Finding Miranda

Finding Miranda (FM) is the third adult game set in the Elsaverse. It was publicly released in English on December 10, 2016 in HTML format, and officially ported to Ren'Py in 2021, to be included in the Elsaverse Omnibus Vol.1 bundle released on August 5, 2021. FM story is intertwined with Redemption for Jessika (2016) events, and it takes place simultaneously to Darkness Falls (2018-2019) first season and the AAA (2018) novella, although it isn't directly related with this last title.

During the development process, and after deciding FM would be the third game of the saga, Tlaero looked for fan's input again, this time on whether people would prefer some kind of branching that would enhance replayability, thus risking having a shorter overall story with a big chunk of common content that would need to be repeated in different playthroughs, or a longer but more linear structure, where players would get the same overall content but with less choices, thus limiting "player freedom" and reducing the game's replayability value. Users from the Sharks's Lagoon forum went broadly for a branching structure, and that was the option finally implemented.

In FM, Morland is unveiled as the main villain in the Elsaverse, and Chloe changes definitely her role in the overarching story, going from villain to victim and hero.

Premise
The player becomes Lucas, a brilliant coder with a traumatic love past who is trying to deny his feelings for Miranda, his attractive and eccentric co-worker. As he is encouraged to try to overcome his trauma by starting a relationship with her, Lucas will learn that Miranda herself is going through her own personal drama, while being involved in an incredible fight against evil in which, much to his surprise, he was already tangentially involved.

Canon Path Summary
Finding Miranda starts with a flashback scene in which Xara, the mysterious blind woman already introduced in previous games, visits Miranda to ask her what she thinks the evil plans of her mysterious enemy are. With just a few inputs from Xara, Miranda quickly tells her that this enemy will try to cause a riot at Jessica's concert to get her depressed, and Xara rushes off to try to warn the singer; from Redemption for Jessika, it's known that she wasn't exactly successful on that mission.

The game then jumps to the introduction of Lucas as player's character. He is a brilliant coder who, a couple of years ago, suffered a severe blow which nearly drove him to both mental and financial misery, as he lost his loved one and also his promising job in the process. Players are presented with 3 consecutive choices that will shape Lucas character out: storywise, they can choose whether that blow was the death of his wife, Karen, or her infidelity. His friend Ismael, who helped him to get through the hardest times, is pushing Lucas to drop his current lifestyle and start a relationship with the eccentric Miranda, their attractive co-worker.

After a tense work meeting, in which a belittled Miranda exposes a critical security breach in the company's new code, she pushes Lucas to ask her out, as she also feels attracted to him. During that dinner date, Miranda comments that she's unnaturally good at solving problems and, after Lucas tells her what happened with Karen, she confesses her own traumatic secret: she suffered an accident that put her in a coma for more than a year and, several months after waking up, she's still struggling with the physical and mental consequences. She then offers to help Lucas to get closure. If Lucas is a widower, Miranda phones Elsa, who, thanks to her Dream Master skills, makes Karen appear in Lucas' dreams so that they could say goodbye to each other. If he's divorced, Miranda asks him for some data about Karen to try to know how life's going for his ex; but that same night Karen shows up at Lucas' apartment asking him to take her back: Lucas realizes that he's in a much better position than his cheater wife and throws her out. Either way, he ends the night feeling way better than he has felt in a long time, and ready to start a proper relationship with Miranda.

The next day, the same Friday when the game Redemption for Jessika starts, Lucas and Miranda work together to fix the security breach she detected, and then go to have lunch together. While they are chatting, Xara shows up to ask for Miranda's advice again, as her mole in her enemy's organization has shared some info with her that she doesn't quite understand. Lucas observes dumbfolded that cryptic exchange, which is cut short due to a strange incident: a man with a gun threatens a woman who was sitting in the foodcourt near them. Calmly, the blind Xara is able to convince the armed guy not to shoot, and the police tackle him down.

During the weekend, Lucas and Miranda meet again for another date. There are four mutually exclusive dates for the player to pick from, with each date unveiling a different aspect about Miranda's character and the overarching story. Either way, by the end of the weekend they are officially a romantic couple, and on Monday they are given a week off as a reward for their good job fixing the security breach. Miranda takes Lucas to "El Rey Casino", where they meet the casino's owner, Morland Reyes, a dark character who is introduced as the father of Miranda's best friend in high school. They seem to have quite a bitter relationship now, with Miranda using the money she ordinary wins at his casino to help people he hurts in his business. The next day, Miranda asks Lucas to meet her at Elysian Books, where Lucas is told to keep Xara company while Elsa and Miranda talk about him. That's how Lucas learns that Xara's enemy is actually Morland, and he offers himself to help Xara with her lacking social skills. Meanwhile, Marc shows up at the bookstore and, after meeting him, Miranda decides to actively help Xara out, despite being initially against it. She then devises a plan for the evening: she'll go with Lucas to a rock concert so that they can prevent Chloe from hurting Marc and Jessica.

