Harmony: The Fall of Reverie Review

Harmony: The Fall of Reverie
Developed by: DON’T NOD
Published by: DON’T NOD
Platforms: PC and Switch (June 8), PS5 and XBOX Series X|S (June 22nd)
MSRP: unavailable at time of review

A well-made game like Harmony: The Fall of Reverie walks a dangerous tightrope. On one side, the time and care put into a game can make players instantly fall in love with its plot, characters, visuals, and narrative design. On the other, the unfortunate cracks (as we’ve seen with other titles this year) become glaringly obvious in a well-made game where they might be forgiven in jankier ones. The level of quality is high, but so are the standards. Unfortunately, while Harmony: The Fall of Reverie is a gorgeous, finely tuned visual novel with an affecting story and clear care put into every inch of the game, dissonant mechanics and sometimes confusing narrative choices are that more glaring. The result is, frustratingly, an excellent game dragged down by some of the same things that make it so excellent.

Polly returns to her childhood home after a few years abroad to look for her mother Ursula, who’s vanished without a trace. Finding only a strange necklace, Polly puts it on only to be transported to Reverie, a place where representations of humanity’s drives and underlying desires called Aspirations live and influence the human world of Brittle. Upon her arrival in Reverie, Polly takes up the role of Harmony, an oracle who can flip between worlds at will and see a little ways into the future. Harmony is meant to stabilize Reverie, leading it forward through a new cycle and aiding both worlds. As both the search for Ursula and Polly’s duties as Harmony continue, Polly finds her family drawn into an interlocking web of conspiracies surrounding old friends, enemies, and a sinister corporation called Mono Konzern. The time to choose the next cycle is at hand, but Polly must navigate both worlds to ensure that neither falls to chaos.

Harmony: The Fall of Reverie takes the form of a visual novel with a decision tree. In the story segments, you play Polly/Harmony as she learns about Reverie and bands together with family and friends to take the island and Reverie back from the evil corporation of Mono Konzern. In between story segments, you choose different paths through the Augural, a decision map that shows you potential consequences for your choices in a limited view. Navigating the Augural unlocks more choices, showing you the results of immediate decisions while offering hints for future ones. Decisions on the Augural also give out egregore crystals, a kind of currency that strengthens your connections with the various Aspirations, allowing you to choose the direction Harmony (and by extension Brittle) eventually take. It’s sort of like a narrative board game— you make decisions, move along the map, collect your crystals, and manage your relationship meter with the Aspirations. This leads to larger act-defining choices based on which of the Aspirations you support, and eventually the final choice of how to remake Reverie and save Brittle.

Harmony is gorgeous. The visual novel scenes are fully animated, with characters actually speaking their (fully voiced) lines. Reverie is a suitably bizarre landscape of mazes, floating houses, and in one case a motel that looks like a neon collage, while the island the characters call home is equally as vibrant, if a little more mundane. The cast is on point, with each voice actor bringing their A game, and absolutely no one sounds generic or phoned-in. Each character is unique, the various demesenes of Reverie are distinct and match the personalities of the Aspirations, and you get a greater sense of the world just by playing. There’s also an in-game codex that fills in the more information you get, informing you of history and backstory without info-dumping on you.

Your first-ever node. I didn’t want to spoil too much

The main interface of the game is similarly gorgeous. The Augural is set against a background the color of the night sky, with blue-violet nodes and any pathways and highlights laid out in gold. When you mouse over them, the choices light up, connecting past nodes to future nodes, and even giving you information on what choices are available. It’s an absolute joy to navigate, and it’s useful to see what consequences your choices will have. Want to plan out a path through the act for your desired outcome? You can scroll up and down the Augural and figure out what you want. Similarly, the relationships with the Aspirations are tied to how many crystals you collect, and how many of their decisions you enact. It’s an easy visual reference, even if the nature of the decisions does take some left turns now and then.

