MarkoH01: Luckily different people have different opinions. Otherwise this sequel would probably never exist.
Starmaker: It's a fact. Different people have different
tastes.
---
The most damning evidence is that no matter how hard I looked, I could never find a critique of To The Moon which would explain
what the reviewer liked about the story. There are dozens of "professional" reviews overflowing with unspecified praise ("It made me cry", "it cured my AIDS", etc) which don't actually discuss it (as is customary for shitty copywriters), but eventually, when the spoiler embargo is lifted, every acclaimed work acquires a body of (positive) paid and unpaid critique that goes into details. And there's none of this for To The Moon.
("spoilers" for To the Moon, I guess)
A guy married an autistic woman. They decided to build a house. When she got old and (physically) ill, she told him to spend their money on completing the house rather than on her treatment, and died. (It's not clear whether she decided to die because she was autistic or the illness was terminal and she didn't want the husband to be alone AND broke in the end.) Also, when the guy was a kid, his brother died in a freak car accident. Eventually the guy himself dies "of old age", but before he does, the doctors hypnotize him into having a dream of being young again and going with his wife on a lunar expedition (they weren't scientists or anything). As the shuttle in the hallucination takes off, he dies. The end.
While human mortality is a natural tearjerker when you think about it, there's nothing in the game that conveys it artistically in a more profound sense. It shows a pixel kid getting hit by a pixel car, which is, again, sad when you think about it (three of my friends died in car accidents over the last three years), but the game doesn't just fail to convey the sadness, it doesn't even try. The kid is a nobody, you aren't trying and failing to prevent the death (it happens in a cutscene). It's all like:
- hey, an elderly person died of an illness and perhaps elective poverty,
just like in the dril tweet - hey, a person died in an accident
- hey, a person died of "old age"
- in an alternate universe, they could've been astronauts (er what)
If, instead of skimming my forum post, impersonal-you put up some sad music and take five minutes to meditate on the sadness and inevitability of death as it relates to you and your family, based on the 4 points above, that'll roughly constitute the "good" part of To The Moon.
Did any of your relatives die? When? How? Do you miss them? If yes, how do you feel about your inability to convey your memories of them to your children/grandchildren? If no, do you wish you had relatives who you would miss? How's your health? Are you happy with what you're doing? Will you be at least moderately content with what you'll have accomplished by the time you die? Will you have accomplished
anything, in fact? How many changes of seasons will you get to see?
Unfortunately, the game is saddled with a stupid fucking premise and a stupid fucking plot. The questions I've helpfully come up with in the previous paragraph?
The game never asks them. The protagonist couple live an idyllic middle-class life, grow old together, and die in the same peaceful, sweet-saccharine manner, survived by the dude's nurse/housekeeper (who got to inherit the house) and her oblivious little children: he won't be
missed with any sort of emotional intensity, only "fondly remembered".
And that's the "game".
(end "spoilers")
The only good thing I can say about To The Moon is that the pixellated foliage is fluffy.
tldr but here's my two cents: I really liked To the moon more because of how the story was told than the story itself.
I've found it kind of wonderful to be so much into such a story especially considering the "poor" graphics.
When you look at the stories of the best books, movies or videogames, they are all just the same stories... told in slightly different ways. To The Moon's is no different. The videogame skin makes it so that you are vaccumed into it and you are living it, which makes it so interesting (from my pov at least).
