Freebird Games, the indie studio behind the tear-jerker adventures To the Moon and Finding Paradise, has announced that its next project will be entitled Impostor Factory, and it will be all about, let's see here... uhh, murder. 

There's very little to go on at this point, besides the title, the teaser, and what is effectively a placeholder page at freebirdgames.com, but Freebird said that the new game will be "familiar" to followers of its previous work. 

It will also, however, mark "an end of an era for the development team," and yes, it really is about violent homicide: "In a stark shift from the developer's past story structure style, players will take part in a time-resetting thriller-mystery that involves a series of bloody murders," Freebird said. 

For those who prefer Freebird's previous stuff, the studio has also released Paper Memories: Comic Stories from To the Moon and Finding Paradise. Available as DLC for either game, Paper Memories includes three comics featuring characters from the games, "snippets" from the SigCorp Doctors, and bonus music tracks.   

Paper Memories is available now on Steam. Impostor Factory is expected to be out sometime in 2020.

To The Moon is being made into a full-fat animated film, developer Freebird Games announced today. 

The studio says the film has been in the works for two years and that production is now officially underway, with Chinese company Ultron Event Horizon providing the funding for the Japanese studios creating it. 

Freebird didn't specify who's working on the film, but in his announcement video, To The Moon creator Kan Gao said the "first-tier" studios involved are "pretty big players in the [Japanese] animation industry." If I were a betting man, I'd bet on A-1 Pictures, the studio behind other videogame adaptations like the Persona 3 films and the Brotherhood: Final Fantasy 15 animated series, as well as recent shorts like Shelter. But that's just a guess on my part. 

Gao also briefly touched on his role in the film's creation. "I won't have absolute control over the project," he said, "but I will be able to steer it in the right direction." Gao said making games at Freebird is still his primary focus, and that he's "started more actively working on the next game," which is still unannounced. His most recent game, Finding Paradise, a follow-up to To The Moon, released in December 2017. 

Production on the film only recently began, and Freebird hasn't even offered a tentative release window. About the only thing we know about the film itself is that its budget is said to be "above the level" of Your Name, an anime film from 2016 which went on to become the highest grossing anime ever, surpassing even Hayao Miyazaki's beloved works. "Does a good budget guarantee a good film?" Gao said. "Not necessarily. But a lack of budget certainly doesn't help."

While we wait for more details on To The Moon's film, have a gander at Gao's early works, a collection of strange, poetic, and almost universally sad games.  

A look at some our recent Game of the Year winners—Spelunky, Metal Gear Solid V, Dishonored 2—suggests that baked-in narratives are less important to us than personal stories plotted by physics and AI. That's broadly true, but not to the total exclusion of videogame storytelling, of characters and dialogue and, to give an overarching definition of what we mean by 'story' in this case, 'sequences of events which may be influenced by the player but are not authored by them.' The setting, the conflict, the reasons characters act (through us) and the consequences for those characters. You know, stories. 

Some say games are bad vehicles for this kind of storytelling, full stop. Others argue that while the stories in games are often bad, it's the fault of the storytellers, not the medium. And yet another camp argues that games are the greatest storytelling medium of all time. In listing our favorite stories, we will resolve exactly zero of these contradictory views. Unconcerned with theory for the moment, we just want to celebrate the stories that stuck with us, and recommend a few games for those who love to be told a good tale. Here are our favorites, as picked by regular PC Gamer writers Samuel Horti and Richard Cobbett, as well as the whole team:

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice 

Hellblade is an important game, not just because of the subject matter it tackles—a young woman’s struggle with psychosis—but also because it proves that modern-day audiences are willing to listen to developers that want to tackle difficult themes.

Pict warrior Senua is on a journey to retrieve her lover’s soul from the depths of the Norse underworld of Helheim, and she’s prepared to go up against the gods to do it. Her battles with towering, undead Vikings mirror her struggles against her inner demons, and through sparse writing and long, lingering close-ups of Senua’s face you really feel her pain. She bares her soul to the player, and it’s utterly moving.

The inner struggle is the one the game wants you to focus on, but there’s still subtlety on the surface, too: you can look back at the end of it and think about how Senua’s outward journey reflected her inner torment, making connections that weren’t obvious at the time. 

