After a month or three of solely playing games that I had bought physically, I decided it was time to put my Xbox Game Pass subscription to good use and try out one of the indie games that recently released on it. Dordogne was that game; it looked pretty interesting and very beautiful, and I felt optimistic that I would enjoy it. That did not turn out to be true, despite how much I tried. Unfortunately, this game is very middling, and dare I say, not worth playing. Like so many bad indie games, Dordogne is a solid idea executed poorly, and is perhaps a story better fit for a different medium. But even then, I have my doubts.
Pros:
- The watercolor-inspired artstyle is the main aspect of Dordogne that drew me in, and in an ocean of questionable design decisions, I can safely say this is not one of them. It is an indisputable FACT that this game is absolutely gorgeous, and that might be one of the only reasons I continued to play it. It is a shame that the artists that designed Dordogne’s environments weren’t working on a better game. The art is very unique and works great with the fixed-perspective 3D; the kayaking segments and the marketplace have to be my favorite environments.
- I feel like I praise this in every game, but the music is wonderful. It’s this ambient, contemplative electropop soundtrack that suits a game about discovering lost memories. It's relaxing and for lack of a better phrase, almost gets you lost in thought. Supernaive and the other composers did a fantastic job, and even if you don’t play the game, the OST might be worth a listen if you like the genre. Currents is the best track by the way.
- The only story-related thing that I will praise is Chapter 7. While the gameplay is just as clunky as the rest of the game (see below), the visuals and music reached their peak for me at this point.
Cons:
- The premise for Dordogne is fine, but its presentation is slow and fails to hit the emotional beats it tried to build up. It follows the protagonist Mimi as she unearths summer memories from her childhood in her late grandmother’s house. The story progresses as Mimi finds items that then send the player back into their associated memories, as they try to piece together what exactly happened that summer. The thing is that there is little concern with the supposed mystery of that summer’s events, and instead the game seems to speed past that in favor of presenting a feel-good, slice-of-life-style sequence of outings…of which there are not enough to really establish a connection with the characters.
- There’s nothing special about the dialogue or voice acting either, which doesn’t help the lack of emotion this game brings. And Dordogne ends SUPER abruptly too, right after I was beginning to think the story was getting more interesting. I was left thinking “that’s it?” I’m not going to pretend that games need to have hyper-complex characters to be interesting, but the characters in this game aren’t anything crazy. The most I was able to learn about some of them was in a few scattered letters between family members, which I kept thinking would be addressed in the main narrative, to no avail.
- The gameplay itself might be the worst part, which is why I said that Dordogne might be a story better told in a different medium—like a short film or web series–or at the very least, a different game genre (like a visual novel). Gameplay actions in this game are unreasonably contrived. Opening a jar with a book in it consisted of:
1. clicking and dragging to flip the jar lid open
2. clicking and dragging on three items to take out each of them individually
3. clicking on the book to open it, then clicking and dragging to turn EACH PAGE to flip to what I needed
It felt as if gameplay segments like this were added solely to ensure this could actually be sold as a ‘video game’ and not a ‘cutscene simulator.’ There were a few other minigames here and there, but nothing really worth mentioning save for the kayaking segments I mentioned earlier, which I thought were pretty nice.
- Complementing the lackluster gameplay is an admittedly interesting idea, where past Mimi gets to make scrapbook pages using poems, photographs, tape recordings, and stickers. Unfortunately, finding these poems and stickers amounts to wandering around the same game space each chapter, hoping you’ll stumble upon the indicator that one lies nearby.
- Acquiring the photographs and tape recordings is marginally more interesting, since the player is free to aim around and look for good scenes to capture, but the opportunities to do this are few and far between, and limited to only a handful of areas. The scrapbooking itself isn’t terrible (the poem fragments were pretty well-written), but you can’t even view the completed scrapbook once the game concludes, just the final page you made.
Objective rating: 2 stars
Subjective rating: 2.5 stars
Pros:
- The watercolor-inspired artstyle is the main aspect of Dordogne that drew me in, and in an ocean of questionable design decisions, I can safely say this is not one of them. It is an indisputable FACT that this game is absolutely gorgeous, and that might be one of the only reasons I continued to play it. It is a shame that the artists that designed Dordogne’s environments weren’t working on a better game. The art is very unique and works great with the fixed-perspective 3D; the kayaking segments and the marketplace have to be my favorite environments.
- I feel like I praise this in every game, but the music is wonderful. It’s this ambient, contemplative electropop soundtrack that suits a game about discovering lost memories. It's relaxing and for lack of a better phrase, almost gets you lost in thought. Supernaive and the other composers did a fantastic job, and even if you don’t play the game, the OST might be worth a listen if you like the genre. Currents is the best track by the way.
- The only story-related thing that I will praise is Chapter 7. While the gameplay is just as clunky as the rest of the game (see below), the visuals and music reached their peak for me at this point.
Cons:
- The premise for Dordogne is fine, but its presentation is slow and fails to hit the emotional beats it tried to build up. It follows the protagonist Mimi as she unearths summer memories from her childhood in her late grandmother’s house. The story progresses as Mimi finds items that then send the player back into their associated memories, as they try to piece together what exactly happened that summer. The thing is that there is little concern with the supposed mystery of that summer’s events, and instead the game seems to speed past that in favor of presenting a feel-good, slice-of-life-style sequence of outings…of which there are not enough to really establish a connection with the characters.
- There’s nothing special about the dialogue or voice acting either, which doesn’t help the lack of emotion this game brings. And Dordogne ends SUPER abruptly too, right after I was beginning to think the story was getting more interesting. I was left thinking “that’s it?” I’m not going to pretend that games need to have hyper-complex characters to be interesting, but the characters in this game aren’t anything crazy. The most I was able to learn about some of them was in a few scattered letters between family members, which I kept thinking would be addressed in the main narrative, to no avail.
- The gameplay itself might be the worst part, which is why I said that Dordogne might be a story better told in a different medium—like a short film or web series–or at the very least, a different game genre (like a visual novel). Gameplay actions in this game are unreasonably contrived. Opening a jar with a book in it consisted of:
1. clicking and dragging to flip the jar lid open
2. clicking and dragging on three items to take out each of them individually
3. clicking on the book to open it, then clicking and dragging to turn EACH PAGE to flip to what I needed
It felt as if gameplay segments like this were added solely to ensure this could actually be sold as a ‘video game’ and not a ‘cutscene simulator.’ There were a few other minigames here and there, but nothing really worth mentioning save for the kayaking segments I mentioned earlier, which I thought were pretty nice.
- Complementing the lackluster gameplay is an admittedly interesting idea, where past Mimi gets to make scrapbook pages using poems, photographs, tape recordings, and stickers. Unfortunately, finding these poems and stickers amounts to wandering around the same game space each chapter, hoping you’ll stumble upon the indicator that one lies nearby.
- Acquiring the photographs and tape recordings is marginally more interesting, since the player is free to aim around and look for good scenes to capture, but the opportunities to do this are few and far between, and limited to only a handful of areas. The scrapbooking itself isn’t terrible (the poem fragments were pretty well-written), but you can’t even view the completed scrapbook once the game concludes, just the final page you made.
Objective rating: 2 stars
Subjective rating: 2.5 stars