However, when Miranda and Lucas arrive at El Cuerpo and he tells the bouncer what's going on, Vince changes their plans and, as soon as Marc and Jessica step out of the club, he orders Lucas to covertly escort them, while he helps Miranda to incercept Chloe. Lucas does as he is told and then, on Wednesday evening, he visits Miranda, as he hasn't heard from her in the whole day. That's how Lucas learns that his new girlfriend has actually kidnapped Chloe, and keeps her sedated at home. Worried for Miranda's sanity, Lucas stays with her but makes her promise him to talk to Chloe in the morning and free her. Vissibly distraught, Miranda agrees, and then confesses to him that she hasn't sleep at all since she woke up from her coma almost a year ago, and seriously needs his help to keep herself sane.

But, despite all what they've talked during the evening, when Chloe wakes up on Thursday morning Miranda agressively threatens her with a sword, and Lucas is presented with the whole background situation. It turns out that Chloe is Miranda's high school best friend, and Morland's daughter; but she's also the one who caused the accident that put Miranda in a coma, while doing a job for his father. As Morland can foresee the future consequences of his acts, he must had known that Miranda would be a collateral victim, and she just doesn't believe that Chloe didn't knew that too. Chloe denies her accusation, claiming that she wouldn't have done it, had she known her friend would be hurt. She also adds that her father abuses her everytime she fails on a mission: after having failed on Tuesday night due to Miranda's intervention, she really fears this could be the end for her, and seems willing to accept Miranda killing her with the sword, if that helps her old friend to feel a bit better. Shocked, Lucas also learns that Morland was the mastermind behind his own trauma, as Karen was actually one of his minions: he used her to mess Lucas up so that his former company would fire him, thus allowing Morland to purchase that company some time later at a much lower price.

After all those revelations, Lucas asks Miranda to let Chloe go, which she eventually does. Chloe runs away, and the couple spend the rest of the day trying to forget everything that has happened to them in the last hours. Then, late in the evening, they watch a news report on the terrorist attack frustrated by Jessica that afternoon, and Miranda quickly phones Xara to ask her if Morland was responsible of it. When she hears the answer, Miranda tells Xara that she'll be joining her group on a permanent basis. Finally, in the post-credits scene, it's revealed that Chloe was actually Xara's mole in Morland's organization, but she has been severely punished for this last failure and won't be able to keep helping her.

Alternative Dates
On Friday, players can choose between four weekend dates with Miranda, all of them being mutually exclusive. On each date, Miranda unveils a different aspect about herself, and in one of them players will also learn a bit more of the overarching story. Dates also offer different details about Lucas' own character, and each one ends with a different sex scene.


 * Icy: Lucas can take Serena to an ice rink managed by a friend of him, a guy who wanted to be Lucas' teammate in their high school ice-hockey squad, but wasn't accepted due to his homosexuality. While learning how to skate, Miranda tells Lucas that, despite her current sexy looks, in high school she was an unattractive and unpopular girl, and had only one real friend.


 * Moto: Lucas can suggest Serena to go on a motorbike route up to the mountains surrounding Sangrive, to a hotspring he used to go with his mother when he was a child. On the road to the mountains, Miranda drives her bike in a suicidal way, and Lucas asks her if she really want to die, to what Miranda replies that sometimes she wouldn't mind it. She then talks a bit more about the constant pain she still suffers after her coma, and how she's afraid of eventually losing her sanity.


 * Cross: Being an amateur motocross pilot, Lucas can invite Miranda and their colleague Ismael to a race he takes part in. While waiting for his heath to start, Miranda remarks that she has learnt a lot about mechanics because she has a lot of spare time, as she doesn't sleep; her friends take it as a joke, but she is indeed saying the truth. It's also hinted that Takadas sisters, Lucas rivals in the race, have some kind of superpower.


 * Low-Key: If Lucas decides to just buy some pastries and visit Miranda on Saturday morning, he finds out that she lives in an refitted warehouse and seems to occupy her spare time with an endless list of activities, including martial arts, which Lucas practiced too, back in his college days. He also overhears a phone conversation with Xara in which Miranda explains why is so important to protect Marc in order to help Jessica: she may trust him more than her other friends, despite them also being immune, as she wouldn't link him with the riot. It's important to note that this conversation takes place several hours before Marc actually meets Jessica at the bar on Redemption for Jessika canon path, showing again that Miranda's ability to solve problems can be seen almost as a foreshadowing skill.

