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

Destiny's Sword - Early Access Look

Destiny’s Sword
Release Date: Early Access as of 9/28/2022
Developer: 2Dogs Games
Publisher: Bonus Stage
Platforms: PC
MSRP: TBD

THE FOLLOWING REVIEW IS FOR AN EARLY ACCESS GAME. IT DOES NOT REFLECT THE FINISHED PRODUCT, BUT REFLECTS THE PRODUCT AS IT WAS GIVEN TO US TO REVIEW.

I shouldn’t have to do this. In a perfect world, I wouldn’t have to. But we don’t live in a perfect world, and sometimes things like this happen:

Do not under any circumstances pick up Destiny’s Sword. Having received a free copy of the game, I feel like I was overcharged for the privilege. While there are some moments where the ambition of the premise shines through, it’s a severely broken game, so broken that I couldn’t even get an hour into it without the game soft-locking me within its opaque, typo-ridden purgatory. I’m sorry that I have to write this— I hate writing bad reviews, especially for games that seem relatively ambitious— but I need to remain true to my experiences.

Destiny’s Sword puts you in the commander’s chair of the Stellara, a vessel full of cadets thrust into the center of a three-way conflict on the planet Cypris. On one side, the Protectorate, a galactic government tasked with keeping the populace safe and mining the mineral known as Lucidium. On the other, the Consortium, a group of megacorporations who want Cypris and the Lucidium mining for their own purposes, brutally putting down any opposition from the local populace. In the midst of all this, a group of rebels tries to take back their planet from the Consortium and the Protectorate by any means necessary. You and your team will have to bring peace to Cypris and discover a solution to the complex political situation, whether that means violent “pacification,” or more gentle means. But the situation is more complicated than it seems, and good and evil are rarely as clear-cut as they first look.

Destiny’s Sword itself plays out as kind of a traditional visual novel. You navigate through the Stellara, click on text where appropriate, and make decisions when it comes to a branching choice. In between the main “episodes,” you can talk to your crew, tend to wounded in the medbay, check equipment, and do a variety of other tasks. The game claims an advanced personality and background system, where different facets of your squad members’ personalities offer them different kinds of interactions during combat and different ways you have to manage their emotional state, as well as a multilayered branching narrative.

Not much of this is true.

For one thing, the choices the game gives you are somewhat limited and opaque at that. There’s no way to tell if someone has an ability or who’s even making an ability check, so you just have to make a few random choices and hope the right thing happens. There’s not really a lot of direction or transparency, so the whole thing feels weightless, like the game is going to do whatever it wants and you just sit there and click choices to make it advance. While occasionally a skill bar will pop up, or a progress bar for specific tasks, it just seems like they’re there more to provide the idea of any risk than actual risk itself. After all, you have very little connection to what’s going on onscreen, even with the ability to occasionally make a choice to do something. At the end, a commander (and do not get me started on the fact that your character is referred to as “commander” and there’s also a guy who’s your commander and referred to as “Commander” and how confusing that is) or the ship’s AI tells you how you did, or gives you further mission objectives.

That disconnectedness also extends to the crew, those people you’re supposed to be managing the emotional states of. While the game is in early access and some bugs can be expected, there were times where they repeated conversations from the previous chapter, or just didn’t have much to say at all. I was astonished to find out five chapters into the game’s first episode that the guy I’d thought was squad leader was actually the team’s medic, that my team had medical capabilities that weren’t even listed, and that at least one of them hated me, despite no conversational indication we’d ever had anything but a neutral reaction. It also didn’t help that the game doesn’t even teach you half the dialogue system until the end of the first chapter, which means that you essentially don’t even know half the options you have. While the dialogue system does open up, it once again forces you into a series of weightless choices as various values like “TRUST +3” and “DISGUST -6” flash across the screen, seemingly meaning something while not really explaining anything.

Which connects into the larger opacity. When you have a game where choices matter, those choices have to feel like they matter to the player. They have to have weight, consideration, and be something other than a weighted coinflip between several choices you don’t even really know you’re making. When you’re supposed to care about the characters and story, it helps if those characters and that story are understandable quantities you can care about. Unfortunately, Destiny’s Sword doesn’t appear to be quite there yet. There’s too little information, the narrative tries to get you involved in the larger conflict but just feels disjointed, and while you can learn a little about your squad, there’s not a lot of information easily accessible to make you feel like you’re learning anything at all.