The Thief trilogy 

The first Thief game tells a neat noir story complete with dry narration from a cynical protagonist and a femme fatale who hires him for a dangerous job. The end result of its tangled plot has him stealing from a god of chaos and changing the world. Thief grows from a simple mash-up of hard-boiled fiction and steampunk into something much more complex. Over the course of the next two games it explores the religious consequences of a god's death and the Mechanists who rise in his absence, and by the third game follows those explorations of chaos and order by focusing on corruption within the Keepers, the group dedicated to balance Garrett left behind at the start of that first game.

There's a neatly cyclical quality to the three Thief games, which end where they began—not just with the Keepers, but with a scene of a child being caught pickpocketing. Only where once Garrett was the kid, now he's the adult deciding the fate of that child. So many videogame heroes get dragged back again and again, long after their story is done, so Garrett having such a complete arc is a pleasant rarity. The reboot's Garrett could never live up to it.

What Remains of Edith Finch

The overarching tale of the Finch family is full of intrigue, but it’s the individual stories of each family member that stand out. Returning to the family home as the titular Edith, you poke around the abandoned house, slipping in and out of the memories of the various characters as you gradually piece together a moving tragedy.

Each is told as an inventive mini-game. You transform into a shark, chop fish on a production line and listen to poetry while flying a kite. The simple mechanics provide the perfect window to learn about the personalities of each family member. These vignettes are moving, and deceptively layered and rich, changing your perception of what you’ve heard before while also advancing the overarching plot. The game offers a masterclass in environmental storytelling, too, with each object in the house giving you a new insight into the family.

Quite simply, it’s the pinnacle of the first-person narrative game genre, and toppling it will take some doing.

Mafia and Mafia 2 

The first two Mafia games each contain their own compelling stories, built from familiar cinematic influences—but the first is my favourite, telling a more sympathetic tale of cab driver Tommy Angelo being drawn into the criminal underworld, before finally trying to escape it. The cutscenes look like they're being acted out by Gerry Anderson puppets by today's standards, but it felt like careful attention was paid to the writing, cinematography and use of music in Mafia's story—plus the smoke effects are still nice. The shock ending, which we won't ruin here, ties into Mafia 2 in an utterly dazzling way. 

Mafia 2, meanwhile, focuses on Vito Scaletta and his best friend Joe some years later. Vito gets into the mob to clear his family's debts, following a memorably boring sequence where you work at the docks, doing legitimate and repetitive work until you choose to walk away. The story ends somewhat abruptly, though some might argue that elevates its closing moments, but the friendship between the two main characters is what I remember loving about Mafia 2, as well as believing this story was actually taking place across two decades.

Her Story

You’d think that if you take a murder mystery, chop it into bits and deliver all those parts in the wrong order then the resultant story would be a mess. And in most cases you’d be right. But not in Her Story. You flick through a database of police interviews with a young woman, pulling up clips by searching for keywords and watching them on a battered CRT monitor. Each video reveals a piece of the jigsaw, and it’s your job to slot them all together in your mind.

The minimalist presentation wouldn’t work without astonishing acting and tight, punchy writing. Through a single screen the game depicts more drama than most blockbuster movies. Each clip you watch changes your mind about the case, and then the next clip makes you realise just how wrong you were again.

It’s a showcase of ambiguous storytelling done right. Even if you watch every single clip, and therefore know what every jigsaw piece looks like, the overall picture will still be blurred by your own interpretations and preconceptions. It means different things to different players, and you learn something new every time you play.

Bioshock 2 

While it’s the first game that gets all the attention for its fantastic concept, it’s Bioshock 2 that’s secretly the high point of the series. Under Jordan Thomas and his crew, a story once primarily about a city became a story of its people. The victims of Rapture. The next generation, emerging as butterflies from a cocoon of poverty and deprivation. It told real stories of people who followed a dream, only to realise that they were in service to someone else’s. And then of course there was Eleanor—Lamb of Rapture, and far superior as a character than Bioshock Infinite’s Lamb of Columbia. Through actions rather than words, you guided her nascent morality in a world where morality was routed in human concern rather than big plot twists, as the ‘dadification’ of gaming arguably reached its zenith. This wasn’t your story. It was your merely your privilege to begin hers.

To the Moon

An emotionally draining game that has caused many a tear to drop on our keyboards. To the Moon's premise seems overly complex at first: in the future, a company can travel into your mind and implant new memories in a way so that present time-you believes them to be true. But really, it’s a story about one man’s dying wish to visit the moon, hence the title.

