To the Moon 2 prequel is about a boy and a bird

Freebird Games has announced a sequel to its short but narratively excellent indie game To the Moon.

Well, it's not a sequel exactly. It's more of a halfway point between To the Moon and the next game even though the developer teased it as To the Moon 2, promising fans on Facebook with "more gunfights, more explosions, more zombievas."To the Moon 2.

The joke image that Freebird posted contains a mirror image of a URL that leads to this page for A Bird Story, the official title of the game.

Like To the Moon, it's a "simple, surreal short" — this time about a boy and a bird with a broken wing. It doesn't have any dialogue.

"It might be good to think of it more as a standalone game/story though since all the characters are new (all two of them, counting the bird)," creator Kan Gao told Kotaku in an email. "I'm also a bit afraid that people'd think less of it since it's kind of a prequel to the second 'full episode.' It's its own story, and although it's just about 30 minutes or so, I think of it as just as important as the 2nd ep."

To the Moon lasted much longer, comparatively, at 4-5 hours.

A Bird Story features a series of panorama paintings by Joakim Olofsson (pictured). It's due out mid-year 2013.

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