A game stalling for time

This article contains heavy spoilers for the entire To the Moon series.

To me, endings are an important part of the story. Any imagined world must end before growing vast enough to contain a shark and someone eager to jump over it. I don’t want endless sequels. I don’t want sequels in the first place. Spiritual successors are great, but another adventure in the same world is an opportunity to ruin something. When I found Dune’s outcome surprisingly okay, I decided not to read the other books.

This is another of my hot takes: I’ll often take a “good” ending over a “deep” one. The Evil must be vanquished, the town saved, the princess rescued, and death shall be no more. I am the enemy of all dark and gritty, of all cruelty that exists solely to show the work and its readers are cool and edgy.

That’s part of why I adore stories that try to be nuanced and don’t devolve to the point of being saccharine, yet after everything refuse to accept defeat. I love when it’s almost a rebellion of the work against how it “should” go. What if idealism isn’t reserved for kids?! I love when stories end with eucatastrophies.

But what I haven’t seen explored enough is a story that both wants to revolt, to let everybody live just this once, but can’t. When even a Deus Ex Machina is not feasible, when all hope truly is lost. I would argue the deceptively named Just a To the Moon Series Beach Episode is precisely that. An ending to a story written into a corner.

There can be no spoilers for the Beach Episode. We know how it goes before powering on the computer to play – Neil dies, and there’s nothing to avert it. Since the first painkiller bottle in 2011, we’ve been moving in a clear direction. Yet nobody wants this. The #rosawatts hashtag constantly gets new posts, and the banter between Neil and Eva was the “joke” part of the “ruining sentimental moments, one badly timed joke after another” motto that carried To the Moon and Finding Paradise.

While the focus is on a patient, the elephant in the room is easy to ignore. Oh, the red flashes? Don’t worry about that, go figure out what’s wrong with Faye! But the Beach Episode has to rotate the spotlight. The end is certain, we don’t even need it shown – as Eva says to the echo Neil left behind, “you know how it happened”.

The Beach Episode can’t give us an ending we’ll be happy about; it can’t give anyone closure, because Neil wasn’t that kind of guy. All it can offer is an experience that will leave a hollow feeling in both us and the characters – and it knows this.

What, then, is the game to do? It can stall for time.

The Beach Episode is three hours of… no, not “grief”. While Eva’s struggle to handle Neil’s passing and the digital garden he left her is in focus, that wasn’t it for me. It’s three hours of a story trying to postpone its own end. Let’s go water surfing! Let’s fix a lighthouse! Do you like horror? Would you like to read messages from fans? Come on, it’s not sunset yet!

Everything we engage with is miscellaneous because the fluff is the last line of defence between us and the titular beach. Merlandese’s Arcade!, one of the many mini-games we partake in, is a perfect distillation: going deeper and deeper, trying to outrun a clock that cannot be paused.

But who is the game performing for? Who is fooled? Eva, who knows her circumstances perfectly well? Us, who understand what’s going on a minute in, when we see the books for sale at the airport store? By postponing an ending nobody wants, the game indulges in an experience nobody is quite comfortable with either.

All of the best parts of the “story” take place when we, for a moment, forget that we’re playing Just a To the Moon Series Beach Episode. When instead we’re just looking at the developers’ self-inserts on a random beach; when we’re just seeing how Colin and River would reminisce about their school days if they ever met again; when we’re reading messages from our own reality and are untethered to the digital sand below our feet.

The game’s finest moments are not actually related to it, because the Beach Episode itself doesn’t exist. How could it, when every main character but one is long gone?

Upon finishing it, my first impression was that I couldn’t think of the Beach Episode like a normal game or rate it alongside its predecessors. It felt like an epilogue and not its own thing. I couldn’t explain the sentiment then, but now have a guess. While other entries in the series have a story to tell, this is a game that was only handed the conclusion desperately running from the credits because it knows we won’t like what we’ll see when we get there.

After all is said and done, after throwing everything and the kitchen sink at us and even feigning a “normal” ending in hopes we’ll go away, the game gives up and leaves the choice in our hands. Eva can linger on the beach, watching fireworks, for however much she likes. Neil will be sitting, unscathed, by her side. Even as [Press ESC to leave] slowly fades in, we can look in the other direction.

“Just a little while longer, right?”