To the Moon

My goodness do I have a lot to say about this story. I'll start spoiler-free then get into the details. Overall, the concept was fantastic, but the execution was poor. The tone did not match the story well, there were a number of unnecessary mini games, the story dragged at times, and by the end I was so lost as to why certain things were happening that I didn't feel much of anything even at the climax. I played this game in one sitting, I should have known what was happening and why. I especially should have felt something but I did not. If you like storytelling games, then this one is really up to personal preference. I did not much care for it. [spoiler] For starters, the tone did not match the story much at all. The doctors having goofy banter and saying weird exclamations like "cucumbers!" really put me off. This is a story about a guy on his death bed trying to get his ideal fantasy played to him in his final moments. Why is everyone being so goofy and quirky? If it's to show how "callous" their work has made them I'd strongly disagree with that. I have met many people who work as ER surgeons, police officers, and paramedics, and they do not behave like this no matter how grizzled they are. They use morbid or dark humor to cope, they do not say stuff like cucumbers. It feels like this very heavy and adult topic got sanitized for kids to enjoy and it hurts the story because it makes the tone and story clash so heavily. Even at the climax of the game, when this whole story is supposed to be at its saddest, they still pull a gag with the doctors not getting along. It pulls you out of the story and gets old fast. I can understand adding some humor to prevent the story from becoming a depressing slog but it adds so much humor that it turns the story into a kid's show. The mini games go along with that point. The puzzles and mini games felt so simple and arbitrary that I wondered why they were included other than to pad run time. Not to mention they were also necessary to story progression and were so separate from the story that it again clashed with the tone which made them even more frustrating. The fact that I had to play whack-a-mole to progress the story about a guy being on his death bed trying to get his final wish is just, I don't even know what to say. The plot twist(s) and conflict at times feel completely contrived or nonsensical. For example, the brother's death is supposed to be a twist that recontextualizes the story but it fails because it wasn't given enough foreshadowing. It comes out of nowhere and is meant to be a "oh man that explains so much!" but it doesn't explain much because it was only ever vaguely hinted at. There wasn't enough to bridge the gap and felt like this was due to the writers not wanting the twist to be revealed prematurely. This fact is supposed to explain that a hole existed in John's life but I never got an impression that there was something missing because it focused so heavily on River, as it should have. Not even to mention that he had forgotten about his own dead brother because of the pills his mother forced him to take. That should've been their angle, that there was something missing even if he didn't know what, but it never seemed like that was the case. John seemed to be perfectly content with how things were even back then. It feels like they focused so heavily on the reveal being a twist that they sacrificed the impact the twist should've had. Additionally, the contrived conflict between the doctors towards the end was completely pointless. There's a moment where one of the doctor's seems to go rogue only to do her job as she was supposed to. Why? What was the point of fighting through all of those obstacles and her trying to keep us from stopping her? If she had just explained what she was doing, which was her job, then there wouldn't have been a conflict. Thus, the short-lived "betrayal" was completely contrived and unnecessary. This kind of error particularly bothers me because it would not take much to improve it. Finally, the game did not feel polished. There were several moments where I could not tell things apart because the color palette used was so similar in color. I could not tell what certain things were, I couldn't differentiate bushes from grass, and I sometimes couldn't even see people's faces that well. On top of that, there were so many issues with just walking in the game. There was a ridiculous number of rocks and bushes that looked similar to the grass so I tried to walk through them only to hit an invisible wall. That sort of thing is unavoidable sometimes but it happened so frequently and these bushes were so close together at times that I felt like I was trying to navigate an invisible maze and that became annoying very quickly. The timeline only worked sometimes and along with that, some assets wouldn't load in properly. There were times where there were trees with sections of their leaves missing. I even had a glitch where my character got duplicated at a cutscene so one version of the doctor was standing doing nothing while another went through the cutscene. It was unbelievable. [/spoiler] It's frustrating because this story had so much potential but it wasn't reached.