[PC] To The Moon

I believe that looking from the outside, yes it is tragic, but looking at it from Johnny's perspective, he shouldn't know the difference. He experiences what is a life he didn't have, rewritten for him that he dies happy with no regrets. It was what two humans could do with the short time they had left, and solving it the only way they knew how.

I don't like that she took the reigns and did it on her own, but I guess it was meant to create tension before the relief.

It definitely wasn't the ideal solution, but it created a roller coaster effect for your emotions. I would have rather see them fix some issues with his life so he had the same life instead.

However, he did request to go to the moon, and that is what they had to follow.

They can't go back in time, but merely alter Johnny's memories. They can't give River comfort when she was alive, there's no fixing that part.

It's very sad to have erased their life together, but in the end he lived a second one only to end up with the person he loved again, also realizing her wish to meet again on the moon.

It's heart shattering that River was deleted from his life, but in the end she was part of him, she couldn't disappear completely.

What gets me is the scene where Johnny is talking to his friend in the cafeteria. "She has what I need." "So you want her for what she has, not for her? That's cold man." It's painful to realize later that Johnny did remember her, somehow, and the reason for her starting to make the rabbits over and over again, asking for the description. The reason she slipped away from him after he told her the truth of why he asked her on that date. She had thought he'd asked her, because he was finally remembering. He wasn't.

It's painful to realize too, that Johnny's whole real life was partially a lie. His mother had doctors inject him with the Beta blockers, probably to make him forget his brother and his brother's death. It worked for the most part, but it radically altered and rippled Johnny's life. His desires weren't the same, and his mother treated him as if he were Joey. His love of pickled olives, for instance. He didn't like them.

One thing, probably the thing that kept back tears from welling in my eyes was that Johnny's love for River was pure. Even when Eva decided to go all Memory Dictator on him, he still brought her into his life. It goes to show, that despite the Beta Blockers or any attempts to alter his memory, Johnny would forever love River.

I'd say the saddest part is, is that all the while he thought River was slipping away from him, being distant, but in actuality he was the one thing on River's mind. Even her clinging to the idea of the Lighthouse, Star, Anya, was another play at making Johnny remember. At least he remembered where he had to go, but I don't know if it would have been any less tragic if they'd let his memories remain just the same. Let him remember the first meeting with River. Would he have even realized everything before he died? If so, would that not be sadder or equally sad as a sweet lie?

All in all, it was a very beautiful game. Well worth the cost and time. Kind of interested to see where they go in Episode 2. There was a hint in this one at the very end that they were in someone's memory still... Hmmm.

People that read me here wouldn't know, but the real me is exactly like River. If I pass so much time on the internet it's cause it's the only realm where I've learned how to communicate. Most people have no idea how difficult it is for people like us to be with others, being "different" or "unique" isn't always a nice thing, sometimes it just means you're lonely. Living like this is pretty much like speaking a language that it's different from everyone else around you, soon you feel isolated and misunderstood, and often you have to endure bullying too for it.
My reflection in River hurt me a lot, because I've never been able to accept myself and seeing it burns. As a matter of fact I can't stand being in front of another autistic person, it angers me. However River reflected me so well to the point of being creepy, the whole thing about the stars is something I've thought since I was a child, someone here knows cause I've told him several times something very similar. I don't know if you'll believe me but I'm not trying to blend with the character, it just happens to be so.

"They can see all the other lighthouses out there, and they want to talk to them. But they can’t, because they’re all too far apart to hear what the others are saying. All they can do…is shine their lights from afar. So that’s what they do. They shine their lights at the other lighthouses, and at me.[...]Because one day I'm going to befriend one of them."

My desire is for people that play this game to come to understand a bit better people like us. Because when your whole life is a constant battle for communication being misunderstood hurts more than anything.

The story was incredibly sad to me. I thought that their true life was so much more romantic (and incredibly more tragic), than the fabricated story. If I had been standing in John's shoes, I wouldn't have wanted to forget, but to have known what River's most important messages meant. Sure, the audience understands, but he deserved it, yet it was beyond his personal power. He needed help, and never received it.

just minor stuff, full screen on a huge monitor really felt awkward, was hoping for a windowed version but nope.
mouse controls need a bit more... precision? sometimes I was clicking the wrong thing.
walking over grass and getting stuck on random elements... " yea you can walk on top this large bush, but this little flower patch will get you stuck!"

asides of that, everything else was good.

I... srsly... so many feels.... hate to admit it, but... I cried myself to sleep.. :/
not even sure what the heck got me, but something hit close at home and I still don't know what it was... I'll prolly post more on the game itself once i get out of here and get to work >.>

So trivial stuff first, the incredibly dated engine was somewhat annoying. I won't make a big deal of it, but I found a lot of the controls needlessly awkward, especially when trying to navigate through environmental details. Considering "gameplay" really had no point, I don't see why it was even there. I guess it is harder to sell a visual novel? Because this would have done much better as a semi-animated manga or something.

