Many Welps

Time to Finish: 3 hours

I went into To the Moon with very little knowledge. You see, I pride myself on my uncanny ability to avoid spoilers aka I know when to stop reading things…So the only thing I knew going into this game was that it was an RPG Maker game and it was about two people going into a dying man’s memory.  A lot of the times I find myself interested in games, movies, and books solely for the ideas they possess and not so much the story. So I’m kind of surprised I’ve been sitting on this game since 2015. Traveling memories is such an interesting idea to me and I’d say the game does a great job exploring some of the nuances of that.

Things I Liked:

The Story: There isn’t a whole lot of gameplay here so the story has to be on point which it definitely is. The story was nothing like what I thought it was going to be. I had heard this game pulls on your emotional strings and I can, in fact, confirm the story is a bit of an emotional rollercoaster. There are sad scenes, mixed happy scenes, and the two main characters provide some much needed comic relief when things start to get too depressing. Some times the dialog can seem a bit out of place, like random Dr Who references and some poorly executed jokes, but for the most part, I thought it was really well written.

The Gameplay: One of the things I hate in point and click games is when the gameplay gets in the way of the story. I would rather get to the next scene or story beat than hunt around for 20 minutes trying to solve some puzzle. There isn’t too much gameplay here and honestly, I’m totally ok with that.  Every scene has you hunting around for memory fragments to jump to another memory and solve a light puzzle in order to jump.

The Music: I still find myself humming the theme to this game…Sure, it may be a bit repetitive but the music fits each scene perfectly.

Things that could have been better:

RPG Maker Engine: I know I’m not the only one who has Steam filter out RPG Maker games. Most of the time they’re stock asset games that probably shouldn’t be sold. In fact, To the Moon is the only RPG Maker game I’ve heard of that’s worth playing. I’ve played around with RPG maker in the past and it’s fun for little personal projects and as a learning tool but probably shouldn’t be used as a production engine.

Display Size: Thanks to RPG Maker this game can be played in Full screen or in a 640 x 480 window. Both leave a little to be desired as windowed is too small and full screen leaves things looking a bit stretched.

Screenshots: As you may have noticed, this post lacks screenshots. That’s because RPG Maker doesn’t support screenshots through Steam. I didn’t realize this was something i cared about until I spent a good 15 minutes trying to figure out why my F12 key wasn’t doing anything except pausing the game

Things I wish I knew sooner:

• You can swap between windowed and full screen by hitting alt+enter
• If you want to take a screenshot, use the Print Screen key and paste it into a program like MS Paint.
• There’s a sequel that doesn’t get mentioned as often.
• The story really is that good!

 

Have you played To the Moon? Love it, hate it, want to play it? Let me know!