Finding Paradise review - "An emotional homage to life's little moments"

What does it mean to be truly happy? How do we know if the memories we've lived are real, or if we've ever truly lived at all? Cliche as it may sound, the pursuit of happiness takes centre stage in Finding Paradise, the lovely and equally tear-jerking follow-up to indie hit, To The Moon. The mobile release in particular adds subtle updates to the game to fit a modern audience, but is it worth spending five hours on, or should you go find paradise somewhere else?

Table of contents:

• Finding Paradise story
• Finding Paradise gameplay and controls
• Finding Paradise verdict

FINDING PARADISE STORY AND VISUALS

Because Finding Paradise is a narrative-driven game - and I've always said how much I'm a sucker for these genres - to reveal the story would do it a great injustice. Players should be able to experience this emotional time-travelling adventure on their own with no spoilers to enjoy the full impact of the story, so suffice it to say that it'll lead you to plenty of twists and turns while hitting you right in the feels at the same time.

The game has often been compared to its emotional predecessor, so I won't be focusing on that in this review. Finding Paradise is a standalone point-and-click-esque game, after all, so I'd rather view it on its own without the shadow of To The Moon looming over it.

That said, the basic premise is easy enough to digest. You play as Drs. Eva Rosalene and Neil Watts from Sigmund Corp., and you're here to do one thing - fulfil a dying man's wish, even if it's all in his head. This alone raises a bunch of ethical questions the game's short runtime can't fully explain, but the point here is how this kind of technology should make you feel. Is it worth tampering with a dying person's memories to make sure he's happy when he finally breathes his last, even if it's not exactly real?

THE GAMEPLAY AND CONTROLS OF FINDING PARADISE

The game is an entirely story-based journey, so the gameplay here is extremely limited. While you can certainly interact with the NPCs, such as the main protagonist Colin's family and other random bystanders, all you really have to do is go through Colin's past finding key items that trigger important memories you can use to get the job done. You'll live through each memory in Colin's mind, find objects of importance, solve a match-3 puzzle, then leap to the next memory - rinse and repeat.

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Of course, that's not to say that the core gameplay loop gets repetitive, even though I certainly thought it would be initially. The game somehow varies each memory enough to keep things interesting, and because you're focused on the story and not the actual gameplay, you won't really notice how often you're going through the same thing. To me, this lack of gameplay or even the lack of difficulty is actually a huge pro - I definitely didn't want the gameplay to get in the way of the story because all I really wanted to do was find out what happened next.

Precisely because of that, what frustrated me were the moments when I couldn't move on to the next part of the story as soon as possible. These instances were few and far between, but once or twice, I found myself roaming around from place to place not knowing what to do next, only to find out that I could actually head up a flight of stairs or move into a certain room.

The revamped mobile version, thankfully, gives you hints in the form of exclamation points or shiny icons indicating objects and people you can interact with. You can also consult your logbook when you're feeling a bit stuck. You can drag your finger around on a virtual directional pad to move your character, or you can simply tap directly at a place or an item to head on over there and check it out. I absolutely loved this quality-of-life feature, although tapping on the topmost part of the screen to get somewhere might accidentally pull up your timeline menu from time to time.

WHAT'S THE APPEAL?

Small inconveniences aside, the game really did suck me in from the get-go. Everything from the two protagonists' fan-fave brand of banter and humour to the hilarious Easter eggs kept me going from memory to memory without wanting to stop (Dr. Watts' shenanigans, in particular, will appeal to RPG and anime fans everywhere). I was prepared to get all misty-eyed going into the game, and while the story itself wasn't what got me going, it's the heartbreaking soundtrack that eventually did.

I also really loved how wrong I was when the twist came along - I was expecting things to go one way when things went in a completely opposite direction. That added a pleasant surprise during the third act, and even though the game didn't make me shed ugly tears as much as Sumire did, it still made me suspect there were ninjas slicing invisible onions around me by the time the credits rolled.

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Finding Paradise promptly made me go into an existential crisis after the last scene, and games that can successfully do that always have a special place in my heart. What I appreciated the most was how the story highlights the smallest and the most seemingly mundane moments of our lives and shows us how much they really matter in the end. It is, after all, just as Dr. Watts said - "I think all our memories, and everything in it…can be nothing but the fiction we tell ourselves." I couldn't agree more.