To The Moon

I rarely trash a game, but this one comes really close to being an exception. Many people have said this is a video game made by artists as opposed to game designers, but I must disagree. The people who made this game are neither artists nor game designers. Gameplay-wise, there's nothing particularly good or bad going on here. The graphics are fine for the genre. The interface works. The in-game mini-puzzles are good enough. The control scheme and interface are perfectly appropriate for what the game is trying to be. That's why I gave it two stars instead of one. The main problem is the game lacks interactivity, in that it's not about solving a mystery or becoming engaged in the world as PART OF the story. It is about bearing witness. And certainly bearing witness to a life is a worthy task, but this game fails to provide enough human interest to hook me and keep me hooked. I played for an hour or two, and all I discovered was trite, overdone, melodramatic writing. In all fairness, I might have quit playing the moment before it would have hooked me, and if so, that's the big failure on the part of the developer: creating an engaging and meaningful game that simply takes too long to warm up. First impressions are critical, and To the Moon failed to make one on me.

The graphics, the music and the story are all powerful. Sadly, this is supposed to be a game, but it fails miserably at that. Gameplay is repetitive, tedious, unrewarding and just boring, all what keeps you playing is the story. I really recommend creator to stop doing mediocre games, and start doing excellent short animation movies.

The story is ok (not as tear-inducing as the first reviews would lead you to believe), there's some ok humour in it in the form of Dr. Watts, the music is very nice, and the artwork in general is pleasing enough. All in all very mediocre, and the biggest gripe: it's not a game. There's maybe ten or so "puzzles" where you have to flip tiles, but they're too easy to be considered real games. Same for a smack-the-moles-minigame. And that's it. All the other stuff is clicking through conversations and clicking on objects. There's no interactions with objects, no real ones to speak of. I would not call this a game. I'd give it only 1 star but I do appreciate some elements for it enough in order not to be too harsh. It did manage to soft me up a bit I guess. Finalv erdict: mediocre movie that makes you click through it constantly, but with a nice general atmosphere.

To the Moon do not deserve high review scores from professional critics. Why? Because it’s a really bad GAME. A partially amazing script is not enough to warrant professional praise. A hobby critic is a different matter. We can aim high, low, be 100 % personal or just rave all the way to the moon. The games strengths have been covered enough. Lets’s just say that the scripts partial amazingness did little to prevent me from being bored to death because of crap gameplay. A great story is furthermore hampered by humour and dialogue that is the definition of hit and miss. Sometimes the silliness provides a much needed lighter spirit and sometimes it destroys what the story tried to accomplish only seconds before. But why is To the Moon such a bad GAME? FIRST: The gameplay is so crude it goes beyond definition. The adventuring consist 100% of ”walk around and search for things”. The puzzles consist of ”solve identical, boring problems to get to the next chapter.” And believe me; what little else the game offers are equally bad. This drags on what should have been a 2 hour ”deep, mesmerizing, but a bit to silly” narrative game into a 5 hour ”tedious & braindead” adventure game. SECOND: What maaaybe could forgive the shortcomings is if gaming as a medium provided depth a movie could not achieve. If mechanics, interactivity, etc. made you feel connected to the story. But instead To the Moon aims for the opposite: Your role is only to observe what happened to someone else. And to do so without any way to affect or interact. And this, is To the Moons ultimate flaw. CONCLUSION: To the Moon is proof that a failure of a game can be loved. You just have to love what it did right enough! For me, it's just a failure with a 1/5 rating. I hope the author find a way in to the cinemas. He is a very talented (if a bit immature) scriptwriter and I would love to see a To the Moon movie. But I will never play a game with the author as main designer again. Scriptwriter only? Sure!

Somewhere inbetween Final Fantasy VI and Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. Not much of a game but a beautiful story and experience (although a bit short). Might be a bit expensive for such a short game but still I really enjoyed it.