To The Moon

One of the very best written stories I’ve seen in any medium. It’s joyous, tragic, beautiful, funny, and heartbreaking. I cried too, and I don’t cry at much these days. One of my favourite games. Play it, and let it be yours too.

I'm not sure I will ever buy games based on rave reviews again. This turned out to be one of the poorest games I've played this year - repetitive puzzles, a transparent storyline and predictable gags killed this game for me. The only reason I'm giving this more than one star is that it was (nearly) all put together by one person, so kudos there.

I bought this game because of the good reviews. I don't like it and I wanted to share my experience with potential buyers. It is a very low budget, miniaturized animation, done in black and white and pastels. There are no voices, but bubbles to be read. It is an adventure type game where you walk around trying to find things. It tries to be funny, sometimes it is. There are puzzles that don't matter to the story, but just interrupt the flow of what is happening. It becomes a slow paced endurance contest, with nothing to see or hear or do. I kept wondering how much more of this torture before it's over. I did not make it to the end. It's not for me.

To The Moon is a beautiful game in many regards. The story is delicate and nimble, always keeping the "player" guessing what may happen next, all the while peppering in fun bits of Sci-Fi theory that went beyond my initial impressions of "Eternal Sunshine" ; the soundtrack sets the tone of the story wonderfully ; the sprite art is reminiscent of the best of Square's 16-bit classics. For those reasons alone it is worth ten dollars and the 3-6 hours of time it takes to play. I am definitely looking forward to more Freebird Games and games by Kan Gao. However. I feel like such a strong story would have been better served without the illusion of gaming conventions. There is barely any game here. This story poses as a point and click adventure or an interactive story, when there is actually very little interactivity. The story is almost entirely linear. The puzzles amount to flipping some cards every few minutes (also for me "flipping cards" as a mini game in a digital world seems odd). I I feel this story might work better if it were put into some other medium. A comic, perhaps. A few small potatoes: -The hand-drawn art was nice, but felt out of place, only showing up a few times and in some backgrounds. -The timeline was bit confusing due to all the references to present day culture. I'm guessing from Johnny's choice in reading material as a child that was born in the mid-late 80's, and his being old makes the present time in this game, oh say around 2050+. But then we have this character Neil in the present making jokes about Street Fighter, The Hulk, and Dr Who. I know these jokes were said with a wink and a jab right in the ribs of the target demographic, but they pulled me out of the story.

The game is great, but if you have any intention of reading the extra comics, I'd recomend not buying it on GOG, since they aren't available here and they count as DLC, so you'd have to buy the game again (or buy physical copies, which are way more expensive).