Non-Canon Path
In Finding Miranda there are only a couple of bad endings, and none of them could be really considered a non-canon path. The closest one to a non-canon path is only available in the divorced routes, when Karen shows up at Lucas' apartment: if the player decides to kiss her and take her back, they make love right away, but Karen reveals her true colors at the end of the scene, confessing that she has just poisoned Lucas; it's fair to assume that Lucas actually dies. The other bad ending is triggered when Lucas discovers that Miranda has kidnapped Chloe: if the player refuses to get involved and storms out, Miranda just leaves Sangrive and Lucas will never see her again.

Achievements
In Finding Miranda, players can get up to 12 different achievements. They are designed to maximize replayability, according to the game's structure, and reward completionism. A full playthrough, plus at least 4 different partial playthroughs until Monday scenes, and 1 short deviation from them to explore Karen's bad ending, are needed to get them all.


 * "Low Key": Choose the simple date with Miranda.
 * "Icy": Choose the date on the ice rink.
 * "Moto": Choose the date of the motorbike ride.
 * "Cross": Choose the date of the motocross race.
 * "Timid Widower": Get to the Monday scenes after playing as a widower who hasn't had any relationship after Karen's death.
 * "Aggressive Widower": Get to the Monday scenes after playing as a widower who has had many casual flings after Karen's death.
 * "Cheating made me timid": Get to the Monday scenes after playing as a man who hasn't had any relationship after getting divorced.
 * "Cheating made me aggressive": Get to the Monday scenes after playing as a man who has had many casual flings after getting divorced.
 * "Reconciliation with Karen": Accept Karen's proposal (cheating routes).
 * "I'm in": Reach the game's canon ending.
 * "Back door": Convince Miranda to try anal sex.
 * "Multisexual": Watch all of the sex scenes in the game.

Getting all of the achievements unlocks a bonus scene.

Post-credits Scene
Finding Miranda post-credits scene takes place shortly after the end of the game, probably just one or two days later. Miranda is at her home at night, in a lot of pain, when she is surprised by Crow, Morland's weird-looking bodyguard. Crow offers her to work for Morland in exchange for a powerful sedative that might put Miranda to sleep at last; when she refuses, Crow modifies her offer: they will give her the sedative but also Chloe, so that Miranda could do with her anything she wants, as she keeps failing her missions and disappointing her father. Miranda seems to hesitate. Then the scene changes and Chloe is shown completely alone in a small room (the same one in which the non-canon ending of Redemption for Jessika takes place), typing something on a laptop with her left hand, as she seems unable to use her right arm due to the new punishment she has suffered. Under the nickname of "Yellow Fever", Xara's mole in Morland's organization, Chloe is sending Xara a message saying that she will not be able to help her anymore, because Morland no longer trusts her.

Bonus Scene
Unlike previous games, the bonus scene in Finding Miranda, that players can unlock by completing all 12 achievements, is not explicitly sexual. In this scene, Chloe recalls a conversation she had with Miranda a few days before her eighteenth birthday, and in which she confessed to her friend that, after having scared her boyfriend Paul away, Morland had ordered her to lose her virginity on her birthday, with one of his potential business partners. A then unattractive Miranda suggested that Chloe's first sexual experience could be with her, as she was also inexperienced, and the scene ends when the two teenagers were about to kiss each other.

Sex Scenes
Sex scenes in Finding Miranda are explosive, passionate and fulfilling, as is to be expected from two sexually experienced adults who felt physically attracted to each other since long before becoming a couple, and who are just releasing all that pent-up desire in their first encounters.

Finding Miranda has no gallery of scenes, so there's no way of replaying those sex scenes outside the actual game.

Design and Gameplay
Finding Miranda is, probably, the most complex game in the Elsaverse, in terms of design and gameplay. Some questionable designing choices were made while looking for an almost impossible balance between replayability, player agency, storytelling and playing challenge, thus leading to a hard and confusing yet almost inconsequential gameplay mechanism.

Structure and Paths
From a designing point of view, Finding Miranda can be divided into two different parts. The first one covers the initial steps of Lucas' relationship with Miranda (from Thursday to Monday, in the story), and uses a "sorting hat" structure, in which some events depend on the path chosen by players at the start of the game. In Lucas' introductory scene, players get to choose whether he's a widower or a divorced man; then, they have to choose whether the traumatic experience that changed his marital status made him totally shy with women or turned him into a real Casanova who enjoys uncomitted flings and one-night stands; finally, players need to decide whether Lucas is happy with his current lifestyle or is starting to regret his choices. This complex setting translates into eight possible characterizations for Lucas (divorced-timid-comfortable; divorced-timid-regretful; divorced-aggressive-comfortable; divorced-aggressive-regretful; widower-timid-comfortable; widower-timid-regretful; widower-aggressive-comfortable; and widower-aggressive-regretful). However, in order to simplify things a bit, this characterization system actually works at two different levels:


