To The Moon: Full Review [Steam/BradenBest]

This is my first review on Steam, so I feel that I should mention that this review contains spoilers and mild profanity. I feel my use of profanity is within the guidelines, because they are tasteful idioms and not insults ("figure this shit out?" and "oh shit"), so they cannot possibly be construed as abusive. Context matters. Please respect my freedom to use language in the ways that I see fit in order to illustrate my points.

[edit 01-23: removed the thing about the system auto-rejecting profanity, as this is on pastebin, not Steam]

On to the review.

= THE BEGINNING =

First of all, there is one thing I have to get out of the way, and that is the under-side of this game.

When I started up the game, the screen was off to the corner of my monitor, with only 25% of the game visible. There is little to no config to speak of. Looking in ~/.config and ~/.local/share (the usual linux directories for config and data), I only found one directory for to the moon, and all it had was two text files: Music.txt and Window.txt, containing solely the text "true" and "1", respectively. So basically the makers of this game somehow couldn't figure out how to handle something as basic as config.

Uh oh.

That's not a good sign.

So what did I have to do? I had to GOOGLE what to do to make the screen right itself (that was the whole point of looking for a config file, because the games that start up in fullscreen are almost always improperly configured and have to be fixed manually; I've had this problem with Slime Rancher, Portal, FEZ, and Super Hexagon). You have to press Alt+Enter to un-fullscreen. And because there's no config, that means the game starts up in fullscreen every single time, which means I have to Alt+Enter every single time. Unlike SR, Portal, Fez and SH, where fixing the issue the first time fixes it permanently, and I don't have to deal with an I.T. nightmare every time I want to have a gaming session.

Why, then, do I have to do that every single time I start up this game? Why isn't there an option for keeping the game in windowed mode? Why isn't this the default anyway? There isn't even an options menu, just begin, load and exit. This is annoying. My window manager uses alt+enter to do stuff, and in the case of big picture mode, it cancels it somehow, and steam swaps to the top, because steam does annoying stuff like that. Meaning I have to manually re-select the game window after doing that. You probably won't notice on a Stacking or Compositing WM like XFWM (of XFCE) or Compiz (of Unity), but on a Tiling WM like Xmonad/DWM, Steam's weird Window-Manager-Hijacking behavior quickly becomes evident.

I am getting really sick of having to put on my I.T. hat just to play a game. How would someone who's new to linux figure this shit out? Developers, please test your games from a fresh installation on all the systems you support.

But enough about the frustrating technical malebolge that is this game's insides. Let's talk about the game, shall we?

You can probably gather from this that I don't care for RPG Maker, but it's not necessarily a deal-breaker. I've dealt with a lot worse.

= THE CLUNKINESS =

The game is riddled with god-awful controls, bugs, poor design and a severe lack of polish. If you came here to play something like Hyper Light Drifter, or Flinthook, where there's action and tight design, you might as well turn back now, because the controls are more like Ao Oni. Because this was made in RPG maker and makes no attempt to be anything more than an RPG maker game. I know I'm being harsh, but I AM judging this as a game. Not a story. I'll get to the story later on.

I take issue with the memento game mechanic. First of all, why do I have to click it 5, no, 6 times, just to get to the prompt that asks me if I want to do the puzzle? It should be "click once, have all the notes you currently have get dispensed at once, and either get to the prompt or tell the player they need more notes". Second of all, why do I have to select a memento twice to go to the next memory? Shouldn't it be evident that I want to move on from the very action of solving the puzzle? The first prompt should be enough. But here I am clicking on that stupid memento (and its prompts) a total of 9 times, just to get to the next scene. This is excessive, and shows that there was little to no playtesting done here. Because even if you tested the gameplay and were sure that it worked, you didn't experience the frustration of having to click 9 times just to progress and decide "hmm, maybe I should make this a little less repetitive."

The puzzles are also broken. If you click on one node and then click on a second one too fast, the first one un-does itself and it counts as two moves. Instantly screwing over any "perfect run" you have planned.

This glitch also happens if you move around too fast while clicking in general. Which has screwed over several of my attempts to meet the par number of moves. I'm not patient. Once I figure out how I want to do the puzzle, I do it without hesitation. So having that backfire on me is pretty annoying, because it's not my fault. The game can't properly keep up with my quick movements. And this should have been tested for.

The memento puzzles also feel pointless. What is my incentive for getting them in the par number of moves? I can't even re-do them. There is no achievement for doing them. So why bother?

Another glitch is that if you have the cursor on the screen while you are doing a puzzle, and especially while the puzzle is starting up, the cursor's presence makes it impossible to move with a controller (and possibly the keyboard as well), as the game can't seem to decide which input to go on. So it jerks back and forth between curcor and D-pad until you move the bloody mouse off-screen. This wouldn't be a problem if you would simply make it so the game only takes cursor input when the cursor is *moving*. Simple solution.

The game has "full controller support", but it doesn't tell you that X is the interact button. Not a huge deal on its own, but when you launch the game in Big Picture mode, the right analog stick controls the mouse, which makes you think you have to click stuff with the mouse, and therefore the game must have a nightshade-esque control scheme. So I ended up saying "screw that", and playing 1/8 of the game solely with the mouse (I detest mouse controls) until I discovered that you actually CAN use the controller. However, the controller support is poorly implemented. First of all, it makes zero sense that interact is on X (left face button) and menu is on B (right face button). There is no jump button, so interact should be on X AND A (bottom face button), and menu should be on pause and/or select/back. There is also the action sequence at the end when Watts is trying to stop Eva from messing with River. Where you have to shoot the zombie Evas with WASD. As far as I could tell, there was no way to do that with the controller. So I had to sit there like a tool and move with the controller while shooting with WASD, with my arms criss-crossed. Yes, I could have used the arrow keys, but I was already holding the controller and unwilling to put it down. It shouldn't be on me to change my play style because new controls were randomly introduced. It's on the game developer to figure out a way to make the controls not suck. A button + a direction for shooting would have made more sense than introducing a whole new set of directional keys. For instance, in Hyper Light Drifter, I don't have to use TFGH to shoot my gun, I only need to aim my character by facing in a direction or using the aim button, and then shoot with the shoot button. This is 1-Star NewGrounds Flash Game levels of bad.

Also, where is the control to bring up the time meter? It seems you can only do it with the mouse. This one's not a big deal, but would it have hurt to use a button instead? You've got Select/back, Start, LB, LT, RB, RT, Y, and A, ALL free for use.

I don't know if full controller support is specifically advertised on the store page (I saw "full controller support" on the same page that listed the F1/Alt+Enter controls), but if it is, you need to remove that, because this is not what I would call "full" controller support. It's more like an afterthought.

Something else that didn't seem right was the horse scene. First of all, the horses didn't even move. If you go to that scene and spam the gallop button, the horse will rapidly switch between two idle sprites. Shouldn't the horse be moving around subtly when idle? Besides that, I was constantly getting stuck on random bushes from the side, even though I wasn't running straight into them, and the memory link HUD that's usually on the bottom was gone. After wasting around 5 minutes running around aimlessly, I happened to crash into Watts and knock him off the horse, finding the memento in the process, I then randomly decided to spam X on the memento and apparently I had the 5 notes I needed. I would have known this had the HUD not been hidden for no reason.

On that same note, there is another frustrating part towards the end of the game, when you say I need "3 memory link bars", I look at the HUD and assume that "oh shit, I have to get 15 memory links". When all I actually needed was 3. Why would you misdirect the player like that? just say "memory link" like you've been saying for the other 60% of the game.

There are also typos in the game. A lot of games tend to have minor grammatical errors or misspellings that can be attributed to the spellchecker not catching the use of the wrong word ("feet of strength" instead of "feat of strength"), or a slip of the keyboard (geograhpy), but I noticed a few occasions of typos that come from naivete, i.e. it was no accident. The author actually thought these were correct at the time of writing. One that comes to mind is the marriage occifiant saying "by the power invested in me". It's "vested"; not "invested", and usually, the officiant adds "by the state of XXXXX" as a convention. Now, I've considered that this might have been a joke, intending to remind the player that this is John's memory and not reality. And John might have never learned the correct version of that sentence, but if that was the case, wouldn't Watts have lampshaded it? I'm not one to complain about typos, but some typos just stick out like a sore thumb and are genuinely irritating. I found myself wondering when the next instance of a blatantly incorrect use of English was gonna happen, and what it might be, like "lack toast and tolerant" ("lactose intolerant"), "irregardless" ("irrespective" / "regardless"), or "should of" ("should've" / "should have").

