I’ve been wanting to talk about this game for a while, and now seemed like an opportune time since you can get it for as low as $1.00 right now as part of the Humble Bundle. Perhaps more difficult than getting you to spend the $1.00 is convincing you that you should spend some of your very precious free time on it, but that’s what I intend to do.
To the Moon is an RPG Maker game, it looks like an old 16 bit Super NES RPG, and to be honest this was a bit of a hurdle for me at first, I feared getting into a game demanding a commitment of several dozen hours to finish. I think I owned the game for three or four months before finally sitting down with it to play it. Once I got started though I had a hard time stopping until I reached the end. To my delight the game sidestepped all of the fears that it’s initial appearance raised in me. It plays more like an adventure game wrapped up in the free exploration trappings of an RPG without the grinding and random battles that typically plague games like that. All told the game took me around four hours to finish, not a minute of which was filler.
The real draw of To the Moon is the touching story. It starts with a pair of doctor’s who specialize in altering diving into the memories of a terminally ill patient and modifying their memories so that they remember achieving a goal that is meaningful to them. So when the patient dies, they die remembering their life as it would have been had they achieved their goal. As the title suggests, the doctor’s are helping the patient realize his dream of going to the moon. From this beginning it turns into a beautiful story about marriage and the struggles two people have understanding each other and making a life together.
The story starts in the recent past, and moves farther into the past, reviewing the man’s life and his experiences with his wife. This works really well because you explore his house in the present, finding mysteries and seeing the way that his relationship ended up. As you travel into the past you uncover those mysteries and reveal new ones, gradually seeing the whole story of he and his wife’s life together. Eventually you come to understand everything, in an even deeper way than the patient himself understood things. You come to discover why he wanted to go to the moon, even though he himself couldn’t tell you why.
And the music, holy cow the music. The music was touching, pensive, and beautiful. It perfectly accompanied the game, accentuating the emotions being explored by the characters. You’ll just love the music, which is part of what makes now such a good time to buy, with the Humble Bundle you’ll get the soundtrack along with the game.
I can’t recommend it enough, it’s a touching, emotional game, it’s the only game that’s ever really made me cry, that is if you don’t count the tears of frustration I shed when I was much younger. The game is exactly as long as it needs to be, you’ll move through it quickly, but it’s packed so full that it’s more satisfying than many games that are twice as long.
Go over right now to the humble bundle site and buy it, waste no time, you’ll even get a couple of other games with it. I can’t personally vouch for them, but I’ve heard they are pretty good. But To the Moon is worth the price of admission all by itself. Go! Buy! Now!