Speaking of things that aren’t easily accessible, for a game that’s supposedly “feature complete,” it’s upsettingly easy to get soft-locked. The first time it happened, I was stuck on the medbay screen waiting for an event to fire while it never did. The second time was a little more obvious, with the next chapter’s cinematic being played twice and then the story refusing to progress whatsoever despite having completed all the chapter tasks. This wouldn’t be so bad if the game didn’t autosave constantly, meaning that any soft-locked game has to be started over from the beginning. This also means (much like with the dialogue sections) that you see a lot of repeated content over and over again, hoping that this time, things will actually allow you to progress the story. This is only compounded by a large number of typos throughout the text, things that should be fixed by the time your steam page is boasting that it’s “feature complete” and has text by a New York Times bestselling author. “It’s Early Access” is an excuse that only gets one so far, and when you are claiming a game is “mostly done” on your Early Access page, that confers a certain responsibility. Destiny’s Sword shirks that responsibility.

It’s a shame, because the game’s fairly flashy and the art is excellent, using painted backgrounds and portraits that do tend to change as you talk to people. It’s kind of cool the first time you see the skill bars or progress bars, even if they tend to mean less and less the further you get into the game. Even if a game is sparse, that doesn’t mean it has to be shallow, and I wish a game with this much flash had much more substance and transparency and much less bugs and typos.

But I have to play the game I get, not the game I wanted. Maybe in the future Destiny’s Sword will be worth more of a look. But in the already impressive field of narrative games, and with early access titles that had much less of a pedigree and staff but came out much more finished, this one’s an unfortunate swing and a miss.

The Good:
- Intriguing systems where you manage the crew of your starship and take on away missions
- Fantastic artwork

The Bad
- Bugs mean you end up caught in loops of conversations
- The game can soft-lock you at random, forcing you to start from scratch due to autosaves
- Opaque systems mean choices might as well be random or a coin toss
- A lot of flash, but seemingly little substance

Final Score:

It’s so raw. It’s just so raw. Please make this game better.

I Was A Teenage Exocolonist Review

I Was A Teenage Exocolonist
Platform: PC, Playstation, Nintendo Switch
Developer: Northway Games
Publisher: Finji

Dear. God.

Dys, feeling very much like I did when I finished my first playthrough of Exocolonist

So for some background, normally I try to be a bit more formal in my approach to reviews. That ends this second. Upon receiving I Was A Teenage Exocolonist on Saturday, I have lost roughly two days to the game. I have played three of its twenty-seven possible paths, including the one where, well…it’s probably for the best that you discover that one on your own. It’s weird, and takes a couple of playthroughs, but it is beyond worth it. Between its addictive game loop, methods of drawing in real bonds, some bizarre story choices, and some absolutely gorgeous art and music, I Was A Teenage Exocolonist is the kind of game you can get lost in, right up there with both coming of age games like Growing Up and Chinese Parents (and to a lesser extent, Monster Loves You!), weird narrative experiments like The Yawhg and the Monster Prom series, and vast time-sinks with loads to explore like Cultist Simulator. It’s ambitious, it’s audacious, and it’s incredibly heartfelt, and I can only hope it discovers its audience.

You begin on the colony ship Stratospheric, nicknamed “Stratos,” heading to the planet Virtumna to found the first-ever colony on an alien world through a recently discovered wormhole. As you approach, however, you have strange dreams, dreams of possible futures. And one specific dream of a burning house, a colony lit ablaze, and a creature with very sharp teeth closing in for the kill…

You have ten years. Ten years through your tween-age to teenage existence to unravel the mysteries of Virtumna, to discover the truth behind your dreams, and to save both your own life and that of the colony’s. Ten years to train, explore, build your friendships and relationships. Ten years to live on an alien world. Here’s hoping you can make them count.