The problem with this approach is that you’re fighting the mechanics even as they’re supposed to help you make more informed decisions. Choices aren’t always telegraphed, and it’s unclear which direction you’re headed at times. It’s also sometimes not immediately clear which choices are blocked off, with some choices becoming “inevitable” nodes that you’re forced to play when you get to them, and some pathways looking like they’re multiple choices leading to multiple outcomes, only to lock you into specific outcomes instead. While there are some novel uses of the choice-based approach (one act sees you navigate an Augural map specifically mirroring Polly’s mental state at the time), it’s difficult to figure out somtimes which choices lead where. One map in particular had me following what I thought was a pathway to go with Truth and Chaos’s option for an act, only to end the act with Power instead and no idea how I got there. Similarly, the field of vision leads to issues figuring out where a choice will lead— A choice can arc off into the distance, but once you move your mouse, the links between choices will disappear, leaving you to figure out where it led on its own.

This also leads to an odd way of playing, where you spend more time planning out your choices, managing your crystals, and checking your route through the map than actually paying attention to the story. After all, the individual choices have no weight, just the outcome. It almost makes more sense for there to be a little more ambiguity in the augural, a little more uncertainty about the choices being made. Otherwise, the loop becomes just clicking nodes and collecting crystals, sacrificing investment in the plot for route planning.

Tied to this, (and unusual for a visual novel) there’s also no particular emphasis on playing the game multiple times. Your save file ends at the last choices you make unless you want to start over again, opening phases and all. It’d be a lot better if, like many others in the genre, you were able to fast-forward through the parts you’d already seen, or go through a chapter select after playing the game through once. In a game about seeing potential futures, it seems like an oversight to not go through multiple times and find out more about the plot without going through the process of a new game.

Which is a shame, because this is a great visual novel, one with a lovely story, engaging characters, excellent art direction, and one especially spoilery use of mechanics that’s absolutely brilliant. It’s imaginative, the node map is novel and well designed, and I would love nothing more than to recommend this game without caveats.

The longer I spent with Harmony, though, the more fragile it all seemed.

The Good
- Beautiful graphics
- Fully-voiced and animated visuals
- Distinct visual style
- Novel and intriguing choice mechanic

The Bad
- Route-based choice system means you spend more time plotting routes than caring about story
- No real encouragement to play the game more than once
- Occasional confusing pathways mean choices aren’t telegraphed even when they should be.

Final Score:

An excellent game with one glaring flaw, but an excellent game nonetheless

Foretales Review

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Foretales
Release Date: September 15, 2022
Developer: Alkemi
Publisher: Dear Villagers
Platform: PC, Nintendo Switch
MSRP: TBD

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Sometimes, the right things come together in the right way, and it can be an utter delight.

Foretales is a careful balancing act— it’s a dark fantasy story about an apocalyptic disaster, but it handles itself with humor and some genuine love of its characters and setting. It’s got an action economy, but things never feel rushed or weirdly paced (well, most of the time, we’ll get to that). It has a morality system, but one that never feels like it’s leaning too far on one side or the other, or punishing you for whatever choice you take. And, most notably for a card battler, it has a ton of diplomatic options for most situations, allowing you to preserve the cards in your hand while spending a number of resources to circumvent the fights and usually gaining a decent reward out of it all.

It’s light and fun without being shallow, deep without being dense or obtuse, and with a story and characters that add a ton of personality to the whole thing (as well as the snarky all-seeing narrator), it blends dark fantasy and lighthearted adventure, and overall, apart from some annoying quality of life issues, it’s a fantastic take on both deckbuilders and adventure games alike.

Volepain the Shoebill and Leo the Tiger are hired by a mysterious leper to steal a musical instrument from a noblewoman. The heist goes cleanly enough, but upon touching the lyre, Volepain is struck with horrifying visions of things yet to come, all leading towards some kind of apocalypse. It falls to Volepain and Leo to save the world, all while staying one step ahead of the strange calamities, dangerous cultists, and a variety of murderous ne’er do wells, pirates, and nobles all out for their blood. But maybe, with Volepain’s visions, the duo and the numerous thieves and lunatics they tend to drag along in their wake have a fighting chance at saving the day. If not, well, at least it’s an adventure, right?

