To the Moon +4

To The Moon is a fantastic experience. It’s a story driven RPG with great characters, great story telling, and a powerful soundtrack. It’s story has great mystery, some fun comedy, and serious tearjerkers (come prepared with tissues). Being written, developed, and composed nearly all by Kan Gao, it shows through the ability for all the different elements to work together to enhance the story and experience.

The main downside is that the “game” aspect isn’t very impressive. The majority of the gameplay involves just walking around and reading the dialogue triggered by interactions. There is little challenge (besides emotionally) to progress, and the game almost plays out more like an interactive movie than a game (though movies don’t have pixel based visuals and dialogue boxes for conversation). For some people, the lack of gameplay can be a turn-off, but personally I don’t feel it detracts from the experience.

Overall, would I recommend this? If you’re just looking for a challenging or gameplay filled experience, then perhaps no. However, if you want an incredible story that lives up to the stories of some of the best movies and books, absolutely!

When it comes to story and music, I usually have less expectations on a game than a movie. However, this game delivers with an emotional story and music. There is minimal gameplay so it felt a lot like reading a book with polished super nintendo RPG visuals. While I enjoyed the story, it sometimes felt like the story dragged on at times with things that had none-little impact on the story. In other words, it took me about 4 hrs to beat but i was probably only interested in about 3 hrs of the game. I still gave 5 stars because holding my interest for the majority of the time is still better when compared to most other games. Story and music are areas I'd like to see future games improve on. I feel too many game developers these days focus on graphics and more content to make a game long, that it becomes difficult for them to put a lot of focus on each part of a long game. Of course, there are exceptions to the rule but maybe only 1 game out of 1000. You can see the focus in this great short game through it's story, music, and ability to make minimal graphics still look pretty.

The stellar reviews finally brought me to this game. As many before have observed, the actual gameplay is minimal. There is very light exploration and several quick mini-games along the way which basically serve to nudge the story along. But if you adjust your expectations and decide to invest yourself in the narrative, the experience can be surprisingly poignant and thought provoking.

Which is why I regret the one thing that detracted from my experience, which is the dialogue between the two characters that you play throughout the story (the "doctors") that I found to be hokey, crass and juvenile to the point of being completely distracting. Constantly flinging sarcastic comments or insults at each other, being jarringly rude to other characters, routinely calling each other "idiot", "moron", or at one point, "butthead." The dialogue between these two so-called doctors struck me as so wildly out of place that it constantly jolted me out of this otherwise touching storyline and came close to derailing the whole experience for me, unfortunately.

Having said that, I was still able to somewhat overlook the childish banter and remain attuned to the larger story, which is truly moving and memorable and still made the journey worthwhile in the end.