Freebird Games does it again. The team delivers an emotional story simply through dialogue and highly detailed sprite work to drive the player from happiness to sadness. Impostor Factory pretty much does what the previous two entries in the To the Moon series established, and makes it the best it ever has been.
Since this type of game pretty much focuses mainly on story, I’ll brush on the bare-minimum, as one would NEED to experience this as blindly as possible. You play as Quincy, who’s been invited to a company party, but then encounters many trials and tribulations, only to then discover something much grander than he can ever think of. And that’s all I’m going to say. You must play this game as bind as possible, and play at least To the Moon too before playing this game. As a matter of fact, play everything in the To the Moon series of games. They are not long at all and are some of the most gratifying and emotional games you will ever play.
The reason why I keep hyping this game up is simply because of how much it can accomplish for being such a simplistic looking game. All the layers (heh) that goes into a game, Impostor Factory excels in. Literally everything a game can do, it does SO well. Like art direction? The game uses a mix of beautiful hand drawn artwork and pixel artwork to convey a world and story that the player can easily identify and understand with no effort whatsoever. Music? All of the games in the series are known for its soothing and somber uses of strings and percussion, each one nailing the feel that it goes for, whether it be sadness, cheery, playful, humorous, and the list goes on and on. Dialogue and characters? For a game that has no voice acting, models, or motion capturing, you would think that a game formatted like Impostor Factory wouldn’t deliver in this, right? WRONG. Much like the other games, Impostor Factory absolutely nails everyone of its characters and dialogue. Everyone is written so well, and their sprite work is animated so well, where you can absolutely understand where each character stands emotionally in each scene, and how to perceive it in your mind as you read it. I feel like this easily is their best work when it comes to its sprite animations too, and since this is the latest game in the series, its no surprise that something this effective is present. I can list more, but I can’t explain in words how well everything mixes well. This game doesn’t get carried by one aspect and tries to undermine others. It’s all a well packaged story that can only be shown and not explained.
Impostor Factory continues to show how well visual novel games can be, how well pixel art games can still be as emotional and have the same quality as the biggest studios, and will absolutely tug at your heartstrings from start to finish. Please go play this game, but not before the other games in the series. If you’ve never played any of them, and are curious in them, I can promise that you will not be disappointed. At all.