Foretales plays out as a kind of narrative card game. Each chapter, you pick a team of one to three heroes to build your deck, based on the strengths and weaknesses you think you’ll need. turn, you play cards at one of the locations on the board. Based on the card and the location, a number of things happen, such as gaining temporary allies, advancing story events, gaining items, or simply just gaining one of the resources you can also spend (money, fame, grim, and food) to play further down the line. Battles are also decided by cards, as you can either spend resources and items to get rid of the enemies you encounter, or simply use your cards to buff each character before the fight. Sometimes, battles can even be stopped completely by using the right item or the right card, convincing the enemy to end the encounter. As you go further on, you choose each chapter of the story from a map, trying to stay one step ahead of each calamity in your path, growing ever closer to the impending end of existence…

Those looking for a deckbuilding card game will be somewhat disappointed. Foretales is more an RPG and adventure game with cards. That isn’t to say there isn’t an intense level of strategy involved, with cards needing to be played at the right circumstances and different decks working with different abilities. One character might have a deck better themed around navigating the oceans, and one might be better if you’re trying to get criminals on your side. The decks can even grow depending on whether or not you complete certain story events, adding to the card pool and number of options. It’s a wonderful way of underscoring each character, as well, with the decks mirroring aspects of their personality and the way they approach a problem.

While from its setup it looks simple, figuring out the interactions between your characters and the world around them, or figuring out what resources best solve a problem, opens up a wealth of depth and complexity. Bandits, for example, will respect you more if you intimidate them than if you try to push on your fame. Some cultists can’t be talked to and simply have to be attacked. All of this gives the gameplay loop real weight behind its decisions. The combat system has a “morale” mechanic built in that means (well, in most cases, since zombies don’t stop for morale) if you can end a fight the right way (take out high value opponents, bribe the right guard, toss rum at the pirates) then you get fame for leaving your enemies alive. Some cards can end story events immediately, others can gain you a lot of goods when played in the right area, and overall, it’s a careful balancing act.

Balancing is the name of the game, too. For a game that has a lot of dark moments— there’s an apocalypse, slavery, a cult, massacres, and a rampaging pestilent horde— it balances this with a lot of humor. Volepain and his companions fire lines back and forth in a way that never feels quippy, the narrator begs and pleads with the player to pick the nonviolent options in combat, and saving one of your friends from certain execution involves a rather hilarious series of punchlines. It does a lot to make things feel like Foretales is an adventure with friends, one with humor and horror in equal measure. Most encounters can be won, the lightheartedness doesn’t overwhelm the grim portions and vice versa, and it is genuinely (and I know people hate me using this word, but they’re all jerks anyway) fun to spend time in this world. Even when I found myself getting frustrated at a specific point, I would always go back and try a new way, or play a little more conservatively so I wasn’t getting rid of resources, or maybe burn less cards. Foretales made me think, and I love it when a game takes a more thoughtful approach, rather than just flinging cards and numbers at a wall.

Atmosphere is also a big part of that. The lighting, music, and even the background in Foretales change based on where you are, from the hushed chants and darkened lighting of the library, to the almost Monkey Island-esque riff and sunlight reflecting on water of the nautical portions, everything is a delight for the senses. The art’s well-drawn, the music gets stuck in your head after a while, and the narrator’s occasional asides only help underscore it all. The hand-drawn sketches in between each major act similarly help with the theme, making you feel like you’re taking part in some grand animated movie or premium series. It’s a deeply impressive game overall.

But there is one thing that brings it down a little. Foretales is an adventure game, and inherited one of its sins: Logic. Puzzles can be hard to figure out, and sometimes what the story wants to advance can be a little obtuse. While there’s extensive help in the form of hints and being able to talk your way through problems, it doesn’t help that if you don’t have the right card at the right time, you can spend an entire scene wandering around and playing cards until you either run out of cards, resources, or chances to rest, which means a game over in short order. It can get exhausting, as beautiful as the game is, when there’s just that one thing you can’t seem to do.

This shouldn’t dissuade you, though. While the moon-logic puzzles can get annoying and sometimes the game will get pulled into an unwinnable state, it just incentivizes you to play a little closer and a little more conservatively. It’s a gorgeous, fun, and unique take on card battlers that promises hours of play and replay, and a world you’ll want to revisit even after your first journey.

The Good:
- Beautiful art
- An interesting take on card-based gameplay and adventure games
- Excellent economy and game balance
- A wonderful sense of humor
- Top-notch writing

The Bad:
- Sometimes random chance and resource management means getting stuck
- Moon-logic puzzles are out in force in this one

Final Score:

Annoying puzzles and some randomness might be a cloud, but the game is otherwise sunny