The GWJ Adventure Game Club - Game 9: To the Moon

To the Moon (2011)

IMAGE(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/206440/header.jpg)

Wow. Okay. So you crazy cats have now elected my "pick" for the fourth time in a row. Amazing!

You play as either Dr. Rosalene or Dr. Watts (and you might switch around mid-game). They have an odd job: allowing people to relive their life, all the way from the very beginning... but only in their heads. And it will be the last thing they remember as they draw their last breath. As a result, this procedure is only performed on people on their deathbed, to allow them to rectify their regrets. This particular patient, Johnny, wants to go... to the moon.

You can find the wikipedia page here, usual spoiler warning apply. How Long to Beat estimates about 4 hours to completion, but it felt shorter to me back in the day.
Available on Microsoft Windows, OS X, Linux, Android, iOS, Nintendo Switch (release slated for this summer I believe). Currently very deeply discounted on Steam (1€99).

You can find the main thread over this way. We'll be playing To the Moon in July 2019, with an extra month if needed. Enjoy, folks! And keep the tissue box on hand.

Cool.

It's been installed on my MacBook for quite some time, and I'm ready to go! Since this is short, I think I can fit it in my schedule.

Started this a long time ago, and never finished it. Looking forward to giving it another shot.

AWESOME! Just installed it. Can't wait to start, but think I'll wait til I have a chunk of time to devour it in one sitting.

Oh, I already have this one.

And it's got one relatively easy Steam achievement.... Perfect Game Possibility!

I can't resist. I will do this when I get back from traveling.

Just tagging for now. Dont know if I'll get around to actually playing it again - but then I said the same about Baldurs Gate 24 hours ago, and it is basically all I have been doing today, so what do I know.

To the Moon is an absolutely awesome 'game' experience in any case.

There's some lovely humour in the game.

I just finished the game... chewing on a lot.

Spoiler:

River has autism, am I wrong? I feel like without even saying the it, it was somewhat implied. He was so in love with her but the end of his life was so sad because he wouldn't go against her wishes, yet afterward felt those wishes lead to her death. When they were just noodling back into his memories, anything having to do with River was just... really sweet. He loved her so much.

There are so many ways that unraveling a person's memories could go wrong, and I'm noooooot sure Eva & Neil buttoned this up quite so neatly. They recreated John's memories and I'm hoping kept River mostly intact?? Like, I would have liked a little-reassurance that the "diagnosis" of River's that John was uncomfortable educating himself on was "cancer" (the red hair in the waste basket) and not "autism" and that it didn't end up getting edited out like the sibling death. Or maybe I rushed through this game and I misunderstood a lot and got some wires crossed. This also seems likely.

I'm also... having a slight ethics dilemma where I'm not sure it's respectful to River to just edit away her inconvenient wishes out of her husband's memories. But maybe it's a kindness, I don't know what it's like to die. Maybe this is more like morphine for emotions so the dying don't spend their last moments dwelling on regrets. Let it be as fanciful as the dying person needs. Uuuugh all 3 of my final braincells are wrestling eachother about it.

I love this story, though. The humor is great! I love Eva and love-hate Neil. I did a thread of sh*tty tweets that are mostly maligning Neil over here.

Progress! I've installed the game.

Hoorah!

Also just tagging in until I get home from vacation in a few days. Barely started this years ago and got distracted, glad to have a solid reason to revisit it.

Thinking that starting is often the hardest part, I squeezed in 15 quick minutes of this today. So far so good. I got a little confused at the very first section because I misinterpreted some artwork, but once I sorted that out everything went fine.

Been pretty quiet here the last week, how's everyone coming along? Seeing as it's really story heavy and short, I'm guessing a lot of you who finished it are still mulling over your thoughts?
I myself haven't gotten around to it as I'm saving it for next week when I'm on vacation and away with my laptop.

I started in last night, seemed like the perfect thing to wind down with before bed. Didn't get far into it yet, due to impending keyboard faceplant, but I did at least get farther than I had previously.

I was hoping to play this three weekends ago. I might push it to next weekend though. I'm also playing Nier Automata for the (main) JRPG Gameclub, and I think this will be a nice short game to put between the first and second playthroughs.

It's already installed on my MacBook and ready to go though.

I have never heard of this one. I will play it on iPad, shame it is not on the Switch yet.

Just finished. I absolutely loved the story and the music (though it was maybe repeated too frequently), though I was not at all a fan of the way the game was executed. Anything that was game-related seemed contrived and was often maddening (particularly the action sequence).

Dr. Watts annoyed me most of the time as I found him arrogant and seemed to be trying to prove how "cool" he was at any given moment (though that may just be my general annoyance with hipsters shining through). I enjoyed the other characters well enough, but my favorite part of the game was the relationships between them. It was when interacting with Dr. Rosalene that Dr. Watts actually seemed human to me (and thus far more tolerable). The unexpected and perhaps sometimes irrational love of Johnny and River was portrayed so empathically that I found myself feeling the bond between them as a certainty, which gave the motivations of the characters and the resolution of their stories a sense of inevitable beauty.

