Chronique des Silencieux Review (Vitlöksbjörn)
I really, really gave this one a chance. There's just so much to like about this game. The setting is unique - post-war France that's not Paris. The characters are interesting, the aesthetic is pleasant, and I'm always a sucker for a mystery that requires you to connect little pieces together to form a coherent solution.
But this is a mess! In more ways than one. It's buggy, and the UI is very clunky and hard to use. The story makes some sense, but during your investigation you'll have names dropped out of nowhere, names you never learned, which can spoil quite a lot - since you see them in your notebook. The question "why X wants to hide that they're related to Y?" appeared way before my character figured their relation out. You find a mystery portrait in a room - "Why does X have a portrait of Y?" I have no idea who this person is, and you're already giving me a name? You're supposed to learn about this later. I don't know.
The solution system also is very clunky. In theory, it makes sense: you have two nouns and a verb. But the game is very, very picky about what order exactly you're supposed to learn things - so, for example, I knew that X is somehow helping Y, but I didn't know how. I wanted to connect these two facts but the game didn't let me, even if it was true - probably because this didn't yield much useful info, but it'd be nice to have an option of having an intermediate step.
Controlling things with the mouse makes the cursor just dance around. Scrolling sometimes work, sometimes doesn't. Playing with WASD requires pinpoint precision about where you're standing. And so on.
Eventually, I got past the second case, and the characters suddenly decided they're going to a town Z. Why are they going there? Did I miss something? What's the point? And that's why I decided I just can't. I can't follow the story, the script is meandering, the names are dropped too early or too late, I can't.
Apparently this is a problem only if you're playing in English, though. Maybe playing it in original French would make it a better experience? If you can stomach the bugs at least. And the wonky design.
Curator page