Apparently, this is the sequel to "To The Moon", which is a game I quite liked way back in 2014. I have owned this game since 2020 apparently, but I completely forgot that it existed until I heard about it from a friend of a friend. Just goes to show that the series needs to have a proper title. If it were "Memory Dudes - Episode 1 - To The Moon" and then "Memory Dudes - Episode 2 - Finding Paradise", then this wouldn't have happened.

Anyhow, this is basically just 'To The Moon' again, except with less silly references to anime and Animorphs, and more of a focus on the central premise, which is good. This ended up being a brief, morose meditation on what it is to have lived a long life with a rather large pile of regrets. Some of the attempts at humour really are quite underwhelming, but there is a fundamental humanity to the storytelling that is really quite gripping. There are some good twists in here and the game can be finished in one evening, which I think is just the right amount of time. It's the gaming equivalent of a brief but enjoyable novella.

It's always weird when you sense something is Canadian even without checking if it's a Canadian studio. There's this whole scene in this about picking an instrument for music class and how the kid gets stuck with a big stupid instrument that's hard to carry because he picked last. Other kids boast about having a flute that just fits in their backpack. And I'm just like... man, I lived that.

Do Americans do the instrument thing in Middle School too? Maybe they do it with guns instead. Who knows.

Anyhow, cool game. I will try to play the third one in the series before 2031.

Final Score: 8.917287483274/11

Finding Paradise is the sequel to the game that broke my heart, and while it didn't have that particle lightning-in-a-bottle effect on me, that is not because I think the game is worse. Part of the shock of To the Moon to me was how much I personally related to it, and that I was not expecting it to be so deeply emotional. I expected something similar from Finding Paradise, and on that it does succeed.

This game does everything you would want from a sequel for To the Moon. It gives us another heartbreaking life to relive and expands on the formula. Whereas previously we went back in time, seeing a love story in reverse to try and figure out what the hell is going on in this guy's memories, we instead see a beginning and an ending that seem impossible to reconcile, with similarly heartbreaking reveals as we try and figure out what the hell is wrong with this guy's memories.

It also manages to inject some real tension and more character moments for our Sigmund crew. Despite knowing how the memory gimmick works, finding paradise manages to keep the framing device fresh, and even expands on it from the first game.

Play it anyway. It isn't quite as bittersweet as the first game, but it is still incredibly bittersweet. It hurts, it really does. If you liked the first one, play this one.

How can a bunch of pixels make me feel so many things??