Kan Gao’s tearjerker To The Moon, a game which affected our John so much that he still daren’t open the curtains on clear nights lest he be swept away in a torrent of his own tears, is becoming a full-length animated movie. It’s the story of doctors travelling through the memories of a dying man (with the aid of a fancy machine), seeing his life and creating new memories so he can have sort-of lived his dying wish: visiting the moon. At this point, John is hammering on the door as a brook flows down his body, so I imagine we’ll need to employ Ludovico Technique eyespreaders to make him watch it.

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To the Moon is one of the very best adventure games, our John will tell you – if he’s not too busy wringing you for confessions of weeping. The 2011 journey through a dying man’s dreams was a bit of a tearjerker, see. Following two intermission ‘minisodes’ and so-so tie-in A Bird Story, developers Freebird Games have now revealed a bit of the true second episode in the series. Named Finding Paradise, it’s due at the end of this year (or early in 2017, maybe).

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John probably wants you to cry at A Bird Story, you realise. He’s spoken before about his sinister habit of extracting confessions of tears from people who played To the Moon, and surely he’s got something more devious planned for the not-sequel. A Bird Story launched on Friday, and I would recommend that you first check your play area for e.g. funnels concealed in the surface of your desk connected to tubes which vanish out through your wall and underground to barrels in John’s lachrymose lair. The very setup is dangerously tearjerky: a boy finds a bird with an injured wing.

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There’s no game I’ve written about on RPS that has been mentioned to me more often than To The Moon. I still get emails, tweets and even people coming up to me three years on, thanking me for bringing it to their attention. I always reply, “Did it make you cry?” And they always reply, “Yes.” And usually, “Three times.” It’s an astonishingly special and lovely little adventure game, available here.

Developer Kan Gao has been working on the follow-up, although not a sequel, A Bird’s Story for a couple of years now. And there is finally a proper trailer for it, and a release date. Ho boy. Grab the hankies.

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