To The Moon

I could write and write about it, but there is only one thing you need to know: this is the best message about love EVER! Not only in games, but in every little thing! No work of art has expressed love as good as this game!

To the moon tries way too hard to be emotionally engaging. In the end it all feels forced. Basically to help this dying guy remember his wife who has dementia or something they make this fake world for him and he has this completely virtual reality experience where he meets her and they fall in love all over again. The hook is a real reach, it's basically that they decided IRL to go to the moon together and then it happens in his VR/dream/whatever experience so it's supposed to be all like ohhh how cute they remembered each other so much even in a dream they were together! But it's all fake. That's what I don't get. The guy wasn't really experiencing anything, his wife didn't love him any more or any less, they just gave him some super cool dream before he died. It didn't make sense to me. It's basically a really sappy love story. I might be forgetting a few details as I played this about three years ago but that's basically it. There is no gameplay which is ok if the story was good but it's not. And people rave about the music but it's very simplistic piano riffs almost anyone who's played for a year or two could make up.

This ridiculous excuse for a game is a complete mess with a horribly written story and no gameplay. All you do is click everything hoping to find the invisible objects, then use them on the one place available. This is supposed to be an adventure game, but there are no puzzles. What about the story? You go into a man's mind to give him one last happy memory before he dies,that is the entire thing. All the characters, even the ones who are supposed to be genius scientist, act like children and are quite annoying. You explore dream worlds, but there is no dream imagery: The settings make Inception look like Super Mario Brothers 2. Plot holes: Your client married an autistic woman whom he was encouraged to meet by his friend. This opens up many flaws in the story: His friend supports the relationship, opposes it , and then supports it again. This inconsistency is never explained or developers, it just sits there, a roadblock to coherence. He gets upset when he finds out that his wife has Autism. This fails for so many reasons: He knew about her autistic behavior, this just gave a name to her condition; her disease never affects their relationship, which seems to be perfect. Nothing in the story would have changed if she was neurotypical. A broken lighthouse is a constant throughout the story, and it never gets fixed. It symbolizes nothing, affects nothing, serves no purpose to the story and is completely pointless. It might have been a very awkward and poorly designed metaphor for their relationship, except that their relationship is perfect so it makes no sense in that context. Eventually, the characters travel through time. Time travel works in a story if it allows the viewer to see things from a new perspective and gain information not present in other times, but no, the only thing learned is that the client is named after his dead brother. Another pointless part. This game is shit, and belongs on the scrapheap of history with Ultima 8.

It's kinda refreshing to see a game that knows what it wants to be, what it wants to accomplish, and then it goes and does that without many silly extra's on the side. To The Moon accomplishes that completely and wholeheartedly. It does what it wants to do, and doesn't bog itself down with unnecessary extra's. (Read more here: http://retrooftheweek.net/p/7/ )

More of an interactive story than a typical game (exploration and point and click puzzle solving are present but no the main driving force) but a great one nonetheless. A good mix of humor and emotional dialogue keep you going through the story which progresses in a Memento like fashion. It is quite short (4 hrs give or take) but worth it. Few works of fiction have moved my cynical self and even fewer made me care, this one made me shed some tears.