Review: To the Moon

http://freebirdgames.com/to_the_moon/

Play...  if you enjoy watching and listening as much as playing.
Don't play...  if you don't like games that make you cry.

Rich in story, light in gameplay.  And that's not a bad thing; just make sure you know what you're getting, because I'd guess at least half of this game is dialogue and cut-scenes.  But the story that they tell is a very interesting and touching one.  To the Moon is about two doctors who enter the memories of a dying man in order to fulfill his last wish.  They have the technology to explore and change a patient's memories so that before they pass away, it's as if they had lived a different life.

The most prominent element of To the Moon is the story.  The majority of actual gameplay consists of point-and-click exploration with the occasional mini-game thrown in.  This game came close to just feeling like a movie whose story is only occasionally interrupted by player control.  What saved it from this was the theme of exploring the patient's memories, which kept it from feeling too linear.  I would have liked for it to push that theme a bit more, allowing a greater amount of exploration, but it still pulled it off well, and it was interesting to see how each memory the doctors explore is related to the others.

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In the game you can visit memories at different points of time in the patient's life.  When you're allowed to visit each memory is very controlled.  I would have liked to choose which memory I was going to.  There's a point in the game where the doctors make the change in one of patient's early memories that causes memories after that point to change.  It would have been really neat to be able to make the changes myself and then periodically jump back to future memories to see what effect my changes are having.  But again, which memories you visit and when the changes you made manifest themselves is pretty much set.  It's still fun to explore what's there, the novelty just wears off by the end of the first play-through.

Several parts of the story utilize suspense and cliffhangers, which is okay, but the way they try to pull it off with dialogue gets a little irritating at times.  It feels like every few minutes, the following conversation occurs:

"Wait, do you think...?"
"I'm afraid so."
"What should we do?"
"There's only one thing we can do."
"You don't mean...?"
"It's the only way."

It just comes off feeling a little forced; it's painfully obvious that the doctors know something that the player doesn't, and there's not really a good in-game reason that they wouldn't come right out and say it.  Worse still, by the end of the game, some of the secrets they kept from you are left unanswered, and not in an open-ended, "huh, I wonder what they were trying to convey" kind of way.  It really just felt like they forgot to explain something which would have made certain parts of the story make a lot more sense.  This is probably my biggest criticism.

Its flaws aside though, it really is a beautiful and thought-provoking story.  Questions arise that the characters never really vocalize but which the player is almost certain to consider while playing.  For example, if you had the ability to go back and change certain of your memories, would you?  Would you do it to someone else, even if they asked you to?  Which memories would you change?  Are some memories too sacred to change?  What would you be willing to lose in order to give you life the perfect ending?

I know we're already in the middle of the "spoiler" tags, but this next bit is a major spoiler, so seriously, if there's a chance you'll go and play the game yourself, I'd skip the next two paragraphs.  The old man in the story is dying, and wishes to have his memories changed so that he can go to the moon before he passes away.  The doctors reasonably assume that the best way to accomplish this is to go back to his earliest memories and implant in him the desire to become an astronaut.  But they can't do it.  Not at first.  After doing some more poking around, they discover that the reason is his wife.  With her in his life, he has no reason to want to go to the moon.  The only way for his desire to go to the moon to surface is to remove his wife from the picture, meaning he would die having no recollection of her or their relationship.  This provokes some of the trickiest questions yet.  Is it right?  They're only memories after all; the real her had already passed away, so it's not as if they would be affecting anything in real life.  But does that make it okay?

The doctors go through with it, removing a crucial memory of he and her meeting each other.  Sure enough, they are then successfully able to nurture a desire in him to become an astronaut.  This is near the end of the game, and there's a poignant sense of loss as you watch a montage of him training and preparing and eventually being accepted by NASA.  But then something beautiful happens.  While going through orientation, he is introduced to one of the other new recruits:  his wife.  The two of them train to go to the moon together, and upon returning begin their life together, thus recreating many of the memories that he had lost.  It's as if he loved her so much that the memory of her had become ingrained into his subconscious, so that when she was removed, the man's mind simply put her back elsewhere.  Tear-jerker!

</spoilers>

Despite the parts of this game I think could have been done better, I genuinely enjoyed this game, it's JRPG style graphics, the beautiful music, and the surprising depth of the story.  Freebird Games has hinted that there's more to the story and that they're planning on releasing future games and other content that expand upon it.  (I think there's even a free "episode" available as DLC.)  I hope we see similar interactive-storytelling like this one in the future.