NOTE: This blog post is going to be spoilerriffic, so if you think you'd be interested in an emotional, story driven, isometric, pixel art journey through a dying man's memories, BUY IT.
I've always held gameplay to be more important than story in a video game. Games can exist with no story, Super Smash Bros. Melee and Rock Band just to name a few. But a game cannot exist without some sort of gameplay, that just makes it a really long movie. Say what you will about games like Heavy Rain, or The Stanley Parable, but they DID in fact have a some gameplay, if if it was just wandering around and hitting contextual button commands. But especially last year did I discover the importance and impact of a great story-driven game. Through playing both Bioshock: Infinite the Spec Ops: The Line, I discovered that even if gameplay is important, a game can always have more impact with a compelling and emotional story.
Enter To The Moon, a 2011 indie game from the mind of Kan Gao and developers Freebird Games, although it's worth noting that the team of Freebird couldn't fill up a starting lineup in a basketball game. And that's the kind of thing that should help you figure out what the game is. It's a bit short, taking around 2-3 hours to beat, has a purposefully retro aesthetic, and has no spoken dialogue. Almost. I'll touch more on that later.
The game begins by looking down onto a house by a lighthouse. Two kids play the piano when they hear a crash. The view cuts and two scientists, Neil and Eva, climb out of a car. The tone is established as being a bit comedic, with the two pointing fingers, and the driver explaining that he swerved to miss hitting a squirrel but did anyways. They bring a large case from the car and you are then given control to direct this group to a house. You reach the house, knock, and are welcomed in by a woman who brings you upstairs to a dying man named Johnny. You know very little about him until you take a look around the house. You discover a room completely full of paper origami rabbits and a broken music box. You then go back to the man and your partner and discover why you're there and what you're doing. With helmets, the scientists access his memories. With this technology, they can grant patients their dying wish. Johnny last wish was to go to the moon. He claims not to know why, so you and your partner traverse back through his memories Memento style (and actually use mementos as links to previous memories) in an attempt to spark the desire to go to the moon at a young age in order to have him become an astronaut in time.
This is where the true meat of the gameplay is introduced and doesn't really deviate from this until a bit of an arcade segment near the end, but that's not that important. There are essentially two modes of playing. There's walking around exploring and clicking on things collecting clues to link to the previous memory sequence that's pretty reminiscent of Cole Phelps but 8 bit and more natural. The other gameplay thing is switcher puzzles that appear when attempting to travel back to the next memory. That's about it. Does that sound enticing to you? Probably not, but this game doesn't sell itself on the gameplay and neither will I.
Not really sure how to describe it, but the buttons flip all the things in the row and you
want all tiles face up. Simple enough, mostly.
As you travel back in time, you begin to discover just what happened throughout Johnny's life. You discover he is a widower to a woman named River. She rejects using money to continue with her medical bills in favor of completing the dream house they'd started. Johnny plays a song he composed on the piano for River which was the same song the two kids were playing in the intro sequence. By passing back again, you witness an exchange where River gives Johnny an origami rabbit and asks him to describe it. You get the feeling that Johnny isn't quite describing it in a manner River would have preferred. Continuing further, it is revealed that River has a persuasive personality disorder. At moments she appears to be distant and unable to relate to things, and as this was diagnosed lately, it's very difficult to treat. Regressing further, you experience the couple's wedding, their dates, their lives together. You feel the connection between the two and really become attached to them, even though you know the end. Or at least I did.
One memory is jumped into with Johnny confessing the something was the reason he first approached her, although doesn't say what. Later, you see this first encounter in a school. Johnny is encouraged by his friend Nick. It's an awkward encounter, one to be expected, but they agree to go on a date and to go see a movie. Then the next jump into Johnny's young life is blocked. We're unable to see what happens, nor access it. Returning to the future, we discover that Johnny has beta blockers, an item used to block out one's memories. By triggering his memory with a scent similar to that time (contrived, yeah, especially as the scent is the dead squirrel roadkill), Eva and Neil return to the young memory to discover Johnny had a twin brother, Joey who was killed in a car accident. By moving further back, we see Johnny was a bit jealous that Joey appeared to be the favorite, but joey was nice enough about it. We then go to Johnny's earliest memory, one at a carnival at a very young age. He runs off into the woods to a spot to gaze at the stars. River appears, but doesn't reveal her name. They talk about the stars and how River sees a rabbit constellation. She asks Johnny to explain it, and he does it extensive detail, until he is called away. They say they'll meet there again in a year, and if they get lost? They'll meet together on the moon.
With this, we discover Johnny's long wish to go to the moon, as well as what happened with the relationship. The beta blockers covered up the original encounter of Johnny and River, and any attempt the scientists had of sparking such an interest of space travel to Johnny as a child was futile, since the reason for going to the moon was always there. By preventing Joey's death in the memories and taking River away temporarily in the school to somewhere else, Johnny continues on with his life alone. We chronologically progress through the memories with any semblance of Johnny and River's relationship being wiped away. This all happens throughout a cutscene and was truly upsetting for me, enough to possibly squirt out some liquid from my eye-holes, but that's not important. The only problem was that this is also the one instance of a voice-over. The song that they chose to play over involved a child singer. While I understand why, I kinda killed it for me. It would have been excellent with the piano pieces they used the whole time.
We reach the conclusion and see Johnny being initiated into NASA. He takes his tour around the facility as we follow him until finally, he is introduced to one of his partners, a woman by the name a River. And yes, this entire ending is contrived, the fact that they BOTH get into NASA to be in the same crew together is an outrageous possibility, but fuck you because I wanted this relationship to end happily and it did! Even if it was only Johnny's memories.
No, those aren't tears, I swear.
It's rare that a game has such an intense emotional impact on me. This game was 3 hours long and had a bit of bollucks and annoying gameplay, but this was a game I was genuinely interested in seeing be resolved. I wanted to see how it ended. Was a disappointed? Absolutely not. Unfortunately if you read this, there's pretty much no reason to go buy and play it now, but at least hopefully you understand my enthusiasm for it.
9/10
No comments:
Post a Comment