Retro Revival: To The Moon

Chris - It's a revival of a classic game from 2011, although I'd never played it. And let me just give you a flavour of what the game is. It's a bit like Pokemon in terms of the GameBoy Pokemon that we used to play - So you move up down left and right. It's a bit like Zelda, which is the same thing on the GameBoy, so just give us the synopsis for the game because I'm really intrigued... 'cause I know you haven't played it and I have literally just played it now 'cause it came out a few days ago. I played it for the first time on Switch. Tell me the synopsis here.

Leigh - Okay. So it says "it's a meditative experience that explores human mortality". So apparently the story follows, two charming doctors. All right. Then as they attempt to rebuild the memories of a dying man in order to fulfill his final wishes, it sounds quite horrific, doesn't it? Is it like the bucket list?

Chris - It's not laugh a minute as a game. These doctors... how it goes is that the very beginning of the game, the doctors crash a car because they're trying to avoid a squirrel in the road. So they hit a tree. Well it turned out that they also did hit the squirrel as well. The old man is lying in bed and you go up to his house and they go, "oh we've been expecting you doctor A and doctor B". And then they go, "right, we're here to, to grant a final wish". 'Cause that's what we do. The people around this guy, they go, right. Well his final wish is that he wants to go To The Moon, which is why the game is called To The Moon.

Leigh - Why didn't he just wish that he was never ill?

Chris - I know. So they go, yes we can make that happen. And that's when I stopped playing the game.

Leigh - Oh wow.

Chris - The problem is in this day and age, you should be able to move diagonally. Even in chess, the bishops can move diagonally, but in this game you can't move diagonally. It's too, it's too retro. If you can update and upgrade a game, make it better then you should. Like Pokemon is a perfect example - Let's Go Pikachu.

Leigh - We'll never find out that if the man ever got to the moon.

Chris - It's getting a zero out of 10 'cause it's the same shape as the moon. I would recommend instead to get a game called Octopath Traveler, which sounds super weird but it's basically the same kind of thing. But you can move diagonally and there's four stories and it's really, really good. I've been playing that loads this month. To The Moon... you can get it on PC, Android and iOS for around 10 quid. So it's not expensive. Maybe you could tell us what happens in the end. Tweet gaming@nakedscientists.com