Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind posits that the sum of your experiences is worth more than the outcome. An imperfect ending and a collection of bad memories are worth all the good ones along the way that shaped your life. To The Moon almost comes to the same conclusions, but instead it decides that no, actually it would be better if you could just get rid of all the bad stuff and give yourself a perfect ending. I hate that.
What the hell does Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind have to do with the video game To The Moon, I hear you ask. Well, it turns out a lot. Both feature plots about exploring a character's memories, and both are love stories. That’s not the only movie that To The Moon invokes. It’s also clearly indebted to Memento and Inception, but Eternal Sunshine is the one that runs through the DNA of this game the most.
Now, much like those films, after starting at what you thought was the beginning, I’m now going to hop further back in time before returning here to finish the point I had started making.
Hans Zimmer BRAAAM
I’ve been hearing about To The Moon since at least 2018. It’s one those games that always comes up when I’m in a discussion about must-play indies on Nintendo Switch. In fact, I was shocked when I discovered that this game is actually from 2011 because I had never heard anyone mention it until it came to Switch, then it’s all I heard about. I guess that’s the power of the Nintendo Switch.
For a game I’ve been hearing about for that long, it’s strange that I really had no idea what to expect. Maybe that’s why it took me this long to finally play it. But when you hear over and over again that a game is incredible and you have to play it, you’d think that would come with some sort of description, and yet I never had one. The most I ever knew of To The Moon was that it’s a fantastic game that I should play because whenever anyone spoke about it with me, that’s really all they said. Could I have looked it up? Sure, but truth be told, I didn’t care that much.
The fact is, there are dozens upon dozens of incredible indie games that get overhyped all the time as this amazing thing. Maybe about 10% of them live up to the hype. And in my experience, overhyping something never ends well. I was told for years that Chrono Trigger is the greatest JRPG of all time, if not the greatest game of all time. When I finally played it, it’s a fantastic game, no doubt, but it did not live up to those expectations, not even close. So I’m always wary when people speak about a game the way they spoke to me about To The Moon.
Perhaps that’s part of the reason I didn’t care enough to look up what kind of game it was beyond “an amazing indie game you have to play”. Everyone speaks in hyperbole now without ever justifying it, and I’m just tired of it. But enough people told me to play it that I put it in my Eshop wishlist and then promptly never thought about it again.
Cut to 2024, I am slowly transitioning to adding PC gaming into my rotation. As part of that, I went through all my console wishlists and put any games that didn’t have an easily obtainable physical edition into my Steam wishlist. You know where this is going, so I’ll just skip to the part where months later, To The Moon went on sale for like 2 dollars and I finally pulled the trigger.
Then, after it sat in my Steam library for an additional couple of months, I finally decided to play it. Well, actually, I didn’t decide to play it. I had people on Bluesky vote on which backlog game I should play next for this column because I’m very indecisive, and I made it one of the options to add some variety since there have been a lot of shooting games. It won unanimously with 2 out of 2 votes. Those 1.5k followers sure do come in clutch.
Fly Me To The Moon
So, after years of hearing about what an incredible game To The Moon is, did it live up to the hype? Not really, but that’s because the game itself seemed to purposely ensure it never could.
Let’s get this out of the way first. Don’t let those pixel graphics fool you. To The Moon is a walking simulator. There’s nothing wrong with walking simulators, but that’s what this is. The gameplay consists of nothing more than you walking around areas and interacting with objects to move the story forward. That’s it, so there’s not much to talk about in terms of gameplay. Which I don’t mind because it means less writing for me, and I’m very lazy, although I realize this pointless run-on sentence is actually giving me more writing to do, but I guess since I don’t have to write multiple paragraphs on the gameplay, it evens out.
To The Moon is all about the story; it’s what makes and breaks the whole experience. Remember at the beginning of this when I contrasted the game with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? Well, you’re about to find out why.
Much like that film, To The Moon is all about our memories and how our lives are shaped by our past experiences. It features scientists delving into someone else’s memories to alter their mind. While Eternal Sunshine had the scientists erasing memories, To The Moon has them there in order to implant a false idea that will reshape every memory hereafter. The goal is to make a dying man believe, through these false memories, that he went to the moon.
The catch is that this guy, Johnny, doesn't know why his wish is to go to the moon. All he knows is that he wants these people to make him think he went to the moon before he died. The scientists — who I’ll be honest, I forgot their names — go through his memories in reverse order to try to find important mementos that will give them a sense of why he wants this, so they can implant a motivator that will rewire all his memories to believing he eventually went to the moon.
As you go through Johnny’s memories, you learn he had an imperfect marriage to his high school sweetheart, River. By the end of their marriage, River was making an exuberant amount of origami bunnies for reasons Johnny didn’t understand, and she never explained.
