We’re unaware of what exactly makes these games so powerful. What most people see is the writing, with everything else serving as a complementary backdrop. Impostor Factory meets the standard with an emotional journey that philosophizes about life with a few laughs sprinkled in.įreebird Games’ works have always been a powerful marriage of direction, sprite design, music, pacing, and writing. Finding Paradise followed in stride quite well, earning an Editor’s Choice award from me. All jokes aside, To the Moon has changed lives–including my own. Well, okay, Impostor Factory is made with RPG Maker XP, so clearly they’ve moved into the modern age of game engines. The boxing cat and the sentient rice cooker are a welcome bonus.Kan Gao and his team at Freebird Games have somehow created arguably the best storytelling gaming has ever seen–with RPG Maker. And the humor is both slapstick and risky, letting players release tension as they explore the gore and mind-bending moral conundrums posed by the game’s story. In Impostor Factory, the team has taken a big swing by including full-on horror, as well as a complex meta-story involving the nature of science and time itself. The smooth character art and animation also remind me of Secret of Mana’s lush 16-bit pixel graphics.įreebird games have always been funny in a gentle way that doesn’t clash with the games’ tender yet challenging emotional core. The grounds are also richly illustrated, including a dramatic temple of Apollo folly straight out of neoclassical England. And in an homage to classic horror, the mansion reveals modern secrets hidden beneath its Victorian appearance. The game’s murder mystery is set in a beautifully creepy mansion complete with ramparts and mysteriously locked rooms. The styling in Impostor Factory is really inviting, with art that I enjoyed more than in any of the previous games.

Freebird has always excelled at nonverbal cues. These are sometimes more interactive and, at other moments, take the form of fleeting glimpses of memories that are seen only in passing. This is when the game picks up a familiar mechanic from To the Moon and Finding Paradise: you explore scenes from someone’s memories in order to gather orbs that let you break through to the next area. He even begins to suspect the household’s little cat in an imaginative scene that made me laugh out loud.īut that’s just the beginning, because Quincy learns some truths that would change his perspectives on the events around him. He runs around the house, confronted with gory scenes that grow more elaborate, which then suddenly vanish. Or… are they? What unfolds is a slapstick horror comedy with Quincy at its centre. Then things start to get bloody when he finds the hosts gruesomely murdered. The hosts’ staff say he’s the first guest to arrive, but he runs into fellow guest Lynri when he goes upstairs. As the unfortunate fellow, Quincy arrives at a fancy party, although he appears to be dressed casually. You start with a classic story opening: some guy just shows up. However, Impostor Factory is a standalone experience, and its weighty emotional climax will especially reward returning players with a complex sci-fi plot with ties to the previous games.

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