Recollections can snowball generally. One reminiscence unlocks one other one, and earlier than lengthy you’re questioning how you could possibly have forgotten all of it. It’s one thing we get after we meet up with previous pals: we every bear in mind completely different components of the scene, filling within the gaps, till it feels as crisp and clear as watching on IMAX.
If this can be a phenomenon, then Dordogne makes use of it as its basis. It’s a few forty-something grownup, Michelle, who has inherited her Grandma Nora’s home in rural France. However Nora and Michelle have been estranged for many years, as Michelle’s father and Nora had a raging argument and haven’t gone again to speaking since. However with the keys to the cottage in Michelle’s arms, she returns to see what’s there, and that reminiscence snowball begins rolling.
To be truthful to Michelle, she does have some amnesia too. There’s hints of a trauma that triggered her lack of reminiscence, together with a summer season vacation that she spent together with her Grandmother. It’s this summer season vacation that performs out in flashback, one week at a time, as you get to play as ‘Mimi’, the youthful model of Michelle. The recollections convey you to the purpose the place the trauma and estrangement coincided, bringing you full circle to the fashionable day.
Dordogne is painstakingly hand-painted in watercolours, which manages the twin feat of being distinctive, and making use of a nostalgic wash on all the things. The trendy day sections in Dordogne are extra glum, with a gray rinse to the occasions, whereas the moments up to now make superb use of the complete palette. The watercolour artwork fashion additionally helps with the gameplay. Stuff you don’t want to have a look at are pastel and undefined; whereas all the things it’s best to work together with has a skinny define and is extra outlined.
We caught our hand up quick to overview Dordogne, and it’s all right down to that artwork fashion. Frankly, it’s attractive, and the Ghibli-esque characters toddling across the surroundings are simply as properly realised and animated. A lot care has gone into the visuals of Dordogne, and so they make it really feel like an artefact that you simply’ve discovered at the back of the closet, somewhat than a contemporary recreation. It’s beautiful.
As is the case with quite a lot of narrative adventures, Dordogne wrestles with how a lot gameplay to offer the participant. It veers from talky, explorative sections to extra minigamey sequences, utilizing the controller to emulate the actions of constructing lunch, turning locks in doorways, and fixing kayaks. These sections by no means discovered a candy spot: we by no means felt like we have been free to tinker with objects absolutely, as giant-sized prompts appeared on the display screen telling us precisely what we have been meant to do. We have been by no means caught, positive, however we felt like somebody was behind us, manipulating our arms and pushing our head to look the place it needed us to look.
Motion across the environments of Dordogne feels a bit like these early Resident Evil video games, which is a comparability we didn’t count on to make. Two completely different mansions, two very completely different moods. It’s not fairly as irritating as these video games, however it’s the identical fastened, elevated scenes with laboured motion round them. We bought caught behind tables and fumbled our manner slowly by environments that needed to hem us in to explicit spots. Dordogne can by no means make navigation as snug and blissful because the watercolours themselves, which is an actual disgrace. We needed to discover – the work positively demanded it – however it often felt like we have been bumping round from blockage to blockage.
Dordogne has a style for collectibles. Early within the recreation, Mimi features a scrapbook, and it acts as many issues: a reminder of what you ought to be doing; a spot for all of the stuff you discover on the earth; and a possibility for free-form expression, as you should utilize all of the stickers, photographs and sounds you acquire to create pages with poems on them, recalling your vacation. The free-expression stuff specifically is sensible. We’d have favored barely larger pages than have been on supply, in order that we may really match stuff on it, however there’s one thing very candy and endearing about having the ability to assemble your individual collages.
The draw back is that amassing the stickers and photographs is extra laborious than it actually ought to have been. Dordogne performs out in a sequence of weeks in largely the identical place: Grandma Nora’s cottage. If you wish to acquire all the things the sport has to supply, you have to to go to all ten rooms of the home, the grounds of the home, and maybe the odd satellite tv for pc location – you get to go to caves and marketplaces – every week of the sport, each up to now and the long run. Meaning visiting the identical bedrooms and residing rooms dozens of instances, treading previous floor on the off-chance {that a} paper, phrase, cassette tape or different goodie is ready for you. It’s a completionist’s nightmare: in the event you don’t do that sweep each, single time, then there’s a irritating hole within the scrapbook.
You don’t get to revisit these areas. Finishing the sport doesn’t open up chapters which you can return to. That is one canonical, linear expertise, which is sensible from a believability perspective, but in addition implies that the overwhelming majority of achievements – and a good quantity of narrative – may be bypassed, which by no means fairly feels proper.
We’re narked as a result of that story is properly value experiencing. The grumbly Mimi and the strict Nora quickly develop to understand one another, and there’s a plausible – if barely brief – arc to their characters. It does what it units out to do, which is make you are feeling a deep sense of loss, not for Nora essentially, however for the time that Mimi and Nora may have spent collectively, misplaced to a petty familial dispute. It’s that loss that chimed with us most, bringing on the tears.
The dialogue is extraordinarily robust, even when translated from its native French. Characters and exchanges are plausible. A late-game magic-realist second even lands properly when it may have been mawkish and inauthentic. It’s all dealt with so properly.
Dordogne is an imperfect package deal, then: a stupendous porcelain plate of a recreation that has cracks in it. The plate is exclusive sufficient to warrant buy (or a free spin on Recreation Move), however we surprise what it could have been like with extra gameplay care. A go on the controls, a sandpapering of the various obstacles to exploration, and a greater method to its collectibles would have performed wonders.
However time and time once more, Dordogne would whisk us away someplace stunning, and all could be forgiven. Typically you possibly can reside with cracks within the plate.
