Review: To the Moon

Few games try to be touching. Those that do regularly fail, because the player is rarely interested in being touched. He or she wants to blow things up or make characters look stupid, because that’s a lot more fun.

To the Moon, then, must be lauded for succeeding at having a serious narrative. It’s Murakami in video game form, a surreal tale of love, relationships, and death that poses a lot of interesting questions. Furthermore, it does it without alienating the player—the player character (one of them, at least) is a callous jerk, denying the gravity of the situation in favor of Street Fighter jokes.

Let me put it plain: To the Moon is the best written game you’ll ever play, a true triumph of narrative, a game that shows that video games can tell stories as well as other mediums. It’s by no means perfect, but it is a great game you owe to yourself to play.

The narrative of To the Moon can be described pretty simply: you’re a pair of scientists tasked with fulfilling a dying man’s last wish with the help of a pseudoscientific device. Once inside the mind of one Johnny Wyles, you proceed backwards through his memories, attempting to establish connections which will let you plant ideas in his mind as a child, letting him live out his dying wishes in his mind.

It’s all very complicated, and to say more would be to ruin the surprise. But Johnny’s story is masterfully told. It’s not only a high degree of difficulty, with immediate reveals and gradual explanation, but wonderfully suspenseful, charming, funny, and heartwarming all at the same time. Sure, a couple jokes fall flat, and a couple characters feel a little underdeveloped, and there’s a teeny tiny plot hole, but all that is water under the bridge. The narrative it’s telling is perhaps the best in games. It manages to do this without the assistance of solid mechanics, too.

That’s the catch. The catch is this wonderful story is told as what effectively amounts to interactive fiction. The first half of the game has a mechanic that makes it a top-down, 16 bit hidden object game; the second half eschews a consistent mechanic for a number of mini-games that are only compelling as obstacles preventing you from progressing the story. By themselves they are neither challenging nor fun.

So it’s the story you’ll be playing for, and the atmosphere. The music, by Kan “Reives” Gao and Laura Shigihara, features a number of different understated piano and orchestrated themes but falls back on a beautiful little piano piece. “Repetitive,” the game calls it, but it’s beautiful, and it serves as leitmotif to the entire game. The other songs are less memorable but still fantastic, and they serve to enforce the game’s melancholy mood. To the Moon has atmosphere, to say the least.

To call To the Moon a game would be doing it a disservice. It defies label as a game, and exists as interactive fiction. The game parts are mostly unfortunate but do little to detract from the story and the atmosphere; they aren’t compelling in and of themselves, but you will play through them to hear the rest of the story it’s telling. So really, your enjoyment of To the Moon will be determined by which camp of gamer you come from. If you demand compelling mechanics, then this isn’t the game for you, and you know that. But those of you looking for a game with a story you will remember, a story that will touch you, this is your game.