To The Moon

I heard about this game before release but extensive experience has left me quite jaded about low-budget indie games. A few like the Blackwell series manage to rise above the low-budget blues but most indie games are just awful. So it has taken me awhile to get around to play To the Moon and the recent sale by GOG.com convinced me to try it. How good is this game? It has to be talked about in the same breath as The Longest Journey or the original Broken Sword. In fact, if this game had the budget of those games To the Moon might have made the grade as the best game point and click adventure game ever made. As a game, this game is far from perfect. There are too many problems with it to call it a "masterpiece." What makes it stand out is its creativity, imagination, music score, and story and the way these elements combine to create a mood that suspends your disbelief and transports you to another world. This isn't so much a game as an interactive novel. You OWE it to yourself to play this game. You do your life a disservice if you don't play it. This is one of those games that will still be talked about a decade from now.

To the Moon isn't a game in a traditional sense. From the looks of it you would expect a point and click adventure game, but there are no puzzles. The game basically plays itself, you just need to click on stuff to make progress. So, is the story good enough to justify complete lack of gameplay? It's ok I guess, but derivative - it has Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Inception written all over it. Given a good scenario, this plot could have been material for a decent movie, but it fails as a game. Definitely not worth those 10$.

This game is moreover a visual novel than anything else. It's a sweet and sad story about fulfilling a dying man's wish and finding out about happy and tragic moments in his life. There are quite a few very moving sequences and there is even some part of "suspense" at a certain stage of the game (I am not going to give away more than that). The atmosphere is conveyed the best possible way with the help of the soundtrack, considering that the graphics are rather simple. And this is, to my point of view, the main downside. Definitely, this is not a game for children, but the interface often looks overly simple and remind of an adventure game of the late 80's. My suggestion to the authors: Keep up the good stories and include better graphics/artwork! As far as I know, there is a new version coming up and if the graphics get better, for me it will be easily a "five star". Be warned, though. This game is something for sensitive people. Others might easily find it boring as there is not much of a challenge to game play.

I realize that this game's goal is almost entirely to tell a story, So I didn't really expect much from the gameplay. It should be simple and stay out of the way of the story. Unfortunately, it doesn't even manage to do that. The controls were probably the most obtrusive part of the game. You can either use the mouse or the keyboard most of the time, but it still never quite worked smoothly. The pathfinding for the mouse control is awful, and because the game takes place on a grid, the characters end up zigzagging around like monkeys on cocaine, often just stopping for no reason halfway to the point you clicked on. If you op to use the arrow keys instead, things go much smoother, though you give up the changing mouse icon to indicate things that can be examined/used. This really isn't much of a sacrifice, though, as it's usually pretty simple to find the objects you need to interact with. In between each "level" of the game, you are presented with a puzzle that you must solve to move on. These don't really change throughout the game apart from being slightly larger later on. They are simple, boring, and seem to serve no purpose other than to take you out of the story while you work through them. At least after a certain point the game seems to give up on them. I can only guess that the developers thought that we must be getting sick of it by then and had mercy. I did finish the game though, and I'm glad I did. As everybody says, the story is what it's all about, the music and art are great. If you enjoy this kind of introspective, minimal-challenge game, you will most likely see past the flaws and enjoy it. Unfortunately, in a reversal of what we usually see, it feels like a great story with a bad game hastily tacked on at the end.

From the chat about "To the Moon," I was expecting a true artistic experience. What I got, instead, was pseudo-intellectual pablum that is exactly as profound as "The Matrix" is philosophically-complex. This is a story about two pairs of people, who I will refer to as Team Science and Team Love. Team Science has a job to do, and to do that job they must learn more and more about Team Love. The problem is that neither pair is very interesting. Team Science consists of Nerdy, Comic-Relief Male (who talks about how awesome he is and shouts things like "Hulk Smash!"), and Hyper-Competent Woman (who keeps the team on point, and rolls her eyes at the actions of her comic foil counterpart). I have seen this before. You have seen this before. We've all seen this before. As supporting cast, this might be passable, but these are our hero and heroine. They have to be more interesting than this. Team Love is composed of a complicated woman and a mealy-mouthed, sacrificing guy. This is intended to be a great love story that has lasted through thick-and-thin, but the authors never give us any explanation that believably describes why these two people would rather be together than not. "To the Moon" is for angsty adolescents who think they are more mature than they are. Any adult whose emotional experience goes beyond being stood up at the high school prom will be bored silly.