The game take’s place inside the memories of that man, called John. You travel backwards through his mind step-by-step. So at the beginning of the story you pick up mysteries, and as you go back in time those mysteries unpack themselves piece by piece (wait until you know what that rabbit means—you’ll weep). It never hits you over the head with anything, which means you feel clever for picking up on its nuances.

But its intelligence is not what sticks with you. The memorable bit is the game’s exploration of love, loss and regret, all three wrapped together in something that’s a comedy one minute (it’s seriously funny in places) and a tragedy the next.

Realms of the Haunting

This obscure British gem has enjoyed something of a resurgence of late, and justifiably so. While the script is more than a little on-the-nose and the basic concept is a fairly stock haunted house setting giving way to a fairly stock battle between good and evil, it’s not really the plot itself that makes ROTH so special. It’s the details, some of which may actually contain the devil.

Few fantasy or horror games have presented such a wonderfully fleshed out world—the sense of stepping into something bigger than you could ever comprehend, with every scrap of it meticulously detailed and woven into a grand tapestry. Ignore the relatively primitive 3D engine. The joy of ROTH is in the descent to understanding, dealing with powers, and the moments of compassion that emerge from it, like being faced with a trial from a seemingly implacable god willing to bend the unbreakable rules of his domain because your situation is so dire as to have drawn his impossible pity. It was a world that dripped with fantastical history long before the likes of Dark Souls were a glint in their creators’ sadistic eyes, and remains a beautiful obscurity that badly deserved its sequel.

Grand Theft Auto IV

GTA IV dialled back the wacky, fun stuff of San Andreas—military jets, jetpacks, getting fat from eating burgers—in favour of a sober story set in a stunningly realistic interpretation of New York, Liberty City. This meant that, as an open world game, GTA had less moments of large-scale, thrilling chaos than we'd eventually see in GTA V, but the flipside of that was a more interesting story. GTA IV is a pretty sincere tale—and it has a few thematic links with Rockstar's Red Dead Redemption, which also has a protagonist who can't really escape his past life. 

Niko Bellic, an Eastern European veteran who comes to Liberty City to start again, soon finds himself dragged back into a life of killing. The tragedy of Niko is that you sense he knows it's the one thing he's best at. It's melodramatic but effective—a daring effort to bring GTA into the modern age with a more dramatic story.

The Yawhg

The Yawhg is coming, and it isn't going to be good, and that's all you know. This fantastic little game sends up to four players around town to prepare for that coming disaster, and each simple decision—teach the king your seductive techniques or let him flounder?—can lead to terrible things at the end of the brief adventure (or rarely, something good). The writing is concise, unembellished, and biting; simple fantasy tales that may end with stolid brutality or newfound wisdom, whether you spend a week drinking in the tavern or meditating in the garden.

Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc 

Danganronpa stands out from other visual novels because, rather than a game about making decisions, it's a game about making deductions. You play as one of 15 students trapped in an elite school where the only way to graduate (read: escape) is to kill a classmate and get away with it by lying and framing your way through a murder trial. If anyone pulls it off, the remaining students will also be killed, so everyone has a stake in every trial—doubly so if you've grown attached to the victim or the prime suspect. 

The process of collecting, considering and presenting evidence makes for a far more interactive experience than merely navigating dialogue, and the trials work because Danganronpa has colorful and interesting characters you won't want to see die. They look like one-note caricatures at first glance, but you start to see different sides of everyone as antagonist Monokuma ratchets up the stakes with unique twists. It becomes clearer and clearer that everyone has something to hide, and the dread of suddenly losing a favorite character, or accusing one of murder, should not be underestimated.

A Mind Forever Voyaging

When did games get so political, people demand. Well, try 1985, with one of the most beloved text adventures not to involve hitchhiking around the galaxy or exploring an underground kingdom. A Mind Forever Voyaging is interactive fiction doing something that no other medium could do—to put you into a world, and let exploration tell its story. Yes, in many ways, this was the first walking simulator—its setting, a Matrix style recreation of a small American town, and you a sentient computer program charged with stepping into progressive simulations of the future under a popular senator’s Plan For Renewed National Purpose. Needless to say, it doesn’t go well. Over the course of the game you experience America’s collapse around you, complete with now familiar sites collapsing into decay and your own family becoming victims of an oppressive theocratic regime. Can you stop it, despite your only presence in the real world being as a scrap of data on a computer?  