It’s at this point that I’m going to spoil the story of this game, so if you haven’t played it and have been thinking about it, go do that before you continue reading. You can play the whole thing in 4 hours. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
Ok, you’re back. Fantastic.
By the time you reach the earliest of Johnny’s memories, there are two twists. The first is that Johnny had a brother named Joey who died when he ran right behind their Mother’s car as she was backing out of the driveway. The Mother then gave Johnny enough beta blockers to essentially erase his memory so he never remembered he had a brother who died. Any memories Johnny had before the accident were wiped. This leads us to the second twist.
Johnny and River didn’t meet in high school. They met when they were children. At a county carnival, Johnny snuck off outside the carnival to look at the stars from a log near a cliff. It’s here that he met River. They talked about, made up their own bunny-shaped constellation, and he gave her a stuffed Platypus that he won. This stuffed platypus is a recurring item throughout the game, as River never got rid of it. As Johnny went to leave, he and River promised they would meet up at the same spot at the next year’s carnival, and if either of them forgot, they would meet on the moon.
That’s the reason Johnny wants to go to the moon and can’t explain why. In his old age, River has since died, and he wants to go to the moon to be with her because that little tidbit is still in there. He just doesn’t remember because the beta blockers wiped it all out. River spent most of their relationship trying to remind Johnny of their first meeting because she didn’t understand why he forgot. It’s all but outright stated that River is autistic, and this is why she never outright explained their first meeting, instead resorting to the aforementioned aloofness and origami bunny collection.
This has all the makings of a really terrific melancholy love story about the importance of moments. And it almost gets there.
The scientists conclude that the only way to properly get his mind to falsely remember him going to the moon is if they remove River from his high school memory. This will implant the motivation for him to go. Why? Because the real reason he wants to go is due to her death, so her absence needs to happen earlier in his mind.
One of the scientists protests this, arguing that since the entire reason he wants to go to the moon is his love of River, removing her from his mind completely negates the point. The other scientist argues that they have to do what they must to get him to the moon because that’s his wish, and they have to fulfill their contract.
This poses an interesting question about what’s more important in life. Getting your perfect ending, or an imperfect life full of happiness and everything else. There’s no doubt Johnny would be happy dying thinking he went to the moon but, as the one scientist argues (again i’m sorry I don’t remember their names), he’d still be happier in the life he spent with River, as tumulous as it may have been.
It’s so close to saying something profound about the nature of our lives. And then it completely shits the bed.
The scientist who wants to go through with the contract does indeed remove River from Johnny’s memories of high school, and this causes his mind to finally accept the implanted thought. He imagines false memories of wanting to go to the moon and joining NASA, and eventually going to the moon. I have no problem with this because, again, it raises some interesting questions about the beauty of the messiness of life vs the perfect happy ending.
BUT the game goes and decides that even in this scenario where River was removed from Johnny’s high school memories, she ends up at NASA the same time as him, and they go to the moon together and hold hands on the way. Then the credits montage shows that after they went to the moon, they got married and had the exact same life they did in real life, but without all the problems.
I fucking hate that with a passion. It’s not just boring and safe. It’s cowardly. The story presents an interesting philosophical question: Are the good times worth the bad times, or is it better to accept a fairytale ending? It picks an answer, and then decides “nah, just kidding, it’s a perfect happy ending regardless.” It’s awful. The entire game is about whether the destination is more important than the journey, and then chooses a path that not only says it doesn't matter, but it makes the entire journey you went on playing the game pointless. Why did anything I experienced in 4 hours matter if it was gonna end up okay no matter what?
Let’s bring this back to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. That film poses many of the same questions. The crux of the film is that the main character, Joel, wants to erase all memories of Clementine, his ex, but then realizes he wants to keep the good ones. By the end of that film, Joel and Clementine, both with their minds erased of their whole relationship, find their way back to each other and realize what happened. Despite knowing that it will most likely end the same, in a messy breakup after they grow to despise each other, they decide that doesn’t matter, because the good times make it all worth it, no matter how it ends. Our experiences, good and bad, shape our lives and who we are, and that’s often more important than how things end.
To The Moon plays with those same themes and decides, “who cares”. It’s the equivalent of if Eternal Sunshine ended with a montage showing that this time, Joel and Clementine got married and had a perfect life together. It ruins the entire point.
If you’re just here to know whether or not I cleared this off my backlog, the answer is yes. If you’re hear to know what I thought, here’s the summary. This is a game that lives and dies by its story. There is basically no gameplay beyond walking and clicking the interact button. The story is bad. It’s almost good, and then it makes itself pointless. I can’t even say that it's good despite its bad ending. I’d love to say that despite the bad destination, the journey is worth it. If the game itself is telling me the journey was pointless, what else am I going to think? So all I’m left feeling is that I wasted 4 hours.
Sounds like things are better here on Earth. To (hell with) the Moon.