information hidden behind it, but I'm a bit miffed on principle that it wasn't more important ahaha. We completely missed an entire fork of the story and it didn't even matter, and I'm not sure how to feel about that when the writing overall was so fun?
I will also confess that it took a couple more boxes with encoded messages in footprints to realize it was morse code. Looking now at the box materials to refresh myself as I work on this, you get a clue with this episode 4 journal page who those notes are between. Rusty fills in his hare tracks; Emma doesn't. You can find some doodled on her journal page. I just didn't connect the literal dots until much later. I also just now while re-examining one of the encoded Morse notes just realized it had E Clarkson on the luggage tag, so another clue as to who it involved.
Gotta give Hunt a Killer their due; that's pretty damn nice attention to detail, and makes a good connection.
I just wish it had pinged as morse code to me earlier! I think in future boxes, this will have me primed to look for those possible patterns, I just feel a bit sad that we missed on the context for those.
In my defense, I did actually have all three of those morse code notes in hand at one point and went hm. I think these are morse code, actually, and we can solve them? But then when I went to a morse code solver, it seemed like garbage. I just decoded one of them, actually, the one from episode 4 as I did this because I figured I should get that context even if the box is long ended, and it was quite hard to get the spacing right! The spacing is a bit ambiguous, leaving the message a bit finicky to decode, so I suppose I have to give my frustrated self earlier in the day a break.
Let's see - episode 4 ends with eliminating a suspect. Very easily, might I add? All the papers and such are really extraneous, you really only need to do one very brief thing to complete this box.
It felt like a very sudden and easily earned end to the episode, so we headed on in to episode 5.
This is another suspect elimination, and… yes, checking it now, we felt a little let down by this part, too.
I guessed off the cuff that this one would be exonerating Lillian, and I was right! It was another very simple elimination, based off her photo taken and the sound of rushing water very shortly before Toby would have been getting killed (30+ minutes away) (and honestly, while not intended, her clumsy walking on an easy trail there also helped prove that she was not gonna be able to sprint her ass across the park to kill a man after the photo ahaha), and the rest of the box contents served to clarify that yes, as we knew, Toby was not careless. Yes, Emma is an ecofascist, and also very emotionally volatile. Yes, Conrad brought alcohol along, even though it was banned from the supplies.
Good things to know, but things we already knew! It felt like it actually tipped Emma over from plausibly sus to definitely the red herring.
I was pleased that we got to refer back to our map from episode… 2? But it was so short, ah. I wish we could have played with it more! It was such a lovely prop. I said it before and I'll say it again, Hunt a Killer does a fabulous job with their papers! The varying textures, sizes, it's a great attention to detail to make believable papers and files that are satisfying to rifle through as a player.
Episode 6.
Our final installment.
This was when I first made my confused connection that the notes I'd been setting aside were all morse code, but solving it was bungled by my own struggles with interpreting where to begin and letter spacing </3
I am a little conflicted about episode 6!
We got Conrad's journal, at last, and got to do a few tasty cipher solves in a row (substitutions). It was satisfying to finally get to do the puzzlin' we'd craved, but also a bit unsurprising what we uncovered in there. Who could have guessed, academic fraud?
And with that, the case was over, but we had all these loose ends we'd been unable to figure our way into.
Conrad's journal had its ciphers, but we still had that earlier postcard whose cipher we'd never made progress on, so that we were able to finish the mystery without it… it felt oddly hollow? Undeserved. Those and the morse code.
I've gone ahead and done all the morse code now, here, and I do have to say, I think they must have gotten feedback about the legibility of the spacing because the note in the final box was much easier to input aha. But gosh, even now, with that extra flavor… it was still stuff we knew.
Emma's alibi was always a tissue in the breeze, with Rusty not mentioning her coming with him to reset the trap. This just confirms it, you know?
So, once we'd run out of paths we could find to follow, we ended up looking up just what the postcard cipher was, since we'd managed to figure out during journal that this was a third cipher encoding, but what was it for? We'd never needed it, and as we found out in the video explanation, cracking it was pretty involved and crazy.
And it turned out, we'd never found the stuff it was used for. Way back in the episodes, you get the hint that you'll get into Ricci's university account, but it never seemed to follow through. Remember those props whose diagetic-ness I doubted?
Well, turns out, Ricci wrote his password on the inside tag of his beanie, and since I'd never investigated the beanie that closely, we just. Didn't have any of the information inside that section.
Hidden behind a crazy cipher, locked behind a password, and it's just extra fluff information to give you Conrad's suspicions/potential motive early on.
I'm really not sure how to feel about this!
Of the games I have played recently, Moon Summit certainly tops the list.
The logic flows well, the story is engaging, theorizing really went crazy in the first three episodes. Ironically, once we began eliminating more suspects, it got flatter. I'm also just not sure, design-wise, that it's good design to make those ciphers and codes and have the information behind them be unneeded. Why even bother with it, then?
I'm not sure if the information being non-critical or the postcard cipher being crazy obtuse enabled one or the other, but it felt Not Good!
I suppose on one hand it means you won't get stopped dead if you can't decode morse code, but on the other, it's kind of sad that this work went into things players can entirely miss. And - it's supposed to be a mystery to solve! I suppose we did, but god damn it, realism is all well and good and god knows after the improbable ghost of my other weekend game I appreciated something quite grounded, but I would've accepted the bear scratching a puzzle in the bark to get a password!
There's a balance to find between the absurdity inherent in solve puzzles to find the murderer games, where you're walking a line between gameplay and the detective genre and trying to satisfy both. You want the logic to flow, you want a believable conclusion that feels earned. But just rifling through papers might not be satisfying enough, even if those papers are lusciously textured. I want to dig a little more than the scant files possible to put in a mystery box might allow without putting a puzzle in my way.
But also, it requires a suspension of disbelief doesn't it?
Would this serious researcher leave his cipher code laying around, if he wasn't a man with 30 years of lies behind him? If you're trying to hide your dalliance, you probably don't want to clue your coworkers in to your morse code scribblings.
Hell, Emma got into Toby's laptop because he conveniently scribbled the password into his journal's edges.
People are nosy, and people who are isolated and don't like you? Even more so.
I'm not sure how better to really balance the push and pull of genre and game expectations here, but I will say for sure that Moon Summit was fun.
It told a satisfying, believable tale, and the early theorizing really showed their best writing. The hooks, the intrigue were expertly woven, and I am, overall, glad to have played this game. I think the things we stumbled over will be good experience for future games!
If you can find a copy and find an evening or two to dedicate to blasting through the game, with some little theory breaks for snacks and drinks, I think you'll have a fantastic time.