Mass Effect 2

A solid space romp from start to finish. A lot of RPGs struggle to sustain forward momentum for more than a few hours at a time, but Mass Effect 2 does it for 30, constantly nudging you from one point in the galaxy to the next by presenting you with a series of interesting missions, each containing its own short story. It gets the balance just right between exposition and action, with enough big set pieces to keep you on your toes.

The characters are the glue holding it together. The series has some of the best personalities you’ll find in games (and Garrus might just be the best NPC of all time). Walking around the Normandy after a mission to hear the quips of each crew member in turn is a joy, and you can dig even deeper into their personalities in the companion missions, which provide some of the best moments in the entire series. Learning more about them, and forming these personal ties, lends more weight to the overall plot. Even though you might not care about the Geth or the Reapers or the fate of humanity, you care about your crew, and whether they make it out of the game’s bombastic ending alive.

It also has the benefit of being able to incorporate the decisions you made in the first game, which makes for a richer, more personal tale. It’s an excellent space opera that Bioware struggled to better in both Mass Effect 3 and Andromeda, and a game against which all their future titles will rightly be measured.

The Witcher 3 

What can we say about The Witcher 3 that hasn’t already been shouted from the rooftops? The Bloody Baron quest alone warrants its place on our list. To focus just on that would be a mistake though, as barely a moment goes by without a reminder that CD Projekt are playing in a different league to almost every other RPG studio out there. It’s in the plots, which effortlessly merge myth and fairy tale and fantasy. It’s in the humour that underlines everything. It’s in the cheeky imagination of a studio as happy to have you chase after a missing stone phallus as your long-lost adopted daughter. But mostly, it’s about seeing this wonderful world through the practiced neutrality of Geralt himself—a man who can’t stop his compassion and sympathy bleeding out through his stoic front, no matter how much it might make his life easier. What many games demand long cutscenes to tell, this one often handles with nothing more than a subtle eye animation, or an obvious opinion held back. The Witcher 3 tells great stories, but it’s how they all weave together and filter through their star and his unique perspective that really makes them special. 

Analogue: A Hate Story 

Investigating an abandoned spacecraft inhabited by untrustworthy AI is a videogame staple, and it's been done well (most recently in Prey). Analogue: A Hate Story is different. For starters it's a visual novel rather than an immersive sim, and also it's an exploration of the societal pressures on women in Joseon-period Korea.

The spaceship Mugunghwa (named after South Korea's national flower) is a multi-generational slower-than-light colony ship whose inhabitants, over the centuries, regressed to a feudal society that somehow collapsed 600 years before your investigation begins. In other games like this you might read emails about changing the passwords on the armory—in Analogue the logs tell the story of competing dynasties in a society where women are forbidden from learning to read and write (but do so anyway). It's historical fiction wrapped in sci-fi trappings that bounces the two off each other, you and your new AI companions examining and reacting to the text as you go. It's about how the past isn't as far behind us as we like to think, and has a thematic richness that honestly puts a lot of other games to shame.

Oxenfree 

Here are the ingredients: a spooky deserted island; a group of quirky teens who are better at banter than any of us; a mystery involving radio frequencies. Saying any more than that about Oxenfree's story is tricky, because it's a twisty one. Fortunately it's not just a great story because it will surprise you, but because of how it's told, which is in naturalistic dialogue any Kevin Williamson movie would be proud of. Characters talk over each other freely and you can interrupt them as well—when you make a dialogue choice you're never sure if Alex, the protagonist, will save it for the next gap in conversation or blurt it out immediately. 

So many games have a scene where somebody interrupts someone else, but what actually happens is that character A stops abruptly, there's a significant pause, and then character B jumps in with a line obviously recorded in a different session, possibly in a different country. Oxenfree doesn't do that. Its dialogue has a flow that you can get caught up in, so you're already engaged even before its plot uncurls and rears up in your face.

Soma

What does it mean to be alive? Sci-fi stories have grappled with the thought for decades, largely telling the same sad story over and over again. Who would’ve thought that the developers of the classic Amnesia: The Dark Descent would follow up with one of the most gripping, mind-bending, horrifying takes of all in Soma? Maybe it just took inhabiting the body of a character inhabiting a dead body to give the premise the punch it’s been needing. Its optimistic ending is the biggest surprise, given that you’re repeatedly confronted with puzzles that risk the lives of junkpile robots also harboring a human consciousness inside them. They might look like rusting mounds of metal plates and bolts, but they’ll also tell you they’re happy and don’t want to die. What if a human with their guts hanging out told you the same thing? Renegade and Paragon alignments won’t help you. 