I Was A Teenage Exocolonist plays out in a semi-open world. During each month of the cycle, you’re allowed to do one activity: explore the colony and the surrounding areas, talk to people, build friendships (helpfully noted by a heart system on one of the character menus), and do various activities to raise your stats. During activities, the game switches to a deckbuilding format, where you draw a hand of cards and have to put them into the highest possible build for points, either by creating runs of colors, numbers, or sometimes both. You gain new cards from participating in story events and interacting more with the other members of the colony, building your relationships and stats as you go. New stats open up new interactions and story activities as well as new abilities, everything from drawing extra cards, to stat boosts during the card battle sections, to even being able to ignore certain world-map events to save time. It also makes everything feel of a piece, from your desperate attempts to build enough perception and forage for enough food so the colony doesn’t starve, to your combat training going up so that you can save more colonists during the tense “Glow” season at the end of each year when the wildlife attacks en masse.

All of this is presented in a visual-novel style with a variety of gorgeous artwork and music. Glow looks suitably ominous, but there’s a strange beauty to the colony-wide fungus. Pollen season is awash in pink, there’s a lush but downbeat look to Wet season, and Dust season has a shimmer effect that works perfectly with the descriptions of punishing heat. But more than that, important story moments are illustrated in a soft watercolor style that still manages to keep the tone while looking incredibly pretty. It’s relaxing, a game where you’re meant to take your time and explore even as the clock keeps ticking ever upward over those 120 turns you have to do things.

It’s also really transparent with what everything does. Areas are color-coded based on what they do, mousing over a choice tells you what stats you need and who you need to be more involved with, and map markers show you the way to world events. When you know what you want to do on a playthrough, it’s very easy to beeline. But beyond just beelining towards certain things, the game has a gentle enough difficulty curve and is easy enough to understand with its interlocking systems that you don’t necessarily have to beeline. You’re free to explore on every playthrough, figuring out what build and events work for you, and ensuring that you can save as many people as possible.

And save them you will want to. This is a game where, if you’re not prepared for it, any number of people can die horribly, everything from your childhood best friend getting blown up to a creature eating you alive. It’s deeply effective emotionally, letting you know that these people have their fates in your hands, but also that bad things can happen, that the colony you become so familiar with and pour so much love and work into might get trashed, might get fed to fascist bounty hunters from Earth, or might just end up destroyed. But it also creates a sense of accomplishment when you do manage to save someone, when you manage to get things just right, and when the colony manages to coexist, both with their wildlife and their invaders. It’s a game that fine-tunes its emotional highs and lows, so that everything is unexpected but not inevitable. It also helps as you can remember things from previous lives and use them to correct things in the present.

It’s also just straight addictive. The ease of each month and of building your relationships, the satisfying way the numbers go up, the simple-to-learn, difficult-to-master card system (which IMO doesn’t need a hard setting, as it’s just difficult enough), and the way whole months can pass, as well as knowing there’s a specific end, combine to a game you can lose days to, setting up your colonist’s actions, managing your relationships, even exploring day after day until you find something interesting, all of it feels like a choice that matters, and all of it feels rather satisfying.

That isn’t to say the game isn’t without its flaws. After the first time, it can get a little frustrating to nudge at the various tasks, trying to save that one person and help a childhood friend, or figuring out how to keep family and friends from their fates. It could also use some quality of life upgrades, like a map during expeditions so you actually know where you’re going, some sort of quest log for the times when you have to grab specific items or do specific things at certain times, an idea of what perks do what after the first time, and perhaps a little less of a heavy load on the old GPU, as when the snow and pollen starts swirling, my graphics card temp suddenly jumped to 56C and everything slowed down immensely.

But those are nitpicks. If you like life sims, if you like games you can sink hours into satisfyingly, if you like visual novels or weird stories or branching plots, this is the game for you. Jump on board the Stratos when it finally launches, a new life awaits you in the offworld colonies.

The Good
- Addictive core gameplay loop
- Story it’s easy to get invested in
- Gorgeous artwork
- Tons of replay value
- Very easy to figure out the systems, difficult to master

The Bad
- Minor performance issues
- Can be difficult to figure out which things to do in what order to change events
- Could benefit from a map during exploration segments

Final Score: