Chronique des Silencieux Review (Cremi)
I'm at the end of the first chapter of my playthrough.
First of all I like the foundation and the concept of the game. It reminds me of "Return of the Obra Dinn" and "The Case of the Golden Idol" which I liked very much.
The mechanics are really interesting: You try to find contradictions between Diaologue and Documents you find in the World. After that, you try to make conclusions with two actors and one verb to connect them. The Story so far is interesting, the characters are well developed, the environment is ok (not directly my style, but I think many people will like it).
Now, onto what I perceive as negative aspects:
The Dialogues are very strange(English version): I stumbled more than once over the odd construction of sentences. I'm not a native english speaker, but I consume most of my media in English, and some Dialogues seemed very strange.
Another issue is you don't really know where you can go. There are so many doors, but you can only enter some of them. It is hard to see where you can enter. It tooke me about 5 Minutes to leave the train station and it was pure luck that I found the entrance to the "Pays de Galles". (it gets better after you understand the mechanics)
Often you just don't know what the game wants from you. You roam through the whole world, until you tried all Dialogue Options, clicked on every hotspot in your way and then you are just stranded. You go trough all your Dialogues, all your Documents and try to find any contradictions, but you don't find any. Then you try the conclusion system and find one combination that fits... but it seemed very far fetched. The one handed man could be there for so many different reasons, how would you know this reason for certain?
Next try: You find a paper with the adress of a location, you go to the harbor and it says I can't go on because I first need to find an address. I just found this paper with the adress, what do you mean? So the solution? I first need a contradiction to use the address, which I already have in my inventory.
Next thing: I found some drugs which seemed like a big deal. I tried to connect them with so many different dialogues, but nothing worked. I tried the integrated hint system but I got only tips, where I already had the solution or knew the solution. The story for me was somewhat clear, but I didn't know how to tell the game my solution.
After some time I just lost my patience and took a Walktrough to figure out some things and progress from there.
I don't want to spoil anything, but I knew the solutions, but didn't know which lines of dialogue I had to connect to what specific lines of the documents. I only wished I had a verb like "blablabla" is sister of "blablabla" or something like that. It was already crystal clear, when I played some music in some bar. Why did I have to find these strange connections in the documents? And later: What proof of innocence is it when someone says, "I don't like drugs"?
All in all I really like the basic concept of the game and I love that the developers tried to make it work. The connections and conclusions are just a little bit too far fetched for me and it's too hard to communicate your solution with the game.
Or maybe, I'm just too dumb :)
I know it is a negative review, but I think you should try it out despite of it, if you liked "Return of the Obra Dinn" or "The Case of the Golden Idol"
I will update my review after I finished the game.
Edit: It crashed about 4 times in the 6 hours I played