To the Moon
Published by Freebird Games
Available on Steam for $7.99 thru Sept. 14 ($9.99 after that date)
I pretty much went into this game cold turkey after browsing the new releases on Steam last week. Watching the video trailer and reading the sypnosis of the story just caught my interest. In addition I was suffering from PTSD after almost getting suicidal with Super Mario Bros. on the DS. So I wanted to get as far away as I could from that awful stagnated franchise.
To the Moon, at least storywise, is a bit of a cross between Memento, Total Recall, and Inception. You play as two scientists, Dr. Eva Rosalene and Dr. Neil Watts, that work for a company called the Sigmund Corp. Sigmund's service is to fulfill dying wishes. Not real dying wishes like the Make-A-Wish Foundation. No, Sigmund specializes in implanting memories in it's clients brains, much like Rekal in Total Recall. But instead of the doctors simply sitting or standing around as a machine implants the artificial memories, they enter the virtual world of their customer's mind. Hopefully, if the implants work out, the dying person will be able to have a moment of consciousness when they can feel that they fulfilled their greatest wish and can die in peace.
Johnny Wyles, an old and dying man, wants his wish to go to the moon fulfilled. Of course, he never did this in real life, which is where Eva and Neil come in. They must work through his past backwards from this most recent memories until his earliest ones, learning the best way to modify his desires to coincide with his wish. They can't just implant the order "Go to the moon!" in his brain. They have to work more subtly so that Johnny's mind will accept the lie they will be serving up to him. In essence, they have to trick Johnny's mind into thinking that it has always wished to go to the moon and took the steps in real life to make the wish a reality.
To the Moon pretty primitive looking with 2D pixel art which can be quite beautiful even for all that. I guess I wasn't too prejudiced against the look since I had just finished 3D Dot Game Heroes, which was TRYING to look primitive, which probably primed me pretty well for the experience of To the Moon.
The game is really a point and click visual novel with some clumsy traditional gameplay ideas and puzzles thrown in here and there which is kind of a shame. For instance, to go from memory to memory you have to attain mementos by gathering objects in the memories and then throwing them at an invisible shield around the memento. Then you have to do a pretty simple tile flipping game to construct the picture of the memento. It just all seemed a little pointless to me. What purpose does it serve to flip tiles? No purpose. The story is the real meat of the game.
When To the Moon doesn't actually try seriously to use traditional game ideas, it made me laugh a lot. Early on, there is a scene where Eva says she's really good at role playing and then proceeds to get into a Dragonquest-like JRPG battle with a squirrel! It really makes you go "WTF?" before you realize the battle is just a joke and it never happens. But there are other times where you have to dodge obstacles in a hallway that make you wonder why the sequences even exist. But these are relatively isolated incidents.
Most of the game is spent learning about Johnny's life, and also the LOVE of his life, his deceased wife, River. Yep, her name was River. This was the greatest bit of the game, because you are progressing backwards through time, and the further you go back, the more you care about the characters. There is a great sadness about the game, but also a feeling of warmth and love. This atmosphere is further enhanced with the music of the game designer himself, Kan Gao.
While To the Moon is not a perfect game, it is a very interesting experience that was just the cure for my Mario blues. Ignore the pointlessness of object gathering and tile puzzles and savor it for the poignant story that isn't too afraid to crack a smile.
There is already a sequel in the works which I will definitely play. You can also check out Freebird's other games at: http://freebirdgames.com/
My Grade: B+
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