As I said, though, that's trivial. It's about the story. And the story is poor.

I was turned off from the first minutes because I don't find the two doctors amusing. At all. They're certainly real people, because I've met a lot of nurses and technicians in the medical field who are just like them, but seriously a goofy nerd and his surrogate mother? Cliché is too cliché a word for that stuff: it's nearly a Jungian archetype.

The treatment of River's character (and, by extension, Isabelle's) was also irritating. Unless I missed something, is there a reason they didn't say they're autistic? As an Aspie, seeing words like "neurotypical" and "pervasive developmental disorder" made it clear as day, but for someone unfamiliar with Asperger's syndrome and other forms of ASD (autism spectrum disorders), you get the impression that River is bloody weird and it eventually kills her because the writer never separates her neurotype from the disease that claims her life. Aargh! That alone makes my neuroses go into overdrive because it is bad storytelling, bad medicine, and bad presentation of a "condition" that is poorly-understood at best by NT people.

Don't let's get started on the way that Neil and Eva keep talking about "those people" with all the class and dignity of using a certain six-letter word for African-descended people.

My very personal bias and annoyance aside, the way that Isabelle describes herself was very true. Not that anyone unfamiliar with high-function ASD would understand that because not once is the syndrome named! But, yes, if you don't know what it means to be Aspie and want a concise summary, the bookstore scene works quite well.

So, my experience is tainted by the first half of the game having constantly pecked at my patience with unpleasant characters and a clumsy mishandling of something that isn't plot-relevant (it seriously doesn't matter that River is autistic, so there's no reason to a.) present it as though there'll be some grand reveal nor to b.) fail to provide that reveal after all the build-up -- cf., Chekhov's gun). The twist of Johnny and Joey was telegraphed way in advance and is quite contrived (ironic as that's a word the author uses constantly through his avatar: Neil), but I can actually forgive that. Since it wasn't the central conflict, I had low expectations.

On that note, though, the twist that is the central conflict can go drown in its own schmaltz. It is a trope that is not so much old hat as a cave drawing of an old hat dating back to the neolithic period. True love that lasts forever and started before hormones and pair-bonding exist -- gag me. It's not true to life (people who knew each other from that long ago tend to regard one another similarly to siblings... even if Johnny was clueless, River had no reason to feel comfortable with it) and it has been done to death.

Oh, but watch out, there's a pointless action scene to distract you while Eva does what anyone with half a brain would've done. Since it is all memory instead of time travel (as an aside: BRILLIANT plot device -- it gets around all the problems that time travel causes and avoids the disappointing "It was all a dream!" reveal), Neil should have been able to predict what would happen and/or Eva could have explained in about 60 seconds. Again, I really do think the gameplay detracts from what is supposed to be a novella.

The ending was saccharine. I cry at things quite a lot, but I cry when they seem real. This had me rolling my eyes. I didn't have much investment in Johnny and River's relationship, frankly, because most of their screentime was devoted to the mystery. And let's be clear: this is a mystery thriller, not a romance.

Overall, the whole thing feels bloated. The ASD stuff seems to be the author's personal agenda and it bogs down the first half of the game with nothing fulfilling. I wonder if he wanted to make a game about what it is like to be Aspie and chickened out when he realized that "And they lived quietly in opposite corners of the same room forever" was the ending he would arrive at. There was some potential, but it got pitched in the bin in favor of a plot that was straight out of a 13-year-old girl's fanfiction diary -- River is a fairly common variant on the Mary Sue in that she's perfect except for one particular flaw that doesn't seem to actually bother anyone. Ironically, the second half of the game feels annoyingly rushed in spite of being bogged down with needless gameplay elements. If he wanted to tell another tired romance story, he shouldn't have started it with a mystery. The two genres can co-exist, but they're stapled together and bleeding in this case.

Given the option, I'd remove about 80% or more of Neil and Eva's dialogue: they should act as exposition fairies at most. I'd either drop the ASD stuff or present it directly without any pussy-footing around. I'd spend more time on establishing real reasons for Johnny and River to be in love instead of using an insincere crutch. I'd want to see more of how losing his brother and most of his memory thereof affects Johnny. I'd extend the ticking clock because, really, the game practically moves in real time and it needs to be a bit more like Inception in terms of time dilation. I see the potential for a decent story and I think some of the plot elements were reasonably good (the rabbit-moon symbolism, the point of going "to the moon," the way that Johnny subsumes certain aspects of Joey without knowing why). I did find the regular use of the scent of death to be a bit needlessly morbid, but that's my own taste.

I guess I have to be the person who honestly wouldn't recommend this. It's not like I can't handle a little bit of schmaltz. I tend to tear up every time I watch the ending cinematic of FFIX, for instance, but that's because I had time to get invested in Zidane and Garnet. This story spent way too much time with the wrong characters, namely, Eva and Neil.