I've also seen instances of factual errors in the game, like a forum post on this steam community where a user is "nitpicking" about an error in the Animorphs question, noting that not only is the actual correct answer "LION", but the answer the game has isn't even right from an "available roster of morphs" standpoint, as David's snake morph is a rattlesnake, not a cobra, and there is not even one instance of him morphing into a cobra. I put "nitpicking" in quotes because I don't feel that this is nitpicking--this is a legitimate complaint. Get your facts straight.

link to thread: https://steamcommunity.com/app/206440/discussions/0/864946409180903166/

= THE STORY =

Is the story compelling? This is the big question, because it is the primary point of praise in every positive review, the reason that I bought it, and potentially, let's be honest, the only saving grace of what is otherwise a...well, terrible game.

I did enjoy the story towards the end, but, being completely honest...no. It's not. I'm sorry, but with all the other glaring issues evident in the game, I couldn't help but stay in "critic mode". I didn't find the hit-or-miss comedy amusing, I thought Watts was an obnoxious little man-child, I thought Eva was a salty wannabe-tsundere, the only emotional reaction the game got out of me was when Joey was suddenly introduced and died. And even then, I was thinking in the back of my head, "A car accident. Of course. How cliche." I didn't even give a damn when River was forcibly relocated. I was totally on Eva's side. I reasoned that John already had his life in REAL LIFE with her, so it's fine to erase that memory, because he's getting what he wants. It's all in his head. What happened IRL still happened. So why be sentimental about it? This created a dissonance between myself and Watts, the guy I was controlling, and how the game was trying to force me to be on his side by making me play a section that I didn't want to play. If I could just follow Eva's direction and make no attempt to interfere, I would. But I know how this trope works. The game will just sit there forever until I actually do something. So I'm not doing this to get to Eva to stop her. I'm doing it because the game is demanding that I do it. This is probably one of the worst moments in the entire game, because it ASSUMES that the player is on a specific side of this conflict. The emotional side, and not the rational side. It's also funny that this was the very same segment where I was forced to use the keyboard because of the ill-conceived WASD shooting controls.

Joey dying hit hard, but I didn't give a damn about River "going away", because he still got to enjoy her company in real life. This isn't like Kurisu and Okabe's entire relationship being erased from existence from actual time travel in Steins;Gate. Watts, Eva, Lily and the kids will continue to remember John's real life. Nobody will remember that Okabe and Kurisu were getting close. And Okabe is forced to live with this memory, alone.

That said, it was a real "F U", so to speak, when River came back. It would have been more impactful if it showed them meeting in old age and taking a fancy to one another, so that it's bittersweet. You kinda... ruined the stakes.

= THE CONCLUSION =

This game is like a pseudo-visual novel. I feel like it would have been much better had you focused on the VN aspect of the game and fleshed THAT out, rather than throwing random ideas and gameplay gimmicks at the wall and seeing what sticks, to the detriment of the game's quality. I say this because the story is the only good part of the game (which isn't saying much when everything else is abysmal, but still). The game itself sucks. It's a trainwreck of lazy design without polish or testing. Far too amateurish to justify a price of 9.99. And would probably be better off as a novel or a movie sold on Google Play, seeing as there are no real choices you can make -- the game is VERY linear.

Story be damned, this is still a GAME. And for a GAME, especially one that you are SELLING for MONEY, there is a severe lack of polish and bug-testing. Which is exactly why I can't recommend shelling out 10 bucks to watch an "interactive movie" that might as well just be a movie, because the interactivity feels like a chore more than a game, and the story is so linear that it can't even be considered a VN. Why even have interactivity if there's no choice? Or rather, there is a choice: do what the game says, or don't progress at all. You guys should play Steins;Gate to understand how to make a proper Visual Novel, and learn from it. Because I feel like this game is trying somewhat to be a VN, without knowing what a VN actually is, and utterly fails as a result. This could have been so much more. It sucks because I was hoping to really like this game. But it turned out to be a disappointment.