It looks great, and it plays great. It's an old school shoot-em-up bullet hell arcade game. However unlike other bullet hell games in which you control a ridiculously fragile magical girl, you can take quite a lot of punishment. Which is good because there's absolutely no way you can avoid all those shots unless you're the kind of person who can play through superhexagon on your first try. The one thing I dislike though, is that the story is being told while you are in the middle of avoiding being blown up by the enemies, in japanese; with subtitles. It's not a big deal though, the story is a pretty standard animesque storyline, and quite troperrific. So you won't miss much.
This is not really a game, the term visual novel would be a better fit for it. If you know what a visual novel is and enjoy them, then 'To the Moon' is a must for you, and as long as you have a soul, wil hit you right in the feels with gut wrenching intensity. The story is beautiful, the music while not brilliant is more than adequate and works beautifully with the scenes. The graphics, which could be considered its weakest point, with their old-time, 16bit feel, as if made with rpg maker actually manage to enhance the fairy tale feel of the whole experience. Just don't expect gameplay because there isn't any. This is not a game, this a story, and a beautifully told one.
Having played up to and through episode 5 I can say that Sam & Mas save the world is a good adventure game, just not the game I was hoping for. It almost looks as if technology has worked against this particular genre of gaming. The new games are devoid of that magical something the old games had, a mix of ingenuity and intelligence forced on by hardware limitations which made them so memorable. As such it fails to recapture that special feeling the old lucasarts games had. The puzzles are a lot easier and the interface much simpler. Those of us who remember all those hours of frustrated unsuccesful item combination, trying variants of pull, push, use, look at, speak to, etc with the object or objects until you found a particular combination that worked, might be frustrated by the very opposite cause in this game. The puzzles are all too obvious and do not require choosing which action to go with which item. That said, the particular brand of Sam & Max humour is still there, and I did actually break out laughing at Bosco's insane paranoia. It is a good game, just not great, recommended for hardcore fans of the characters and the genre. And if you happen to find it on sale (like I did), definitely go for it.
