To the Moon - with this junk

What an infuriating, overblown, pointless little waste of time and money. I won't bother with screenshots for this so-called game. They're fuckin' chibis; nothing worth seeing.

Computer games are no less prone to hipsterism than any other medium, resulting in a great many products posturing as artsy and soulful though aggressively bereft of any discernible quality or originality. After all, as long as it has no qualities as a game, its players cannot be accused of being gamers and the activity itself must represent some other, transcendent interest. Right? Right! Vapid, pretentious crap will always find an audience.

So let's not spend too much time on To the Moon's inevitable lack of player choice, or on its simplistic card-flipping excuse for puzzles. This is a click-through "game" and though others of its ilk might redeem themselves by immersive atmosphere, beautiful artwork, complex characters and/or storytelling or gut-wrenching ethical and emotional decisions, it's amazing how deliberately this one avoids trying. In fact it's hard even talking about it because there is nothing to talk about. I've played 3/4 of the way through and feel completely unmotivated to finish the stupid thing.

Visually, it's nothing but pixelated chibis in a painfully mundane locale. Its soulful piano score sounds decent at first but soon grates by simplicity and repetition, and the few other canned sound effects don't help. Worst of all, its much lauded storytelling resolves to simply shoving a few blatantly obvious set pieces in the player's face and demanding stock emotional reactions. The plot would fit fine into a half-page piece of emotionally biting flash fiction (I've attempted a couple of them on this very site) but is painfully overstretched for hours' worth of gameplay. The dialogue is... awkward, disjointed, sparse with nonsensical segues and never really lending any of the characters individual personalities. It's a good thing the mildly autistic one keeps being described as such because you sure as hell couldn't discern that from speech bubbles.

For instance, here's a reply to a question about working overtime, early in the game:
"You know the answer, you stupid owl."
Ooo-kaaaayyy...
Now, yes, there's some symbolism there, owl, night shifts, we get it. It is not complicated. It is also completely irrelevant, neither expressive nor clever enough to have ever made it past a first draft. The "stupid" part makes it too abusive for friendly banter, the "owl" part makes it too lame for a witty comeback. The English word owl lacks the sonority to make an impact by itself, which is why it's always paired as a descriptor with harsher or more strident nights or Creek Bridges. That's either a case of incompetent translation or hopelessly incompetent writing - and given that the entire script sounds like that, I'm leaning toward the latter.

What To the Moon does have is a couple of segments ridiculing game tropes, like a comment to "google it" in response to a trivia question or a jab at RPGs' combat encounters. Nothing like "going meta" for critic bait. This piece of dross advertises itself thus:
"Winner of multiple awards such as Wired’s Top 20 Games of 2011, Gamespot’s Best Story of 2011, and IndieDB’s Editor’s Choice Award for Indie of the Year 2011"

Well, thanks for nothing Wired, Gamespot and IndieDB. I guess we know what your reviewing's worth.