Deranged monsters roam the halls (and you can turn them off now), but they too are confused, semi-conscious beings in unfamiliar bodies. They’re mostly a sideshow to the main attraction, the underwater research station built to harbor the remnants of humanity after a comet devastated the surface. In order to discover who you really are and save whatever you can of humanity on a glorified USB stick, you’ll need to descend to places without light or life in some of the most oppressive, uncomfortable underwater environments this side of Bioshock. But for every plot twist Rapture holds, Soma has two, and they’re all going to make you feel like shit. 

To the Moon was Kan Gao’s first commercial success, a game about memory, loss, and dreams of being an astronaut that many players felt a strong emotional connection with (by which I mean everyone cried). To the Moon exceeded expectations for a game created with RPG Maker, but it was not his first. Before that, he spent many years working with the much-mocked engine, refining his poetic writing through many smaller games.

Though lacking polish and scope, those first projects are an intriguing glance into Gao’s mind, and share many traits with the award-winning To the Moon. They have lovingly crafted soundtracks, deep themes and a focus on storytelling and atmosphere, on small gestures and human emotions (plus annoying puzzles and birds). Those early experiments can be downloaded for free on Freebird Games’ website, and can be a nice appetizer before To the Moon’s new sequel Finding Paradise.

But are they all worth playing?

Quintessence

Superficially, Quintessence looks very much like every teen’s first RPG Maker game, with default art assets, rough menus, and a wonky battle system. As soon as you start playing, however, you realize it has one big redeeming quality: craft.

It may look cheap, but its cutscenes are composed with the care you’d expect from a Final Fantasy game. The camera movements, the lovely animations, the pacing of the dialogue, the music, the expressions: everything is calculated. Quintessence feels cinematic.

It’s a game that starts at the ending, with a final dungeon and a hardened group of heroes solving puzzles and battling monsters. After their tragic defeat, we’re back to the start to witness how everything started. This is not a start in medias res followed by a flashback, though. Thanks to a pact with a deity, the protagonist effectively rewinds time, getting another chance to relive events. 

Unlike To the Moon, we’re not back in time to make everything better: the protagonist wants to avoid getting involved in this mess in the first place, but it doesn’t take much for him to get tangled again in a story full of shapeshifters, magic, and lies.

It’s an intriguing tale, but its pacing is glacially slow. Every map change is an excuse for a new cutscene, a conversation, or a new character to be introduced. Quintessence is packed with details, and the never-ending dialogues, combined with the intricate maps, can sometimes feel overwhelming. Battles, on the other hand, are a convoluted real-time affair, often just an excuse to stretch your fingers before the next dialogue.

It’s a game that demands patience, and unashamedly wears its JRPG influences on its sleeve. Those willing to give it a chance will get to enjoy a lengthy, compelling story full of twists—albeit one that might possibly never get an ending.

As Gao’s attention shifted to commercial work, the fate of Quintessence became uncertain. Although Gao stated his determination to finish the game, it has been officially on hiatus for more than five years, and it’s still missing its final chapters. Even if you are interested in a look at his early work, you may want to hold off for now.

The Mirror Lied

"This is NOT a horror game," the description says. There are no monsters, no jumpscares, and no ways to get a Game Over: you’re just a faceless girl in an empty house, tasked with the duty of… watering a plant. 

Weird, but not horrifying. And yet, there’s something palpably disturbing in the way the house withers and shifts as you explore it, looking for answers in dusty rooms illuminated by crepuscular lights.

Books in the libraries have titles, but the pages are all blank. The phone keeps ringing, ominous messages telling you that a mysterious "birdie" is coming to get you. And the world map pinned on a room gradually gets emptier, continents disappearing one after another. 

This is not a horror game, not one of the many Yume Nikki-inspired RPG Maker titles with small girls fighting big monsters. And yet, it’s impossible to walk away from The Mirror Lied without feeling a bit uneasy. What was it all about? I don’t know. Nobody knows (the most accepted theory: "some metaphor about the bird flu"). Perhaps not even Kan Gao knows for sure—people tried to ask him, and this was his official response: 

While Gao hasn’t made proper horror games, this sense of uneasiness, of crumbling realities and distorted dreams, brings to mind the two mini episodes that were released after To the Moon, the Holiday Special Minisode and Sigismund Minisode 2. 

