Steam Cleaning Part 2: To The Moon

This isn't what the title screen looks like for the version I got from Steam

Full Disclosure: I think I've played something like 2/3 of this game, based on the in-game meter that seems to tell you how far you've gotten.

I never saw anything that looked like this in my playthrough

To the Moon is a game that I feel like I should enjoy more. I'm a bit concerned that part of the reason I didn't like it is that I played it on PC in a different state from the original game or something, because most of the screen shots that I've seen look quite different from what I experienced. In all, I'd say it's almost clever and charming enough to overcome the unbelievable boredom of the game play. For me, that wasn't enough to get through to the end, but it was enough to inspire some admiration.

The premise of the game is that you're a team of memory-trekking "doctors" whose job it is to grant a man's dying wish.

(to go to the moon)

presumably, so that he can unwind some kind of unconscious problem he has. It turns out that in the process, you reverse-learn a whole lot about him and his wife, and the connection they have to a significant object.

It's a lighthouse.

a lighthouse

and other things that they are attached to. In terms of game play, this amounts to participating in long sections of pixel-hunting, reading cleverly written and charming - but expository - dialog, and solving some simple puzzles.

The strongest point of the game is its writing. The dialog is funny, and the characters are clever. I laughed out loud a few times, and found myself moved by the melancholy of the relationships the dialog sketches. The game even manages this while still holding to the level of humor that one would expect from a JRPG, so corniness and G-rated jokes abound, but that doesn't end up grating or infantile. Particularly, the relationship between the 2 main characters winds up being entertaining and touching, even before the game ends. There are other characters that show up as well, and these also have witty dialog (even if the overall characterization is a little bit cliched). As a whole, the game is well-written and interesting in terms of character and dialogue.

Let's play a game of "Find the Platypus."

The problem with this is the game play. Just as the last game, Space Ace, had a problem in that the art didn't justify the gameplay, To the Moon has the reverse problem, that the game play just doesn't justify the benefit I gained from the artistic direction. In between the dialogue sections, the game amounts to a pixel-hunt, in which you have to search around levels that are essentially devoid of interactive objects, until you find the three-to-five objects that are attached to their memories and collect them. Getting around the maps isn't fun, and there isn't enough interactive stuff to make it entertaining. It's like in an adventure game, you do the wrong thing, or go the wrong way all the time. In a good adventure game, the game makers have written some funny dialogue or given you other interactive objects that shed more light on the game world to keep this activity entertaining. In To the Moon, the JRPG style of the game really doesn't allow for that, and you end up just wandering around, looking for a place that your mouse will turn into the magnifying glass that indicates you found an interactive object. This is made doubly annoying by the fact that the game seems willing to let you skip this searching by giving you the memory-travel items sometimes, but other times forces you to slog through extensive searches of the local area, hunting for a jar of olives or a platypus doll.

More fun than the pixel-hunts are the between-memory games, in which you play a mini-game that requires using logic to flip tiles in a picture so that the correct faces of the tiles are all facing up at the same time. This sort of puzzle is entertaining, but really doesn't connect in any significant way to the rest of the gameplay. I can see that there is a conceptual link - the flipping of the tiles represents the gradual reveal of information that the player is also achieving as the game world moves backward in time - but it still seems out-of-place and unnecessary.

The game also tries to deal with autism, sort of successfully

Really, the game feels like a short story that someone turned into a video game. Except reading a twenty- or thirty-page short story takes about half an hour, but playing this game has so far taken me three or four hours. That's WAY more of a time investment than I'm willing to commit, particularly when I have a lot of the story figured out already, and it's just a matter of seeing the details of the connections more than the general outline. For some people, the details might be interesting enough to justify a few hours of game play, but for me, it just wasn't worth it. I kept trying to come back and finish the game, but every time the game jumped backward in the memory of the character, I thought, "Can't we just get to his childhood already and figure out that it was his sled or a platypus or whatever?" Seeing the interstitial parts of the game fleshed out the characters, but the game itself wasn't interesting enough to make that worthwhile.

I will say, however, that the music in the game was also a highlight. There are some orchestral songs, and some that are solo piano, and both of these types was well written and recorded, and contributed to the melancholy, lightning-and-rain-and-a-glass-of-wine atmosphere of the game.

Overall, I admired the game's character in terms of writing, but just couldn't get past the boring game play and reliance on pixel-hunting that made up the fundamental aspects of the game. For people that really want to take an emo journey into someone's past, or who have more time and rest (I have two young kids and don't get much sleep these days, and I fell asleep playing this game twice in my 4 hours of game play, which took place over the course of 3 days) it might hold your attention. I couldn't get away from the feeling that it would have been a lot more compelling as a 20-minute experience.