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To the Moon review

Game: To the Moon
Platform: PC
Genre: Adventure
Developer: Freebird Games

Staff review by Lewis Denby

March 01, 2012

Johnny never really knew why he wanted to visit the moon; it’s just something he felt he wished to do. Now, he’s elderly and terminally ill, comatose and unable to fulfil his dream. But in this near-future world exists a technology that allows doctors to change a person’s life as they perceive it, by delving into their memories and rearranging them, so that they may die believing they lived the life they desired.

To the Moon is a love story of sorts. It’s also a story of guilt, regret, friendship, grief and misunderstandings. And it’s not really much of a game, its only significant problems arising when it tries too hard to be one.

To the Moon asset

It’s perhaps closest to the hidden-object genre, only the objects aren’t hidden, and seeking them out serves only to progress the story. It looks like a dreamier Chrono Trigger, but you’ll mainly do a lot of walking and talking, rather than fighting and levelling. There are tile-reversal puzzles and a single action sequence towards the end, but neither of them needed to be there.

You play as two doctors, Neil and Eva, who work for the Sigmund Agency - the company that arranges these memory transformations. A late-night call to a clifftop mansion sets in train a journey backwards through Johnny’s life, as the doctors search for the best moment to implant his desire to become an astronaut.

This is an incredibly, masterfully sad game. It tugs on heartstrings - not via cynical emotional manipulation, but by telling enormously confident stories about the human condition. It’s about the problems any of us may face as we move through our lives, and it’s one of only a handful of games to have brought me to tears. Crucially, though, it’s also at times a game of immense joy, a celebration of existence and persistence in the face of adversity. That’s an incredibly special thing in our medium.

To the Moon asset

You could call it a romantic comedy. It’s extremely funny in places, and it certainly hinges around Johnny’s troubled but adoring relationship with his wife, River, who died two years before Johnny became ill. But it settles for none of the clichés you might associate with the genre. Instead, it derives all of its poignancy and humour from the astonishing candidness and unremarkableness of the topics it breezes through.

This is a game that takes on subject matters unheard of in gaming. Terminal illness, mental health, and genuine corporate moral grey areas that make most games’ attempts seem trivially black-and-white. And it refuses to ram them down your throat. Instead it positions them within an absurdly well-crafted world that simply exists, for better or for worse, just as is the case in real life.

To the Moon tells its story mainly in reverse, which allows its opening mysteries to slowly piece together as the game’s four or five hours progress. At the beginning, names get dropped and situations are referenced, but neither you nor your player characters can make sense of them. You accompany the doctors on a journey of discovery as they work to understand their client: what made him happy? What made him sad? What made him human? And what made him want to go to the moon?

It’s phenomenally well-written. Neil and Eva banter as would lifelong friends, picking at each other’s flaws, teasing one another relentlessly, but clearly both caring a great deal about their colleague. They’re silly and playful, and while aware of the gravity of their role, they still treat it as a job, the thing they do for a living, not some life-changing event that will shape the rest of their days. The contrast works remarkably, because the story they’re unraveling is about precisely that: pinpointing the moments in a person’s life that changed them.

To the Moon asset

I could talk about the story all day - all its intricacies, all its clever subversion of what you expect it to do, all its unlikely beauty in gorgeous pixel-art cut-scenes and unfathomably expressive character sprites. I wish I could talk about three pivotal moments - sections where you’re hit with the dawning realisation of what it all means - because each of them left me speechless. But obviously I can’t. Maybe later, when you’ve all played it.

And you really, really should, providing you’re prepared for something a little different. To the Moon isn’t a traditional game, and it’s a shame it ever tried to be. The tile-reversal puzzles are an unfriendly distraction from the plot, and the action sequence is so misplaced as to be painful. But it’s only painful because almost everything else here is so immaculately, meticulously crafted, not a minute or a pixel wasted, not a single step out of place.

Its retro graphics look beautiful. The original soundtrack is utterly stunning. Its story is one of the most confident and grown-up that our medium has ever seen. Don’t approach To the Moon expecting taxing puzzles or combat or stats, because that isn’t what it’s about. It is its own thing: an indie adventure about going to the moon, but with its sights set far beyond it.

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