Do You Remember My Lullaby? 

Kan Gao’s works are sometimes criticized for their lack of interaction. His virtual words can sometimes be reduced to little more than the occasional puzzle or brief walk from a cutscene to another. In this case, he solved the problem by simply not having a game at all.

Do You Remember My Lullaby? is an immersive movie about a mother and child, narrated with few words and many small gestures. It’s a Christmas story, perfect for this holiday season—though being a Kan Gao game there is no happy ending and everything is terrible. Even in this game, Gao used RPG Maker’s default assets to paint its world, but to call them simply "default assets" would belie what he did with them.

Instead of making assets from scratch, Gao focused on improving what he already had, giving each character a full range of small movements, expressions and gestures. Simple scenes, like a mother making a cake, are portrayed with an attention to detail that makes everything feel more humane. A perfect non-game to try if you have half an hour and a pack of tissues to spare.

Lyra's Melody

It’s another sad game, this one. But not for the usual reasons.

Lyra’s Melody is the forgotten idea for a full-fledged game, that became less and less important as To the Moon became Gao’s main project. The only trace of its existence are some forum posts that gives us a brief summary of what it could have been:

When Ralle Peregrine was a child, he began to hear a mysterious melody in his head. Around the same time, his childhood sweetheart, Lyra Shire, began to lose her hearing.

As they grew up, Ralle became a guitarist to accompany the strange melody that only he hears whenever he closes his eyes. By then, Lyra had gone completely deaf.

He wrote many songs for her, but she could hear none of them.

One day, when Ralle was playing the mysterious tune at his usual spot, a wagon came by and stopped. Out came a man; a wanderer named Traviston Estel, with a piece of rye hanging out of his mouth.

That of which he soon spat out, as he took out a music box, echoing the very melody that Ralle has been hearing all these years.

The only playable demo is a lovely, criminally brief affair with no fights and the usual mix of cutscenes and minigames. Not much happens in terms of plots, but the interactions between the two protagonists are pleasant enough to leave us wondering. As it stands, it's the ghost of a tale that may never be, worthy of a play only for the most fervent fans.

If you didn't enjoy To the Moon, Gao’s previous works aren't going to blow your mind. There’s no artistic revolutions here, no dives into new genres or new ideas. Kan Gao’s path has been focused on polish—on the meticulous refinement of his particular style of storytelling over the course of 10 years. It makes me wonder what he could do with a bigger budget and full team behind him, but I think I already know the answer. Gao’s games are popular because they manage to strike a chord even in their primitive, pixelated form. Additional resources would help him reach a bigger audience, but his games would remain exactly the same. Because this one time, they sent a poet.

Between Steam's daily and weekly deals, not to mention a few well-timed individual sales, a lot of indie games are cheap right now. The sales aren't bundled together and therefore will end at different times, but they're all good deals on good games. Here's a rundown, sorted by when they end:

Friday, December 15 

Ruiner - $13 at 33 percent off (same price on GOG)

Saturday, December 16

Kerbal Space Program - $20 at 50 percent off 

Tacoma - $10 at 50 percent off

Monday, December 18

Ultimate Chicken Horse - $9 at 40 percent off 

Battle Chasers: Nightwar - $20 at 33 percent off

Wednesday, December 20

To the Moon - $4 at 60 percent off 

Thursday, December 21 

Gorogoa - $12 at 20 percent off (same price on GOG) 

Gorogoa is celebrating its launch week, by the way. Our review went up earlier today (spoilers: Philippa was quite taken with it). It's worth noting that the Steam winter sale also starts on Thursday, December 21, so more and likely steeper discounts are sure to follow. 

Some online stores give us a small cut if you buy something through one of our links. Read our affiliate policy for more info.

Can a game engine as old as the Super Nintendo remain relevant in 2017? If we're talking about RPG Maker, the answer is a resounding yes. After two decades of relative obscurity, the game-making software has exploded in popularity in recent years, leading to gems like To The Moon, LISA, and Always Sometimes Monsters. Since its first release in the early '90s, RPG Maker has mostly avoided mainstream attention, trundling along as a hobbyist tool for hardcore 16-bit JRPG fans. It wasn't until 2007 that the community even established a central repository for sharing advice and distributing their games. Dubbed the RPG Maker Network, it hosted more than 50 games in 2008, and another 74 in 2009. Many of these games were tech demos and proofs-of-concept, small projects made more for the developer's sake than for the player's. Others were fan games, lifting sprites and lore from established properties. Almost no one was selling their games.

