Harmony: The Fall of Reverie Review (Naomii Nimmermehr)
I had to give up at this. Besides the gorgeous animations and overall style as well as the superb voice acting this game didn't deliever what it promised me in the demo. And that's bothering me most: I PLAYED the demo! I took my sweet time with it, decided to buy it anyway and yet it.. disappointed me anyway.
Pros:
Great animations and music. Memorable and exciting. Loved the diversity and character designs.
Backgrounds are beautiful and subtly animated to feel alive.
Cons:
- Story is very confusing and slow. To make this even more bothersome the transitions between the scenes and your choices interrupted the flow of the story again and again
- to choose between the different paths you have a complex userinterface that shows you your possible decisions - and the ones you can't do because you missed a specific collectable gem somewhere. Of course, you can't rewind or save somewhere. To get it (and have a different outcome) you have to replay everything. Neat!
- to make this even more complicated the story also shifts between two worlds, the one where Polly (our main character) is a special chosen being, and the one from the real world.
- Unfortunately I found the story to be too confusing and not engaging at all. I just never found my way into Polly's world and problems, I didn't understand why she was so committed to a mother who didn't even really like or understand her.
- Even after a few hours ingame the characters didn't appeal to me even. Not a single one - they all looked great but somehow I couldn't sympathize with anyone and I didn't really care about them all.. probably because I couldn't put myself in Polly's shoes and was constantly struggling with the interface of the gameplay.
Some dialogues felt superfluous and bland, they didn't gave my anything.
- The game is a prime example of "telling instead of showing" because white every character in the real life world is absolutely frightened of the organisation "MK". At one point in the game we engage with the organisation and get into one of their buildings.. we also find an old ruin and explore that but do I get to see ANYTHING? no.. This kind of thing happened all the time and I think that's one reason while I couldn't connect with the world.
Summary: As a visual novel "Harmony - the fall of reverie" simply fails. It doesn't give me much of a choice of paths, because once I decided to go in one direction I cann't step back from it.
And while that might be okay if the game simply wants to tell me a good story it also disappoints with that - the story is confusing and the characters are somehow superficial and not very authentic, sometimes even just unsympathetic. The great drawings and animations don't help much.
To make everything worse the whole narration is constantly disrupted by the user interface I have to "chose a path" from.
Can't recommend it, even in sale.