Harmony: The Fall of Reverie Review (Randomshadows)
TL:DR: Truly don't know how to feel about this one. While I loved the concept of the story, the navigating of the many trees of possibility wasn't executed as well as I had hoped. As a visual novel? It's incredibly beautiful, well voice-acted, and the dialogue is well written. Worth a look for fans of that genre, hence my thumbs up review.
I love DONTNOD.
This kind of game where choices matter is so hard to develop when there are so many variants; players can get frustrated easily when they don't have a satisfying outcome. With Harmony, I felt like many of the choices I made did have meaningful effects, but in ways that didn't always feel satisfying, and the feedback and design on the UI/UX for the augary was frustrating. Some of the pathways presented also felt disingenuous to the game's premise (such as Polly potentially choosing to just abandon ship entirely) . Overall, I felt really locked into pathways, and would often get annoyed with how little wiggle room there was.
I feel like I immediately want to go through and see what other situations could have played out, which is definitely part of the fun of a game like this. However, I feel like I want to go look it up rather than actually play through the game again, which is disappointing.
Also... I genuinely would love to get data shown to me on what other players have experienced! I want to know how rare my ending choice was, and see if I have a similar experience to others, or if I had a more unique take on the choices. That feedback to players in this kind of game feels quite important to me, and it's just missing as far as I can see.
as a visual novel, the art is gorgeous and the premise and setting was great, but marred with confusion overall. This mashup of novel and choice-trees was just overwhelming.