To the Moon – one of those games that are considered works of art. And it’s true – if art is intended, first of all, to evoke strong emotions, to find a spiritual response in the viewer or reader, then the creation of the studio Freebird Games coped with its task two hundred percent.

This little game, which looks like a regular indie game made on RPG Maker, made thousands of people shed buckets of tears – so powerful and emotional was the story of how employees of the Sigmund Corporation create artificial memories in the minds of their dying patients and give them another chance to live life, fulfilling their last wish. Three years later a small prequel was released A Bird Story, but a full-fledged continuation has arrived only now, six years later. And it turned out to be both similar and dissimilar to the original.

Man on the Moon

In fact, when you talk about how touching and tear-jerking the story was in To the Moon, Personally, it’s hard for me to resist saying that this was such a deliberate manipulation of the players’ feelings. Two doctors from Sigmund are trying to fulfill the last dream of the dying Johnny – to fly to the moon to see his long-deceased wife there, because once, as children, they agreed to meet there if they lost each other. Agree, even a simple description of the plot brings tears to your eyes.

Kang Gao (Kan Gao), author To the Moon, almost immediately torpedoed sensitive players with the deaths of Johnny’s loved ones, personal dramas and tragedies. But this manipulation cannot be called cheap – there was a well-structured intrigue with a cathartic denouement, melancholy music, many interesting details and even excellent humor. Well, how can I resist here?!

Remember and change

But in Finding Paradise everything is a little more complicated. The game doesn’t necessarily try to make you cry, but rather raises larger questions about what happiness is and what makes a person happy, about the regrets we experience in our lives, about whether something is worth changing, about the difference between reality and expectations, about loneliness, and so on.

Eva Rosalin and Neil Watts, the same doctors from the Sigmund company, have a new client – Colin, who is dying (and actually in a coma), who could be seen in A Bird Story a boy flying paper airplanes. So, Colin, unlike Johnny from the first part, lived a long happy life – and what his last wish is, he himself doesn’t really know.

He speaks about this to Eve and Neil personally when they, with the help of their super technology, plunge into his head and into his memories. It seems that everything came true – he was a musician, then a pilot, married the woman he loved, who gave birth to his son. And yet, something is bothering Colin, not allowing him to leave calmly, so our doctors must, after carefully studying the memories, change them so as to help the client.

In the process, it turns out that there was another girl in his life, whom Colin knew from early childhood. This, of course, is the main nerve of the story Finding Paradise. The gun, which hangs on the wall for the entire first act, attracts attention, but does not shoot, in the second and third it bangs so that it hardly seems a little – with the ability to intrigue and surprise Kana Gao everything is still ok.

In the circle of memories

Another thing is that before this climax and denouement you still have to, relatively speaking, sit in the hall. It is clear that fans of creativity Freebird Games they will endure it in any case and the very opportunity to get up and leave will be taken as an act of blasphemy. But for beginners, for those who come here without first experiencing magic To the Moon, problems and questions may arise.

The thing is that the first chapter is very long. Where in the last game there was death, tears and drama almost immediately, in Finding Paradise for the first four hours (or even five) we observe rather banal things. The characters travel through Colin’s memories, see how small he was, how he met his neighbor, who became his best friend for many years, how he studied music, how he became a pilot, how he met his future wife, how he proposed to her, how they flew on their honeymoon..

During these 4 – 5 https://ukcryptocasinos.co.uk/solana-casinos/ hours you can watch a couple of films Tarkovsky or Andrey Zvyagintsev, read "Waves" Virginia Woolf (Virginia Woolf) or at least start Ulysses Joyce (James Joyce) – this is really real art, where about the same questions that are raised in Finding Paradise, they say much more interesting, more complex and more unusual.

So, in any case, it seems, when you once again collect key fragments of Colin’s memory in a circle and activate important key memories in the mini-game (now these are variations on the theme of “three in a row”) in order to move on. Yes, this is diluted with arcade QTE-style inserts and excellent humor (one parody of “The Godfather” at the airport is worth it!), but nevertheless the feeling of being drawn out does not leave.

In addition, it begins to seem that you have already figured out the main intrigue of this story. After all, in Finding Paradise we move through the patient’s memories not in a strict chronological sequence corresponding to different periods of his life, but mixed up, jumping, for example, from early childhood to old age or maturity and back. So we immediately see a more complete picture of Colin’s life and roughly understand where everything seems to be going.

Laughter and drama

However, the gun that fires in the second act turns everything upside down. You begin to understand that without the long first chapter the effect would not have been so strong.

