|
|
Genre: Adventure Developer & Publisher: Studio Chien d'Or Released: February 15, 2026 Requirements: OS: Windows 10 Processor: Minimum, Intel Core i5 2400, 3.10 Ghtz Memory: Minimum 4 GB RAM Graphics: Minimum, Nvidia GTX 670 Storage: 9 GB available space
|
|
|
By flotsam An Abyss of Dreams Studio Chien d’Or A game that invites you to “experience a poignant, unsettling narrative that confronts the dark legacy of Québec’s Catholic institutions and the children left in their care” and asks you to “step inside a brutal orphanage” is going to be bleak. Which this is, almost oppressively so, and yet I am not sorry I played. If you are like me, we watch films and read books for all sorts of reasons and choose them dependent on our moods – light and fluffy or deep and meaningful, and everything in between. I am open to the same experience in games, and am pleased that there are games that provide that option. You play as Thérèse, a young girl whose world collapses following her mother’s death. Along with her younger sister she is sent to the Saint-Nicolas-de-la-Passion Orphanage, a foreboding institution governed by “brutality, silence, and unquestioned faith.” It plays in the first person and you point and click to move through the game node to node. At each point you can look around 360 degrees, and you would be well advised to do so. The game autosaves regularly, helpfully telling you it has done so, and you can manually save as well. There is though only a single save point, each new save overwriting the previous one. I liked that the game is in French with English subtitles. This is Québec after all, and it helps to ground the events. Sound effects and a largely melancholy soundtrack accompany your endeavours. Which involve exploring the orphanage by day, and entering a series of dream sequences at night. The latter involves the most elaborate puzzling, the former a more sedate puzzling experience, but illuminating in terms of the orphanage itself. You will collect and use various items, but will never have more than a few at any time, and you will solve a few larger environmental puzzles. It can be a little directionless at times, most notably in the dream sequences, but wandering and exploring carefully should set you on the right path. There is no default curser, a small white dot fixed centre screen being all that there is. However it will change in response to hotspots, predominantly being a pointed finger to indicate a direction you can move (and weirdly someone you can talk to), but also a magnifying glass (look) and a cupped hand (pick-up). What it won’t do is change to indicate you can use an item here, so when it comes to deploying your inventory items you are on your own. Most though are relatively obvious, but it might cause a hold-up or two. The visuals are a mixed bag, most notably the characters, but some of the scenes are rather excellent. Cinematic sequences punctuate the events. What else? Notes you pick up are automatically added to your inventory under their own tab, and can be read again at any time. The narrative is not a happy one. A supernatural element that gets introduced late in the game didn’t really do it for me. It took me just under seven hours.
I played on: OS: Windows 11, 64 Bit Processor: Intel i7-9700K 3.7GHz RAM: Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB DDR4 32GB Video card: AMD Radeon RX 580 8192MB
|