All that changed in 2013. 188 new releases hit the RPG Maker Network. ModDB, the popular modding site, saw 74 stand-alone RPG Maker games added to its database. The next year, Steam got in on the action, adding 30 RPG Maker games in 2014 and following it up with 99 more in 2015 and 135 just last year. RPG Maker has quietly become the go-to tool for aspiring developers who want to make a game and sell it, too.

Why, after more than 20 years, has RPG Maker recently seen such an explosion of popularity? It's the most accessible game engine around, but recent iterations have added the depth needed to make serious games. And, perhaps most importantly, it's on Steam.

Accessibility and customization

From the moment he heard the first stirring notes of the original Final Fantasy, Phil Hamilton fell in love with video game soundtracks. For years he dreamed of scoring an RPG of his own, something in the vein of Chrono Trigger or Secret of Mana. Unfortunately, his style of music never seemed to fit with other people's games, so he decided to take matters into his own hands. Diving into RPG Maker VX, Hamilton began building and scoring his own game, and he was so enamored with the process that he rounded up other like-minded developers and formed Dancing Dragon Games, going on to release standout RPG Maker games like Skyborn and Echoes of Aetheria.

Hamilton attributes much of his studio's success to how user-friendly recent editions of RPG Maker have become. 

"From RM2k [RPG Maker 2000] to VX Ace," he says, "there have been a few peaks and valleys but generally speaking I believe VX Ace to be the apex of 'casual' game development. It takes the best of all previous iterations put together."

RPG Maker VX Ace, released in the west in 2012, was essentially an enhanced version of RPG Maker VX, incorporating a number of improvements that had kept its predecessor from reaching its full potential. Support for multiple tilesets (the source of a 2D game's sprites) and the addition of numerous DLC resource packs released by Enterbrain, the developer of RPG Maker, made VX Ace the most approachable version of RPG Maker yet. Combined with its release on Steam—the first time RPG Maker had been available on the platform—VX Ace marked the start of a new, more inclusive era for RPG Maker.

Increased accessibility isn't the only reason RPG Maker has taken off in recent years. For as welcoming as it is to beginners, the software packs a lot of depth for those willing to sink their teeth into it.

"RPG maker is just great as an entry-level software, but not in a way that's restricting," says Ross Tunney of New Reality Games, makers of the Data Hacker series of RPGs. "There's a much steeper learning curve for Unity, and Game Maker I've found that that is limiting in terms of scope for what you can create."

Key to RPG Maker's depth is how open to customization it is. Though the engine comes packed with basic art and battle systems perfect for first-time developers, it's the support for user-made plugins that studios like Amaterasu Software, makers of the Unforgiving Trials games, find invaluable. From New Game+ modes to character subclass systems, plugins creators like Yanfly have saved Team Amaterasu plenty of development time with their ready-made solutions.

Community

"RPG Maker offers an excellent foundation for game development along with many possibilities for customization," says Martin Matanovic of Team Amaterasu. "Many mundane tasks of game development have been made easier with the tools provided in RPG Maker." 

Even with all those advances in approachability, RPG Maker's software is still only half the story. As the engine has evolved, so too has its community, growing from a ragtag group of hardcore JRPG fans into a diverse body of talented developers more than willing to help each other out. 

"The RPG Maker community greatly increased both in size and in expertise," recalls Matanovic. "We found many talented artists and developers that helped us along the way."

Much of the community's growth can be traced back to the efforts of Degica, the western publishing partner brought on to help Enterbrain in 2011. In addition to establishing an official RPG Maker forum and staffing it with knowledgeable moderators, Degica regularly updates its blog with tips and tutorials from experienced developers, as well as offering free monthly resource packs containing new art, audio, and scripts for anyone to use.

"We worked to provide more support, more tutorials, and a bigger official community atmosphere for newcomers to join and learn," explains Nick Palmer, community manager at Degica. "When I first came on the project, it was me and one other person, and I was just part-time. Now? We have an entire team that handles RPG Maker. It is definitely an entire different ballgame."

