Hello!
Today we're going back to the past, and looking at a 2008 RMXP game made by Freebird Games, wayyyyy before they made TtM. Well, actually that's not quite right, I'm playing its second installment, which was made after TtM's release, but doesn't change much besides adding a TtM credit screen and a "Retro Vacation" option.
Said option just opens this:
A weird Pac Man like parody of Quintessence: The Blighted Venom, which has Vikon, of all people, star as the main protagonist. He dodges the other protagonists of that game only to be caught in a comical army of Salories, and the game ends with a bizarre ad for To the Moon.
Now, it might seem like just a silly minigame. But this minigame originally existed in Did You Remember My Lullaby, the other side story they made back when they were still working on Quintessence. There, it had a fairly different ending. Lunair woke up from her sleep, commented on how she spent two months dreaming of "this crap", and it cut to this:
(Forgive the "Unregistered Hypercam" watermark, I borrowed this image from Kan's own playthrough of it.)
So yeah, it was basically a long winded way of teasing a new(for the time) Quintessence chapter, while also cheekily saying that DYRML wasn't Quintessence. This will become relevant soon.
As for the game itself, there's not a lot to say. The intro itself makes its oddness clear, having the rooms of its central location, a mysterious mansion, fill in abruptly for no explained reason. You play as a little girl, but it quickly becomes pretty clear that neither she nor the mansion are what they seem. There's no visible way outside, and throughout the course of the game, unsettling things happen silently, like wall paintings going blank and creepy calls warning about "birdie".
This culminates in a house fire, which, oddly, only singes her bedroom. After it dies down, she discovers a bunch of increasingly exasperated messages on her computer warning about birdie's journey and asking her to kill it, except they all came too late, so she could never act on them. She gets one last call, this time from "birdie", and then escapes with it, which is actually a blue dove. Then she shoots herself, and a bunch of her belongings back in the mansion vanish, followed by the bird itself.
People(okay, only Freebird Games fans) have tried to figure out what this entire mess means ever since Kan retroactively linked this to the Sigmund Corporation series, right before IF's release. Ignoring that this is essentially an incoherent sequence of events from which extracting anything parsimonious beyond the general narrative of a bird wreaking havoc on the world is essentially impossible, one would certainly observe that nothing about the setting is natural.
The house is bizarre, the protagonist is bizarre, the antagonist is bizarre, and at no point does the game attempt to clarify anything about them. Sure, the emails talk up how much of a threat "birdie" is, but they don't go into any detail about how or why it is. Similarly, the mansion exists just as a place where bizarre, eerie things happen. The girl exists only to do plot mandated things, and has no identity of her own, not even a face!
Thus, all we can conclude is that this is an intentionally open ended work that leaves a skeleton that invites interpretation without committing to anything. Or at least, that's what we could conclude, if it were not for a small yet important clue - a microscopic slide which looks like this:
Any reader familiar with the H5N1 plague should be able to readily recognize this. And, in 2008, there had been a particularly nasty outbreak of it throughout the world. It's not hard to connect the dots and see that he basically made a tiny apocalyptic game about it in the wake of its spread.
Besides that, what's also notable is how upfront the setting and "story" is about not being tied by realism or logic. In fact, there's a tendency for this author to sneak in sly references about how his side stories "aren't real" or "aren't the main story", like the bit with the Quintessence minigame in DYRML. This has some interesting implications for the Sigmund Corporation franchise. Sadly, I no longer have enough interest to elaborate on those, but, given the clues dropped here, it shouldn't be too hard to reach them on your own.
Well, I hope you enjoyed my coverage of this tiny, bizarre old game. Next time, I'll probably cover something less niche and more understandable, and it probably will be great. See you then!
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