I'm pretty sure I've gone through and found all possible choices and endings for this game so I feel relatively certain I can give a proper review on the game. My feelings are somewhat mixed, there was clearly potential but a lot of bad decisions dragged the game down for me.

The short of it: Good atmosphere, amusing characters, decent horror, very short story, bad monster, mechanics undermine the horror and the mystery aspects of the game, very bad and time wasting mechanics to fast-forward already visited sections.

Now the long version: I'll try and keep this spoiler free, but I may have to give away some minor plot points, nothing really important though. I'll start with the major gripe I have with the game: the lack of fast-forwarding through conversations you've already covered. Sure, technically there is a mechanic to fast forward, if you like clicking like a madman on your mouse to rapidly skip through the text. The problem is that the image load screens can't be fast-forwarded, nor can certain fixed "load" screens which always appear despite them not really loading anything other than text! You can't even save manually so you can replay a specific choice you made. Instead you have rapidly mouse click your way through the section from the save designers decided to put in for you until you reach it and hope to all that is holy you don't accidently press the wrong choice again. This all creates a lot of unnecessary padding. Especially since there already exists a conventional method to fast forward through conversations that is far more practical and used by all other VNs!

Whilst there are multiple death endings, there is only one categorically good ending and another somewhat good ending. If you found the good ending, then congrats that's the only way you can save your teammates, every other path leads to the death of all your teammates or the death of some of them. The good ending probably also the least informative route to take, since you are not given any information as to what the scientists back home found on the plot item that you take back to earth. The somewhat good ending will always occur if you don’t die, even if you realise beforehand the major trick the game is trying to pull on you. There is no way to point it out and attempt to resolve the issue unless you follow the good ending path, and that's only because another character realises the truth and tells you something is up. It doesn’t even make sense for your character in game to have not picked up on it, unless the organisation you work for only puts fools in charge of delicate operations.

This leads to the next issue, your choices usually end up being binary (either option will funnel you down to two non-death endings, or lead to the death of all your team members) or being able to choose between several options, all of which result in a slightly different flavour of the same outcome. This means the game is very short, and not very content rich since no matter your choices, you will be railroaded down one of two paths.

Now this would all be fine if they kept to core of what the genre of the game: mystery horror. Since this is a mystery game you would expect to be able to have bit more control over your teammates, maybe be able to ask them to look at specific items, take photos, ask a team with you back on earth to help analyse certain pieces of information. Instead, it's completely in your astronaut’s hands as to when they decide to take the photos for you or describe to you what's going. Occasionally, you get the option to ask for a photo or be able to ask them to look around some more, but only when the designers decide it would be appropriate. Your teammates will even completely forget to mention side-paths that you use to reach the same room from during a different playthrough, all in the name of funnelling you down the two non-death endings of the game. This kills the investigative side of the story in my opinion, as it allows the designers to obfuscate aspects of the plot so a tinge of mystery remains as to what happened at the site of the anomaly. But did they at least do the horror right? Well, the atmosphere is quite creepy and well executed in my opinion, so no faults there. The major problem with the horror is the "monster", which interacts in a far more lethal manner with your team compared to how it acted with humans prior to your teams’ arrival. It just blatantly tries to kill your team for no reason that I can gather other than that's what the designers decided monsters should do. It even inexplicably appears at moments when I know for sure it definitely shouldn't and couldn't due to the layout of the site of the site. Very disappointing.

Now some of the good aspects: the horror is alright, the writing is decent, and the atmosphere is quite well executed. The characters are strangely eccentric and comically unprofessional for a supposedly professional first contact team. This however results in some light comedy to brighten the mood now and then, so I can’t completely fault the designers for going this route.

All in all, a very rough game. The price is low, so as long as you don't expect much I would say go ahead and buy it. But if you have even the smallest of doubts, then don't waste your time.

Zarya-1 is a "Choose Your Own Adventure" story that is written like an audio drama, but presented in text with a dozen of still images thrown in. As a commander sitting on Earth, you are leading a mission to investigate a mysterious signal on the moon. You will "listen" (but actually read, since there is no voice acting) to the reports and the banter of the team members on the moon, and occasionally you can choose between 2 or 3 alternative commands or comments.

