Wow... Just... So sad...
Reviews for "Personal Trip to the Moon"
It's okay I guess.
This is not a game. This is a shredder. It take every single emotion thath lurks behind my eyes and shredded them. Silence. Cold silence. Then, on the final notes of the soudtrack, i felt it. The touch of another soul. Coming from a videogame, something created for entertaining us. Miles away form my city, Roma. This is not a game. This is worth of every single second of your mind.
I suppose this could have been the point, but it felt like I was mostly finishing this game because I felt like I had to. I find that games like this are becoming more frequent in the freeware/flash side of gaming; that is, games that explore some personal trauma or ordeal of the creator. This is a very good outlet for those sorts of stories, and while no one's troubles are more or less significant than anyone else's, some of these kinds of games are better than others purely from a player's standpoint. With this one, I felt compelled to complete it not because of the gameplay itself, but because you do warn us that it's a very personal thing to you.
Though the point was obviously to explore, with some degree of interactivity, your world and possibly your problems, this game did not beg to be played. The gameplay itself (not the message) was uninteresting, slow, and heavy. Even flight felt heavy. Perhaps that is a mechanic you included deliberately, but it certainly did not give me any incentive to keep playing from my own merit. I felt myself playing for you, which is not something I want to feel while going through one of these games. I want to play this game because I feel compelled to see what happens, not as a favor to you. I think perhaps in future games you should consider what compels an audience to play a game... or what compels you to play them, and try to include some of those elements.
For instance, the exploration hardly felt like exploration at all. Follow the arrows to a destination, press space a few times, rinse, repeat. I can see that you wanted to include flight as much as possible, but the destinations were not really much worth flying to. Nothing except short stints of cryptic dialogue to whet my appetite. It has all of the basic skeletal elements of a game: exploration, good music, good story, mysterious or strange characters -- but these things all seemed to fall just short of one another, creating a disjointed game.
Many reviews say the story and message are beautiful and sad, and I agree. This review is no critique of your personal trauma, your poetry, or the story. This review is purely one for gameplay. I just find myself wishing that there was a little bit more. More detail, more gameplay, more variety.
I guess, in the end, I just feel like the game didn't do you or your personal story any justice. I played this game for you because you put your neck out there and opened up this private part of you to the whole of the internet. I did not play it because the gameplay was good.
Wow. I'm really impressed. I loved all of it and I think you framed your story perfectly. I don't know if the music lag was a design decision but it certainly added something to the story. I hope you release a lot more stuff.