Wonderfully beautiful spiritual successor to Echo Night, one of my all time favorite games. Déraciné exists primarily in frozen snapshots of time, where even the river is eerily still. It feels just like an early CD-ROM game like Myst, but as haunted as Saturn games like Lunacy or Enemy Zero, the way you teleport from point to point like moving screen by screen in those games. There is something, however, about exploring a haunting old building in the woods as the only inhabitant, that also reminded me a lot of Gone Home's very specific mood.

Playing this left me somewhat saddened that FromSoft's success in the past decade with the 'Souls' series has guaranteed that those works will be what defines their output and development process for the foreseeable future. I'm frankly surprised that Déraciné was even made but what it reveals is that the developers at that studio have the chops to tell all sorts of stories outside the realm of action RPGs.

Though it's a fairly brief experience I was quickly enamoured with this sombre fairy tale set within a catholic boarding school. The atmosphere is clearly reminiscent of their work on Bloodborne but there's a degree of childlike whimsy here that masks the darker implications of what exists beyond the school walls. That sense of there being more going on than what you're presented with is carried throughout most of the writing, and I liked the added flavour that imbued in the vignettes you are meant to explore. Hidetaka Miyazaki clearly has a thing for directing scenes of quiet melancholy, and the voice actors (some of whom I am sure have appeared in Souls games) did an excellent job of selling them.

If I have any gripes with Déraciné it is simply that I never really bought into the idea that it had to be a VR-exclusive (one that even requires you have the motion controllers). It stinks of upper management reaching for any studio they can to produce VR titles that justify the techs existence, and I'm bummed that as a result I suspect only a small amount of people will have gotten to play this game. It offers a vision into what else FromSoftware can develop when given the creative freedom, and I hope this isn't the last we see of it.

SPOILERS

interesting story where you play as a fairy helping children in an orphanage. Has interesting lore about a world destroyed by these evil all consuming fairies but you’re a benevolent one because you became one as a baby before being corrupted by your memories and past.

Annoying to navigate with the forced click turning. The orphanage is huge too, so it can be a pain to go from one end to the other. The music was nice. Voice acting a mixed bag. All the kids felt unbelievably nice.

Still worth playing for the interesting if under-explained story. Some plot points felt half-baked: the cult and the motivations of the headmaster in particular.

Best "faery haunting melancholic Victorian orphanage" simulator ever.

Really, I just loved the tone of this and the characters were engaging and precious enough to keep me compelled.

There wasn't too much to do gameplay-wise and the puzzles were all very simple, but the interesting way time is used and the serious commitment to the presentation and narrative had me genuinely enthralled. The gorgeous music helped.

There are many games that offer mostly a story and not much in what is traditionally considered “gameplay”.
Some of them give you options to influence the outcome of the story, or at least let you feel like you’re making choices. Some, including Déraciné, don’t. People like to argue on whether games like this are actually games, but as a linguist I don’t find that discussion very productive.
Being games allows these stories to be told in an audiovisual way without needing to be a movie (or a series), it allows you to experience the stories at your own pace, and sometimes it allows you to experience the story in a unique way.
Déraciné is an exceptionally good example of the last point. Not only does experiencing the story in first person and VR allow for incredible amounts of immersion (and I don’t mean that in the buzzword way), the game makes you complicit in its events. You’re not just watching things unfold or walk around the aftermath of things unfolding. You feel at fault for the things that go wrong thanks to your intervention into this world. This makes Déraciné incredibly special to me.
The story itself is pretty good, the visuals and music are amazing, and even though the characters are fairly flat they’re still likeable enough for the story to work.
Déraciné is such a unique and amazing experience and I wish more people would get to experience it but unfortunately, it is a PSVR exclusive, so it is incredibly inaccessible.

Watched Vaati's videos because who the fuck is gonna waste their money on PSVR lmfao.

Gameplay looks simple as fuck, seemingly a very easy point and click game but the main thing here is the story. Which is actually fantastic! Best story by FROM yet, probably.

I hope FROM do more little games like this one sometime, just not VR so that more than a handful actually play it (even though this is a decent use of VR).