Game Review: To The Moon

          To The Moon is a casual role-playing indie game developed and published by Freebird Games. It is the fourth video game by Canadian designer Kan Gao, and the first commercial production by his indie game development team Freebird Games. To the Moon was originally released on the author’s website and various digital download portals, and was later made available via Steam for Microsoft Windows in November 2011, and for OS X and Linux in January 2014.

Storyline

          Sigmund Corp. uses a technology that can create artificial memories. They offer this as a “wish fulfillment” service to people on their death beds. Since these artificial memories conflict with the patient’s real memories, the procedure is only legal to do on people without much time left to live.

Sigmund Corp. employees Dr. Eva Rosalene and Dr. Neil Watts are tasked with fulfilling the lifelong dream of the dying Johnny Wyles. Johnny wants to go to the moon, although he doesn’t know why. The doctors insert themselves into an interactive compilation of his memories and traverse backwards through his life via mementos. With each leap to an important moment in Johnny’s memories, they learn more about him and what brought him to his current position in life, including his largely unhappy marriage to his childhood sweetheart, River.

Gameplay

          The players will play as either Dr. Rosalene or Dr. Watts in exploring the house and/or Johnny’s memories in order to find out what happens and how to solve it. The game has very simple controls where you move to find memory fragments to leap from one memories to another one. The way they reveal the stories bit-by-bit is also really good so that they players won’t get bored playing and will continuously get curious as to what actually had happened in the past and keep playing.

Soundtracks

          The soundtrack was released on November 4, 2011 on Bandcamp, and as of the latter quarter of 2014 is now available via Steam as downloadable content. The soundtracks are very great. Played by mostly piano, it’s very fitting of the storyline and on certain situations. The songs seem melancholy most of the times so it’s really good.

Authors:

1. Yogi Udjaja
2. Reyna Rosalia