Last week, we talked a little about Brothers and games very like it.  These titles are often experiences more than they are games.  You get into them and you direct a protagonist, but you don’t do much actual video gaming:  there’s no one to kill, there’s no score to beat and – most tellingly, often, no way to really fail.

There’s just you, the story and whatever medium the story passes through as it unfolds.  Sometimes, this is a walking simulator, [you are in a 3d environment where you can roam around and encounter the story] sometimes, it’s a text-driven experience where the narrative unfolds as a collection of still pictures and verbose writing, but sometimes – as is the case with To The Moon – the entire affair is top-down and looks remarkably like an old-school 16 bit RPG.

At first, that sounds like a supremely odd thing to do, but it works here.  It works because a lot of the story is conveyed by dialogue and RPG’s can sometimes by very dialogue heavy. Read more