Perhaps most importantly, Degica sees RPG Maker as a product of its users as much as its developers.

"We are always, always listening to the community," says Palmer. "We are with them every step of the way, trying out new games people have made, talking about game design on the forums, or about projects we’ve dreamt up. Being a fan of the product you release is by far the most fun you can have in this field of work."

The rise of indies and RPG Maker stigma

Just as instrumental in RPG Maker's recent popularity is the changing attitude towards indie games. With the success of Braid, Limbo, and Bastion in the late 2000s, the dominance of AAA started to crumble. Sites like indieDB found an audience eager to explore the humbler, more intimate side of gaming. Even Valve sat up and took notice, releasing its Steamworks SDK in 2008 that allowed developers of all sizes to sell their games on Steam without a major publisher, though you still needed a Valve contact to get on the store. Valve followed that up with the launch of Steam Greenlight in 2012, providing developers with an affordable, if not always effective, means of self-distribution. 

This shift in public opinion, combined with the rise of crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter, was a huge win for games with small but passionate audiences—RPG Maker's bread and butter.

"Both the release of RPG Maker on Steam and the opening up of the platform to be easier for indies has let more people than ever discover that the dream of making a game isn’t out of their reach," says Palmer. 

"Players are beginning to understand that a great game doesn't need to be a 3D FPS about shooting tanks with your gun," adds Francesco Ficarelli, designer of parody RPG Doom & Destiny. "Now, more players are looking for RPG games like those made with RPG Maker, so if your games looks fun and good, it's likely going to pass Greenlight."

For as little as labels like triple-A and indie mean these days, the RPG Maker branding still carries a nasty stigma. One look at the comments on the Greenlight page for a game like Fantasy Symphony reveals the enmity some people still have for the engine. Frustrating though it can be, Data Hacker developer Ross Tunney understands why.

"I think that community members are very quick to judge now," Tunney says. "Proposing an RPG Maker game with any stock assets on Greenlight is a bold move, even if it has a cool mechanic or premise. It's a shame, but I can understand why so many users are getting tired of seeing the same old artwork and hearing the same music."

Nevertheless, Tunney believes that the benefits of RPG Maker far outweigh the stigma it carries. "With some custom artwork and soundtrack, anyone can still make a unique-looking game, and if that's coupled with a decent story and characters, then there's still appeal."

The rising popularity of RPG Maker also feeds into the narrative that Steam is being flooded with samey, low-quality games—more than 5,000 games were released on Steam in 2016, according to SteamSpy. But even though new RPG Maker releases seem like a daily occurrence on Steam, they still represent a tiny slice of the total pie. 2.6 percent of Steam's new games, in 2016. That may change with Steam Direct in 2017: it's possible that the fee Valve settles on will lead to fewer RPG Maker games and fewer games in general. But if current trends are any indication, RPG Maker releases will continue to rise on Steam. 

Phil Hamilton, too, sees signs of the stigma fading. "The 'not real games' thing is a thing. I don't know how big it is—I suspect it is a loud minority. Skyborn has seen enough success that it simply doesn't get those comments anymore. People still criticize it, but because of legit things, not because it's made in RPG Maker."

With games like Oneshot and Actual Sunlight redefining what RPG Maker is capable of, the humble engine has a bright future ahead. Behind its simple pixel art lies tremendous depth, and developers are only getting more creative with how they use the engine.

"It really is a circular thing," concludes Nick Palmer. "The more games made, the more people learn it exists, and then the more they make games. More games, more innovation. And hopefully, more people discovering that they can fulfill their dreams of making a game."

Developer Kan Gao released the first free *shudder* 'minisode' for To The Moon at around this time last year, and now another has been released, completely free. While it's the same sort of length as the first (around 20 minutes), Gao suggests that this one is "a tad more...important, plot-wise". Once again, you're stuck in a hospital playing as the two main scientist characters of To The Moon, as protestors do protesty things outside.

If you own To The Moon on Steam, you should find that the DLC has already been registered to your account. Otherwise, you can download it here. You don't need to own TTM, but it will probably make more sense if you've played that first.

With Sigmund Minisode 2 out of the way, Gao will be resuming work on To The Moon's full-fledged sequel, Finding Paradise. Meanwhile, one of Freebird's pixel artists, Jordan, is still in hospital undergoing chemotherapy; if you'd like to help out with either kind words or donations, there are details of how you can do so here.