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!