 * The Marital status axis creates two different world realities, one with Karen still alive, and another one without Karen, which have a slight impact on the story. For once, some conversations obviously change to take this info into account, but the main effect is seen on Friday night, after Lucas' first date with Miranda: if he's a widower, he gets to see Karen again in his dreams, thanks to Elsa, and his late wife is depicted as a loving partner (Chloe will say at the end that Karen fell in love for him for real, and refused to do her assigned job, thus leading Morland to order her execution); if he's divorced, his ex-wife shows up and literally try to kill him, as she's still working for Morland.
 * The Lifestyle matrix is used as the gameplay key element, with players needing to tune Lucas' answers to their defined characterization: timid-comfortable; timid-regretful; aggressive-comfortable; and aggressive-regretful. However, the actual implementation is far from easy and sometimes even unintuitive, and the achievements system only adds to the confusion. More on this topic can be found on the next segment, Gameplay.

This first part of the game is culminated with the four mutually exclusive weekend dates. Ideally, in order to maximize the game's replayability value, players are expected to go on a different date on each one of the four playthroughs needed to get all of the achievements; in fact, those achievements are unlocked just after finishing this first part of the game, by going to work on Monday.

Then, once Lucas and Miranda become officially a couple, the second part of the game is totally linear, as the story unfolds in the same way no matter how the player initially chose Lucas to be. There's no other path than canon, and the only relevant choice players can make in this last part of the game, storywise, is to step out of it after knowing Miranda has kidnapped Chloe, getting a bad ending as a result.

Lastly, the sexual scene in the casino spa is worth a special mention: it's designed as a branching scene that players can't fully explore in one single playthrough. The original idea was, again, adding more value to replays, as each new playthrough could be used to get some still unseen parts of that scene; however, preventing players from viewing an erotic scene in its full length does not seem a fortunate decision for an adult game.

Gameplay
From a gameplay point of view, Finding Miranda represents a great change from previous titles. Although the basic elements are still the same (conversational choices that adds relationship points to a scoreboard), checkpoints are only used to show or hide the sex scenes and, except for a couple of bad endings after specific choices, all players can get the game's canon ending no matter their performance. This way, the story takes precedence over the traditional gaming elements, in a perspective shift that will become the norm in later games. However, this doesn't mean that gameplay is easier in FM: quite the opposite, as it can be argued that this game is probably the hardest one in the saga, scoring-wise.

In Finding Miranda, players are usually presented with just two alternative answers, and not three like in previous games. Those answers are aligned with one of the four possible positions on the "Lifestyle matrix": sometimes the player needs to choose between a timid or an aggressive option, and sometimes between a comfortable or a regretful answer. And this is where difficulties appear: wording is not always as precise as it should be to identify the nuances that place the options in the timid/aggressive dicotomy or in the comfortable/regretful one, and sometimes it's hard even to tell apart a timid response from an aggressive one, in the context of the game. This makes quite difficult on certain occasions to decide which answer is a better fit with the current Lucas' characterization. In addition, the fact that the achievements differentiate between widower and divorced paths, but only between timid and aggressive attitude (forgetting the comfortable or regretful side) makes easier for the player to lose perspective on what to answer. At least, both player's score and Lucas' initial characterization are always displayed on screen.

However, this confusing scoring system disappear in the second part of the game, once he overcomes his trauma. From that point on, supportive answers are the ones that increase the score. But the bulk of the available points in this second part can be gotten on Monday's casino scene, where Lucas has to humour Miranda by playing right his "James Bond" role in the spy game she comes up with. This role-playing mechanism, which adds some variety to the usual scoring system, is also used in one of the weekend dates.

In the original HTML game, certain scenes also include clickable areas or hotspots, sometimes as an alternative option to the usual choice menu for answers. When those hotspots are available, the scene shows a yellow frame, and player can spot them by moving the mouse cursor around the screen, as a tooltip will become visible when hovering that clickable area. Hotspots can add points to the player's score, but the main use for them is to help Lucas pick the weekend date, in a mini-game in which he goes around his apartment looking for ideas for a date. This point&click gameplay element adds a little more complexity to the game. However, in the 2021 edition made with Ren'Py engine, these clickable options disappear and become menu choices like regular answers, this slightly simplifying the gameplay.

Technical Aspects
The game was originally created with Tlaero's own software, "Adventure Creator", and released in HTML format in 2016. Pictures could be displayed in 3 different sizes, according to player's preferences, and rollback was not allowed. Ren'Py version (2021) incorporates this engine's usual mechanisms, like rollback (specially welcome in this game) and unlimited save slots (the original HTML version only included 3 save slots plus a quick save slot).

Visually, the screen is divided into three areas. Over a black background, the exposition text and dialogues appear in a classic narrative prose style, above the pics. Images take the screen's centre, while the lower part of the screen is reserved for player's choices.

The game has no sounds at all.