To The Moon

I love the look of this game, as it conjures memories some of my favorite SNES-era RPGs. Unfortunately, the dialogue is excruciatingly juvenile and poorly written. You might enjoy it if you are in middle school. If you have an ounce of maturity, this isn't for you.

I think it has been said everything who could be said about this non-game: good visual impact, great soundtrack, touchy story, very poor gameplay. The only thing I feel I need to add is about the "adultness" of the story. Yes, there are themes like death and illness, but travelling to the moon is a childish wish. Everybody who was born in the '60s '70s or '80s dreamed to grow up as an astronaut an go to the moon. And most of us who had no real chance do become astronauts simply grew out of this. I find difficult for an old man still dreaming a space flight - most of them would wish something more realistic and able-to-purchase, like world tours or a house in the countryside. And the plot have a serious hole: why John should sue the two doctors if they won't implant the moon travel into his mind? F**k, he is DYING! Is suing someone really an old man's last wish?

I cannot praise the story, music and presentation of this game enough. No other game can make me cry like a baby as much as this one does. I won't go into detail about those, because other reviews have already done it. Aside from those things, the gameplay is underwhelming at best if not annoying. You only do 2 things: searching for specific items and solving puzzles. And IMO both things can sometimes get tedious and interrupt the story and, therefore, ruin the overall experience. Another thing is that there's no branching story whatsoever. I'm not saying it should have branching story from a design perspective. My point is that the lack of branching story makes most of the gameplay even more pointless. I think I probably would have enjoyed the story even more if there was less gameplay, or if the whole game was just a straight-up movie.

To The Moon is a game where you play as two scientists progressing backwards through a dying man's memories, trying to alter his life and motivations so that he can have the experience of his dying wish: to go to the moon. Along the way you also learn about his complicated past with his wife, friends, and family. As a video game, To The Moon is awful. You have to walk around every level trying to find which random object you can interact with or which specific location you have to stand on to get a point towards progressing to the next level. Then you have to do this same boring puzzle at the end of every level, which neither makes sense in the story or gameplay. Just bad mechanics all around. However, as a story, it is very well done, and this is where To The Moon really shines. Although the objects that count for points feel rather arbitrary at first, the devs do a really good job of stringing them together across levels, so there will be random moments where you say "oh, that's where this random item came from!" And it is evident the writers put a lot of thought and effort into setting up the life of the main character and connecting it across just a handful of moments, as well as designing the environments around the memories (like how the sprites of less memorable characters are fuzzy and less detailed). Some of the plot was a bit cheesy or just bad, but overall it was very well done. 7/10 would cry again

The Game is pretty good and it's worth the money. One problem I had was that I was forced to disable DEP on Windows 10 otherwise the game shutdown immediantly after start. I hope this gets fixed.