Freebird Games’ story-rich role-playing game called Finding Paradise is about two doctors fulfilling the unfulfilled dreams and goals of patients on their deathbeds. It’s very similar to Hirokazu Kore-eda’s movie, After Life, except instead of recreating memories the intrepid Dr. Rosalene and Dr. Watts attempt to recreate their patient’s life all the way up until the end.
The trick to the duo Doctors’ vocation is that all of the life experiences that the patient undergoes happens within their mind. In fact, it’s the very last thing that they’ll do before moving on to the afterlife.
If this sounds very much like To The Moon it’s because Freebird Games is the same developer behind To The Moon. In fact, they describe it as the second entry in the multi-part To The Moon saga.
Of course, it’s mentioned on the Steam store page that you don’t have to have any prior experience with the developer’s previous outings to understand or dive head-first into Finding Paradise.
Many gamers have sort of compared Ken Gao and the rest of Freebird Games to Jenova Chen and thatgamecompany. Both seem to focus on unorthodox, zen-like games that deal more with extracting the complexities of life and bottling them up in simple-to-navigate interactive entertainment experiences. Gao, however, seems to focus more on the literal, where-as Chen focuses more on the figurative.
Either way, gamers seem to really enjoy these alternate slice-of-life games, with Finding Paradise managing to rack up 21,000 sales in just three days, according to Steam Spy.
Obviously it’s nothing like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds accruing one million players in 48 hours, but for an indie game with practically zero widespread promotion and just word-of-mouth to get the message out, 21,000 in three days is quite remarkable. It’s already tracking toward a higher sales trajectory than Battleborn and Lawbreakers on PC during the same launch period.
At the moment, Finding Paradise has an overwhelmingly positive rating on Steam. A lot of people giving it high remarks are noting that the story is well done and the hand-drawn sprites and backdrops are top notch. It’s a shame we don’t get that kind of graphical quality from other RPGs and beat-’em-up games these days.
Anyway, if you were interested in a non-violent, story-oriented game, you can pick up Finding Paradise for $9.99 over on the Steam store.