And everything stops being so banal. Moreover, what follows is a fantasy Kana Gao reveals itself in a new way – here there is horror, and some parody arcade inserts in the spirit of Japanese RPGs, fighting games and scrollers. Humor in Finding Paradise in general many times more than in To the Moon. Plus some purely geek jokes, references either to “The Godfather” or to superhero comics with breaking the “fourth wall”.

All this, as they say, dilutes the suspense, makes the story, on the one hand, less concentrated on tears and drama, and on the other, more diverse. But in any case, the ending still makes you experience a shock – perhaps not as strong, turning your soul inside out, as in To the Moon, but more conscious, subtle and adult in essence.

I repeat – in auteur cinema and literature there are works of art that talk about the same things in a more interesting and original way than the author does Finding Paradise. But within the framework of a gaming language, that is, a more understandable and accessible language, he is certainly a genius – few people in this industry can write such rich, deep and emotional stories. Yes, someone will say that in pursuit of variety and scale, making the locations more spacious, adding more humor, parodies and arcade inserts, he came up with a less emotional and intense plot. But in fact, the story here is simply different – more complex and adult, making you think about a lot during and after playing.

Pros: atmospheric and deep story; more varied gameplay compared to the first part; a slightly more detailed and juicy picture; magical music.

Cons: The game looks overly long in some places.

Finding Paradise

Best comments

It’s strange, I think Vanya said that he completed the entire game in 5 hours, and even managed to get a little stupid in the process.

Having completed To the Moon at one time, I thought that it was too long, but I was very impressed.
And after a while, What Remains of Edith Finch came through, which I liked, but, unfortunately, did not remember.

Still, there should be some kind of protractedness, as for me

(don’t hit the current with slippers)

What’s wrong with this man? Why pixel games did not please him SO much? There are games with a special charm, with a wonderful plot, lively, bright, beautiful, and the fact that they are made in a similar style does not spoil them at all. Ib (the most beautiful plot, revealed also through visual elements, at least 5 endings at the moment, very simple, but still puzzles, replayability of the plot, the most beautiful soundtracks in the style of “music boxes”), Undertale (by the way, has a non-linear and repeated (!) walkthrough, a couple of dozen original and different locations, at the same time very recognizable, unique in detail – yes, yes, there are details in pixel art! – as well as perfectly conveyed characters of the characters and extremely interesting twists in the plot and gameplay), they are pixelated – and have excellent plots, they are interesting to play, they are interesting to study, dig, and you sympathize with the heroes no less than if they were high-polygonal super-realistic models. In Japan, games in a similar style are still very common, there are not just a lot of them – there are a LOT of them, with strange and sometimes overly confusing plots, with gameplay unique to its genre. Even though the same “Kirandia” was popular during the times of MS DOS and Windows 98, no one can take away from it the fact that it was quite complex. UnEpic is extremely amateurish, but well deserves its few hours to play. Pixel? Quite. It’s also a full 2D platformer, oh my god, kitties, how’s that! Dinosaur! To the fire of developers! Nevertheless, the game is good in its own way, with a simple plot, a lot of references, funny and not so funny jokes, absurdity and sometimes even hardcore. Pixelated graphics are just stylistic. Like the style of Borderlands – an almost cartoonish comic-strip highlighting of edges and lines with rather bold and even harmonious color combinations, like the style of L.A.Noire with rain and gloom of a noir detective, like the style of Wolf Among Us with its deliberate grotesqueness and the same Coal lines, like the style of the recently released Okami – special, not for everyone, but nevertheless charming, using its own style for gameplay and conveying the facets of the plot through visual elements. Seriously.

By the way, Doki Doki: Literature Club was released not too long ago. It also accelerates, but not very quickly.
But at the same time, the first hours still give us a passable narrative, they work normally, there is no walking in the game, the only mini-game is quite meaningful, interesting, and affects the main gameplay.
That is, the game starts out as “normal” and even “entertaining”, and then develops into more.
As a result, the player does not have the feeling that he has to “endure”.

I’m even curious what’s there after 6 years? Got the plot of To The Moon?)

