Harmony: The Fall of Reverie

Strengths: Lot’s of narrative games that allows the player to make choices focuses on the narrative. This game truly focuses on the CHOICES and you get to make a mountain of them. These choices also genuinely impact the story. You can see the “shape” of the impact of a given decision a a decision graph and plan far ahead into the future. Great for people who enjoy planning and being analytical. Weaknesses: The main game play loop inherently breaks immersion in the narrative. The game constantly switches you back and forth between the decision graph and the dialog every few minutes. You cannot lose yourself in the story because you’re constantly interrupted. Even worse, due to how far ahead you must plan to avoid getting locked out of the paths you want, you end up treating choices as simply collecting the right combination of gems instead of thinking about how each decision personally impacts each character and the overall plot. The very act of making players count gems and looking at complex graphs activates the analytical parts of their brain and turns off the emotional part. This dehumanize the characters and encourages the player to see the characters as means to the ending they want instead of feeling emotionally attached to them. I struggled to care about the characters. I cared about the Reverie plane and I have my favorite Aspirations but the story didn’t make me care about the people that lived in Brittle (Name of the human plane). The narrative underdelivers the consequences of your choices. I applaud the game for having major consequences across chapters and even acts. However, they are presented on the decision graph as a grayed out graphs. Not exciting. It would have been far more impactful to explain the chain of causation that led to the current consequence in a short summary inside the narrative. Length: I finished one playthrough in 15 hours. Verdict: I still had a decent amount of fun but would ONLY recommend this to people who enjoy being analytical, planning ahead, and value the act of making decisions over lovable characters.

First of all, Harmony is a visual novel : you're presented with a web of nodes, you select which one you want to pursue next, and go from there. Some might unlock or reveal future nodes in advance, some give or take the currencies of the game, different kinds of crystals. The same currencies are needed to be able to select some of the nodes, and therefore choices. Don't expect gameplay here - and that's fine: it's a visual novel after all. Harmony does a lot of things right, and then falls down badly on the one that does truly matter : storytelling. The art style, characters, voice acting, music are all excellent. The world described feels alive, and interesting. You'll want to learn more about the characters and follow their subplots, including romance (with really good LGBT+ representations, to boot). Then the "Choices matter" part completely falls apart : main plot points are forced no matter what, the big bad guys (a corporation) never feels real or represented in game properly, and simply vanishes at some point. There's a fantastic part about going through grief - and personal pain plus a social commentary on capitalist autocracies seemed like great ingredients for a story that talked about family and community, tying it all together. Except that story isn't there, and the ending feels hollow of meaning. In the end, my choices didn't matter all that much - and in a game where that's all there is, I treat this as a cardinal sin.

This game is okay, but it's not one I'd recommend. I loved the voice acting and some of the characters. (Chaos is are a lot of fun.) The art is pretty good. The backgrounds make Atina look like a colorful and eclectic place to live. Unfortunately, I get the feeling that the reason they made this game a visual novel was that they didn't have the resources to make it into an adventure game like Life is Strange. And they don't know what makes visual novels good. Instead, they just rush the plot along and gloss over events that could be exciting, suspenseful or climactic. You hear about protests and violence in the streets secondhand through dialogue. You hear about major characters in harrowing situations and the story doesn't even focus on them until after it's over. It's like the game is trying to make its story moments as boring and watered down as possible. The pacing is all over the place. You go from rushing through the villain's grand plan all in one act to taking two entire acts to grieve the death of a character. Having multiple routes through a chapter means that there's never a wrong answer to how to solve the main problem. There are no bad endings, and you can see where every path leads in the flow chart. Unfortunately, this means that you learn early on that there are no stakes to your choices. I just ended up focusing on the few characters I liked and didn't bother caring about outcomes. And let's get back to the characters. The voice actors carry a lot of the game with what they're given, because unfortunately, the writing is not there for many of them. Some of the characters are gods of specific ideals (Aspirations) who have only one character trait by design, and they still manage to be more developed than some of the human characters. The protagonist's step sister in particular is given quite a lot of screen time to never have anything useful to say. Abigail Thorn is a wonderful voice actor, but there's only so much she can do to polish a turd.

Enjoyed the art and the interesting "other world where you hang out with the archetypes of the human psyche" thing, but the cast of the game was so utterly insufferable that the stakes meant nothing to me, with some of your "friends" doing nothing except whining and complaining and crying 95% of the time they're on screen. I also have to question the "My grandpa is so emotionally healthy that he just loves getting cucked and explicitly loved less than someone else by grandma. Doesn't bother him at all. What a truly healthy man." That's not healthy brother, that's called deep self-loathing. The story is heavily railroaded, with most of your decisions leading to really no meaningful differences in how the story ultimately plays out, and the "true" ending was particularly lazy with how to resolves the conflict. Prose was alright, but nothing special, and soundtrack was forgettable. Clearly needed another editing pass to weed out gems like "Sometimes the right thing to do is unethical." and "It's hard to go missing on an island like this." "How many people go missing?" "Who knows, they go missing all the time."

The art style is good as well as the soundtrack. But unfortunately, especially for a visual novel, I found the story to be boring and not saying much. 4/10

I don't like that it makes relationships analytical. I don't want to be a master manipulator, I want to craft an emotional story that will resonated with me. I also don't like how it constantly breaks immersion by moving between the story and the graph where you make choices.

I guess it's on me, but I don't get this. I gave it the first chapter and the beter part of an hour, but I'm just not getting into it, and for a visual novel I don't feel like I should have to bargain with myself as to why I should continue. I don't feel any sympathy for any characters and I don't feel like I'm made aware of why anything that happends is happening or what the dilemma I'm apparently so traumatized by is supposed to be. It feels like I need to read a wikipedia page about what the setup for this story is even supposed to be about, but sorry, that's not happening.

I am beyond frustrated with the dizzying amount of interruptions and screen transitions. First an overbearing tutorial, then swapping back and forth between dialogue scenes and the augural board after just a few lines of text, I felt actually sick playing this. Story and characters seem to be interesting enough, but I lost all excitement for them after seeing that the augural board part of the game heavily pushes the player to forego the flow of relationships and pre-plan decisions to accumulate necessary amount of points for desired chapter endings.

I really enjoyed the characters, the art, and the themes. The game mechanics are a little confusing at first but they eventually click. The story feels easy to follow almost all the way up untie the end. It ends abruptly and it feels like it's missing at least another chapter. But I still enjoyed the journey.

The voice actors absolutely killed it! The art and the acting make the story all the more impactful. This game absolutely understands grief, and I felt grateful for that. It was also refreshing how this story centered so many women of different ages, has queer and trans characters, and has a hard-hitting and morally complex take on capitalism and colonialism. This game isn't perfect, but it's an incredible choose-your-own-adventure visual novel.