The writing is by far the game's strongest point, and the reason why I recommend it. The characters are distinct and interesting, and their dialogue flows naturally. If you have the imagination to really "play" the scenes in your head, then the game provides a very immersive experience. The plot also conveys the mystery well, and it includes a few twists that I found surprising. I also especially liked the "hard science" approach - factors like gravity, temperature, the way how space suits operate, and medical details, are referenced frequently and contribute to the immersion.

Unfortunately, the gameplay of Zarya-1 is extremely crude, in fact there is barely any gameplay provided. You really can't do anything else apart from picking a dialogue option when you get the opportunity, and many of these options don't do anything except change a few lines of dialogue. The gameplay also does not keep track of any parameters or past decisions. For example, at one point you may have to decide whether it's worth 3 hours to investigate something - but no matter what you do, in a later scene your team will always have "6 hours of oxygen" left. This happens because in the later scene, the game has no idea which decision you took in the earlier scene. And thus all decisions about time and supplies (with which the game tries to create an illusion of urgency) are actually fake decisions, since the game completely forgets about them as soon as you enter the next scene.

You can also be totally rude to your crew members, and it won't have any impact as soon as the next scene starts, because gameplay does not keep track of conversations either. Therefore, Zarya-1 plays like one of the primitive physical "Choose Your Own Adventure" books of the very first generation, where you just read through the scenes and didn't take notes of any kind.

The plot structure is linear, but with many branches, which either lead to death, or merge back into the main plot after some time. You can never revisit an area you left (as you often can in more sophisticated gamebooks), but you can miss useful information depending on which branches you take. However, as long as your team does not die (or you want the perfect ending), it generally does not matter which branches you take. They will all merge eventually, and it never matters what happened before.

It is fairly easy to achieve a "partial success" ending. There is also a "success" ending (the best you can achieve), but that one is unfortunately very poorly designed. Basically you have to replay the game many times, grinding through all the possible paths, until you happen to get lucky and choose the right door. There is absolutely no indication that this door will lead to the success of the mission, in fact it can only be reached after a sequence of fairly arbitrary decisions that don't give you any hints whatsoever. It just so happens that going through this particular door, completely at random, triggers a conversation that then leads to a revelation which is crucial for success. You can also lock yourself out of the "success" ending by completely unrelated decisions very early in the game, and then spend some hours exploring paths in an unwinnable scenario.

Personally, I would recommend to explore the different branches as long as you're enjoying it - they are generally well written (even the ones that inevitably lead to failure), and sometimes they contain information that helps you understand better what is going on. When your team dies, you can rewind the game to the start of any previous chapter, so you don't have to replay the entire game just to take one late decision differently. However, even with that feature, you're bound to replay some scenes half a dozen times or more, if the decision you want to take differently happens to be towards the end of the chapter. And while the writing is good enough to read a scene 2 or 3 times, it _does_ get tedious after a while, especially since there is no way to skip forward. So I'd say, once pursuing the good ending feels like an unenjoyable grind, don't hesitate to check the forum for an explanation how to achieve it.

I enjoyed Zarya-1 and recommend it to fans of CYOA-books and hard sci-fi stories. It has its flaws, but it also has a very reasonable price tag, and you will get your money's worth out of it. I am curious what the writers could achieve with a game that offered more complex gameplay, and I hope they are going in that direction. The very primitive approach of Zarya-1 is okay for a first effort, but it would become boring quite fast if future games did not grow more sophisticated.

Zarya-1 is a "choose your own adventure" style story, but the interactive elements are very rare, quite limited, and -- which is the worst aspect -- the game is full of unnecessary and unskippable mechanics which only wastes your time and contribute nothing.

The story is about a small team of explorers/soldiers who are conducting an investigation on the Moon. You can read the conversation between the team members, and -- as being the commander who remotely oversees your team -- very rarely get to pick one of 2 (and a few times, 3) possible choices as response or command. Occasionally your team sends you a photograph -- though it's not very clear why they aren't broadcasting video, given that the story happens in the future --, which always arrives in low resolution and it's slowly enhanced which process takes about 20 seconds... and it's unskippable... and it's the same chore with every single image. Good thing after an hour of playing... I'm sorry, I meant to write: spending time... with Zarya-1, I have only received 10 image, but after the 3rd one I felt my will to live draining away while I waited watching the same, boring "image enhancement" effect.