I also don’t understand why To the moon is considered a great game, I read the reviews, looked at the ratings, I thought it would be a good game, so I bought it on Steam in absentia and hoped for an excellent story that many people referred to, but I didn’t care about all other aspects of the game. But the story turned out to be very banal, the presentation is very bad, there is not a trace of the original idea that doctors change people’s memories by fulfilling their wishes, it is not felt at all, because for most of the game they just walk and watch – in no way, without influencing anything. At the very beginning of the game, we are given some kind of intrigue, you think why the characters behave so strangely, why exactly this seemingly ordinary fragment of memory turned out to be key for the client, you think that all this will be explained to you and the game will justify all the laudatory reviews, but no, the game does not try to present a coherent narrative, all the time it builds some questions and in the end it gives completely different answers to which
It’s unlikely that you wouldn’t have said to yourself at the very beginning of the game “in the worst case, if the story is bad and banal, then it will end exactly like that”. I don’t see any point in a minigame with balls at all, probably the author wanted to dilute the “gameplay” and separate the transition between chapters, but no matter how annoying it might be, it might be worth making (searching for) a better minigame, because if these balls are removed from To the moon, the game will not lose anything, the “gameplay” will be reduced in time and the player will be able to concentrate his feelings on the story, which is what the game was designed for. The only good thing I could note was the dialogues between the doctors, they seemed believable, not excellent, but simply believable, but in the behavior of the doctors at the end of the game, big questions and bewilderment also arise, why did you decide to act this way, since you spent half the game just talking like that, then why don’t you want to explain now your decisive actions and why they are different. The game gave me more negative emotions than positive ones, I think that it is advertised more than it is worth, even though I am familiar with many types of stories and understand why people like them, why many people say that To the moon is good – I cannot understand this.

Tried and tried, but couldn’t make it through. I think the game is too problematic as a game to call it amazing.
I’ll write a subjective opinion that no one needs, why this is so. If you’ve already played it, it’s better not to read it at all. And if not, at least you’ll know what you’ll have to go through to see what the game is praised for.

Perhaps the game has a very good story (which is difficult to say from the first couple of hours), it has a very nice picture (yes, mostly default RPG-maker assets, but the authors know how to play with colors), very pleasant music (but the compositions are short, and the episodes are long, in the end each composition manages to play 10 times and begins to be terribly annoying, even though it is good in itself), but:
— RPG maker is terrible, crooked and outdated engine. Yes, let the game look like this – 0 complaints. But crashes every 10 minutes (fortunately, autosaves are very frequent) do not contribute to immersion at all. As well as constant changes in the speed of animations (animations are tied to the frame rate, and the frequency is tied to the hypertensive heart rate). Every time I see one of these technical problems, I temporarily fall out of the context of the game itself, the story, etc.n., it then takes time to restore it and it is precisely because of this that I think that the choice of engine is simply terrible.
— Prolonged movement. There are games where moving in itself is a pleasure (Mirror’s Edge, Prototype, Just Cause) and… well, it seems obvious that Finding Paradise is not one of them, which in itself is not a problem, because the genre is completely different. But damn, why is there so much of it?? During the “half preparation”, both characters are given “walking” tasks – one will go to pick up items from the car, the second will go around the room with the patient’s son. For what great purpose does the game force us to walk for 5 minutes along the same path we just walked? Why should we ourselves look for all the rooms in the house, if we have a guide and he could take us everywhere and we would just look?? I was looking for one of the rooms for about 10 minutes, t.To. didn’t notice the door. And not only is there a lot of walking in itself, but along the way there are constantly a bunch of inactive objects that need to be bypassed (so they won’t let you just hold down the arrow) and due to the fact that the game has a “perspective”, and not a pure top-down, it is not always possible to understand exactly where to bypass.
— Prolonged “empty interactivity”, creating space for “blunts”. After that scene, one of the characters gets into the car to connect, and we are given control of the other. I decided that this was necessary so that we could communicate with our relatives before the trip, but in practice they all just say “well, start already, come on” – are they bored in this game too?? As a result, the only active item turns out to be a helmet for connecting to the car, which I still did not immediately find. In short, again a 10-minute walk from scratch – why couldn’t it be just a dialog menu?
— Great mini-games. They are much more boring to play than standard games from Windows 95 or slot machines from San Andreas. Yes, yes, we have a game here about something else and only a crazy person would compare it with GTA, but damn… Why then do we need mini-games at all?? Just throw them away.
A masterpiece is not only when there is nothing left to add, it is also when there is nothing to throw away either. And here – at least throw yourself out.

For example, the new Life is Strange understood this perfectly and took all the best from the original: a high-quality story, where there is something to think about, excellent music, interesting color solutions, but removed almost all unnecessary gameplay elements (special thanks for the lack of stealth episodes that were at the end of the original), adding almost nothing (DND is essentially just dialogue, and not some kind of miracle mechanic) and the game only benefited from this.
I would be very happy with the same Finding Paradise, with the same picture, music and story, but with interactivity only in those places where it is really needed. Well, preferably without technical problems: constant crashes and drops in FPS in a game that looks worse than the first Star Ocean for SNES on a computer where you can go through the same Life is Strange perfectly smoothly look simply ridiculous.