To The Moon
I recently played To the Moon. I had high hopes for this game since I find the idea of going back in people’s memories to be an interesting idea for a story, and a lot of people, including real life friends, liked it. I was disappointed because I found it very boring, especially in the first two acts. Every scene was drawn out painfully long, with seemingly endless amounts of contrived dialogue. The gameplay consisted of the boring task of clicking on mundane items and then reading through the dialogue that follows. The dialogue and gameplay ruined what would have been an otherwise interesting plot. Also, for what’s supposed to be an emotional story, I found the characters rather difficult to sympathize with. It seems that I was just expected to care about them from the beginning, without really knowing anything about them. Yes the story had sad and sappy parts, but they were not impactful or strong enough to really move me much. This is likely due to the format getting in the way of the story.
Not everything about this game was awful. The music in the game was beautiful; it was my favorite thing about the game. There were occasional bits of humorous dialogue which broke up the monotony. The third act was better that the earlier ones and kept my interest because things happened at a faster pace, and the story started to come together. Although this act was fine, I felt like it was a chore to even get to it and almost didn’t make it there. I also enjoyed the art, and took some screenshots, but Steam wouldn’t let me upload them. :(
I also played the two minisodes a bit later. In my opinion, they could accurately be named “Smalltalk with your Coworkers Simulator.” The dialogue was just as bad as in the main game, and as soon as they started to touch on something interesting, they ended.
Overall, I was very disappointed in To the Moon and I don’t understand why this game has such good ratings, but at least it’s not the worst game I’ve ever played. Instead of playing this, I would recommend watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a very good movie that deals with similar ideas of regret and being able to change memories.