To The Moon Review - An emotional interactive story

With all the big budget games from the large publishers that are hammering us relentlessly at the moment, it would be very easy to forget completely about the indie gaming scene.
But that would be a shame, because then you would miss "To The Moon", which is a quirky and emotionally engaging indie game that makes for a perfect palette cleanser in between your Batmans, warfares that are modern or rimmed skies.

Prepare yourself for a different kind of gaming experience

To The Moon is not so much a video game as it is an interactive story told through the medium of video games. Think of it as a 4-5 hour long movie that allows you to really soak in the story by making you actively drive it forward, and you have a pretty good idea about what kind of experience that you are in for in To The Moon.

This may sound disappointing and terribly uninteresting, but trust me, it is not.

The premise of To The Moon is that science has invented a way to enter the memories of dying people, altering them in ways that grant them their final wish. Wanted to become a pop superstar but spent all your life as a secretary? No problem, through modern technology your memories can be altered and you can look back on a successful career as a musical megahit.
This process of entering and altering peoples memories are carried out by trained professionals (probably better than using untrained simpletons I wager). In To The Moon you take control of two of such memory fiddlers, doctors Eva Rosalene and Neil Watts. The game follows the two doctors as they ply their craft on a dying old man, Johnny, whose final wish it is to... you guessed it... go to the Moon!

Taking a look around Johnny's house. Stalked by a couple of creepy kids...

The memory altering process works in a very Inception style way. Rosalene and Watts must travel through the memories of Johnny and find a place to "plant" the desire to go to the Moon. Once planted correctly, the desire should cascade through his life, leading to the creation of a memory of Johnny going to the Moon.
What this means in terms of gameplay is that you spend the majority of the game in different scenes representing different memories, in backwards chronological order. So starting with old man Johnny and ending with young Johnny.

In every memory you will listen to pieces of conversation and examine objects or pieces of scenery, trying to find the most important memories. This collection process is basically just walking around the screens and clicking on everything that looks like it could be of interest and getting back a few lines of text.
Once you've collected everything in a given memory, you can activate a "memento" that will take you along into the next memory (or previous, depending on how you think about it).
The mementos constitute pretty much the only real "game mechanic" in To The Moon, tasking you with some really basic puzzle solving of flipping pieces on a picture until the object on it is clear. It's really easy stuff and shouldn't take you more than a minute or two at most.

This is about as much of a traditional video game as To The Moon gets

The graphics of To The Moon are very 16-bit era. From an overhead perspective you will be clicking your way through various environments that are very simple in their creation, but all do their job perfectly adequately and gives To The Moon a distinct style.
If I can gripe a bit about the presentation and UI though I would have to say that it can get tedious hunting around the screens for something to click on, and it would have been nice if it was a little easier to spot things that were clickable, rather than having to spend so much time pixel hunting for something to activate.
I also had a couple of occasions where two clickable objects were right next to each other, but the cursor did not do a good job of highlighting that there were actually two things for me to use here, which lead to a lot of wasted time and frustration.

You're not going to be sticking through To The Moon for the gaming elements or for the graphics then.
What will make you play all the way through To The Moon, possibly in one sitting as I did, is the gripping personal tale that unfolds as you gradually make your way deeper through Johnny's memories.
It's a tale of love and tragedy and it is a very moving story. Not a very moving video game story. A moving story *period*.
The somber tone of Johnny's story is lightened up by the constant bickering between Watts and Rosalene. Watts always ready with a wisecrack or a pop culture reference, while Rosalene is the "by the book" professional.
The comic relief that the pair of them provides is needed to counterbalance the very serious main story, and for the most part it works pretty well. However, I did feel that it went overboard on more than one occasion and instead took away from the dramatic moments of the game.

Are you going to ride that horse to the Moon? I think not

To The Moon is a short game. I used a bit over 4 hours to play though it myself. And as you've probably gathered by now, it's actually not much of a "game".
What we have here is an emotionally engaging story experience that is almost perfectly paced, and which will make you smile, cringe and cry (or feel pretty sad, at least). You're going to feel a real connection with Johnny by the end of To The Moon, and you'll be rooting for his final wish to be granted.

That's not something that we get from video games very often, and I think that if you are the least bit interested in storytelling in video games, and you can handle playing through a game where you don't shoot or blow up anything (almost inconceivable, I know), then To The Moon is a highly recommendable experience that won't cost you more than a good book.



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