Overall A+, though I hope next month we get something a bit more puzzle-heavy. I think I'm done with walking simulators for a while.

Regarding the diagnosis (not really a spoiler but tagging it in case someone's a purist like me):

Spoiler:

It's pretty clear that River has Asperger's Syndrome -- what would now officially be called "high-functioning autism" as Asperger's, PDD-NOS, and autism were wrapped into a single "autism spectrum disorder" diagnosis with varying levels of severity in 2013 (at least in the US, ICD-10 still has it). You get that from the way she behaves, but they also specifically reference it as being a pervasive developmental disorder, as a "syndrome," and then reference Tony Attwood's book, which is (was?) the most widely read and recommended book about Asperger's. (So as not to confuse, there was a separate diagnosis called pervasive developmental disorder - not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS), but that was more of a catch-all diagnosis. Asperger's syndrome and autism were both considered a "specified" version of a pervasive developmental disorder.
(Source: 17 years working with kids and adults with ASD.)

3or4monsters wrote:
Spoiler:

They recreated John's memories and I'm hoping kept River mostly intact?? Like, I would have liked a little-reassurance that the "diagnosis" of River's that John was uncomfortable educating himself on was "cancer" (the red hair in the waste basket) and not "autism" and that it didn't end up getting edited out like the sibling death.

Spoiler:

It was my understanding that it was her diagnosis he didn't want to know. I took this as a very important and respectful aspect of their relationship -- Johnny didn't want to pathologize her, but to love her the way she was.

3or4monsters wrote:
Spoiler:

I love this story, though. The humor is great! I love Eva and love-hate Neil. I did a thread of sh*tty tweets that are mostly maligning Neil over here.

Spoiler:

As mentioned above I felt the same way about Neil. He shows a lot of heart in many cases, though, and my imagining of him is that as he ages, he'll drop a lot of the facade and become much more well-rounded.

And now back to fancy graphics and playing with my new video card!

Started this game a long time ago but didn't finish. Maybe I should give it another shot.

So I played this back in, I think, 2012 and it has its flaws but ultimately I really like it. It's earnest and heartfelt and aims at some difficult subjects in a way that not a lot of games do (outside of the very indie space).

I played the sequel, Finding Paradise, just a couple weeks back and it was...fine? Some of the rougher edges of the humour that were sometimes grating in To The Moon but also gave it a lot of its personality felt sanded off. The whole "see how a life was lived" thing is still broadly effective but the specific case itself didn't get its emotional hooks into me the way the first game did.

Welp, I ran into a pretty big issue, which I'd completely forgotten about. When I first played To the Moon, my PC and the Windows account I was using was simply "Siona" (all my PCs have Dune names, my laptop is Sheeana). Except now, with Windows accounts using real names, my first name has an "é" in it. And To the Moon will not hear of it. There's no patch or anything, this has been a known issue for years now, and the only workaround is creating a guest account and playing it from there.
I'm still on the fence about it all, I'm not sure whether or not I'm double dipping on the iPad, or going through the guest account thing, but it has put me off a bit.

Really? That's weird: I have an 'é' in my last name, and I was able to play a few minutes of the game with no problem (I played it through Steam though, I don't know if it's the case for you as well). I double-checked, and there is an 'é' in my Windows user account as well... Is this something that happens right away, or is it a problem that shows up later in the game?

That is a really weird issue indeed.

Eleima wrote:

(all my PCs have Dune names, my laptop is Sheeana).

Also this is awesome.

Oh no, it’s a known issue which the dev has addressed in the Steam forums. It has to do with the Windows pathfile.

I was confused why it would use the windows username for anything, but yeah, makes sense now.
Seems like some people have fixed it by changing the games savefolder through registry. No fix here for windows 10, but maybe it it reasonable to figure out how to change it manually.

https://freebirdgames.com/forum/inde...

Still weird that I did not run into the issue with the game despite my user account having an 'é' in it. I just finished it, and had zero problem (outside of the fact that even at fullscreen, all I could use what a tiny rectangle in the middle of my TV, probably because my TV cannot do 640x480 or some small resolution like that).

Overall, I really liked it. I have some grievances with the gameplay (the action sequence near the end

Spoiler:

where Eva turns evil

is somewhat painful, especially I could not use the d-pad on my controller and had to use the analog stick, which is not very precise for 90 degree movement), and I found Neil annoying at first, but he grew on me overtime.

The music was fantastic. The art was super charming. The story was great as well (not the tearjerker I expected though).

So yeah, this was great! I'm glad I have played it. Not a bad way to spend 4 hours on a muggy weekend! I may even play 'A Bird Story' in the next few weeks (which I think is even shorter).

bobbywatson wrote:

So yeah, this was great! I'm glad I have played it. Not a bad way to spend 4 hours on a muggy weekend! I may even play 'A Bird Story' in the next few weeks (which I think is even shorter).

It is!