I understand that this interactive story was designed that you're expected to rewind the events if your team is stuck, so you can select other choices and see where those would take you. This mechanics is a lot like in Steve Jackson's Sorcery! series, except here you can rewind only to specific "save points", and until you arrive to the point where you can make the next decision, you'll have to re-read the conversation you're already familiar with -- but, again, it's unskippable, so it becomes a chore very quickly and kills the mood.

Now and then, when the team is about to do something which takes some time, a countdown is started, and unless you press a "skip" button, you'll sit there, watching the numbers on your computer screen for minutes (maybe even for hours), and it won't make any difference at all, even though there's a button with which you can request an update from your team, but their response will always be something like "we're busy."

Because of all these very annoying and purposeless time wasters I cannot recommend Zarya-1, albeit the story and the characters seem interesting, the sound effects and the music is adequate, and the visuals are nice. If the developers allowed to skip conversations which have already been seen, and got rid of the mandatory "image enhancements" and countdowns, I'd have arrived to a different verdict without a doubt. Of course, should an update arrive which fixes these issue, I'll change my review accordingly.

Addendum: so it looks like all these time wasters are actually delaying mechanisms for the ad-supported mobile builds, where players could only fast-forward time (at countdowns I've mentioned) and remove the ads if they've paid for the game. Dear developers, I think you should have completely removed these annoyances and enabled the "skip the talk" code which allows skipping already seen dialogues (at least I've found the messages for these in the strings.json file at indexes 197--199) in the Steam build, since you've obviously spent a great deal of effort to design and create this otherwise nice interactive adventure and it's a shame that the game experience is ruined by this oversight. Please try a bit harder next time!

I like it. Kinda like playing a text adventure with limited still image graphics on a C64. I would say that this is for once a game where I actually want to find all possible endings, and find the truth of what's going on.

Awesome Sci-FI text adventure, the story is really well written totally worth the small price

Minor spoilers, nothing that will give to much away
For a text based game it manages to pull off a sense of tension, dread and urgency. The story is interesting all the way through. there are tonnes of endings, and you have a good amount of control over what the characters do, although once or twice they ignored my orders and sometimes i wished for more options. over all though there is a good amount of meaningful choices to make. there are 10 chapters (if you get the good ending) and 7 if you end up "elsewhere" i guess they ran out of time or something because i would have loved to see more branches from that area. I really wish we got to see what was on the hard drive you can recover (you can't to my knowledge) and it gets really tedious replaying sections of the story to find all the endings, something that really bugged me after a while... I wish some character motives were a bit clearer and also for a better understanding of what was happening in the soviet base.
However, The game has a pretty good story that kept me hooked and the graphical style, even though it is mainly just text was really good, you should give your artist a raise. maybe you could add more branches and spend some more time with Sarge? also fix his graphic for the finial chapter, witch seems to be replaced with Bones' for some reason. Really enjoyed it. worth the $4

👍

An Odyssey on the moon!
The tale is immersive, the characters are friendly, and the story is actually interesting and original

The concept simple and underwhelming. Text based horror with the occasional Photo. The game lacks graphical artwork.

Zarya-1: Mystery on the Moon is a choose your own adventure game similar to something like Lifeline on iOS. The story is well written and there are some nice quality of life additions (at least in specific version on Steam) that you don't see with other games like this. (Like skipping the real world timers for example) Be ready to "fail" and try again, it lets you restart at certain checkpoints in the story, but each path usually reveals more of what's going on. I beat the game and obtained the "success" ending along with most "failed" or "partial success" endings.

Whether $4 or a sale price is worth it depends on how much you like this genre, but I enjoyed it. Check it out if you're into these types of experiences.

This review is provided by the 𝓕𝓾𝓷𝓴𝔂 𝓙𝓪𝓵𝓪𝓹𝓮𝓷𝓸𝓼 (Curation Page | Steam Group) and the support of readers like you, thank you.