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It’s a little clunky, but this memory-fueled adventure has loads of heart - Dordogne Quick Review

2K View2023-06-17

Dordogne

9.0

SportsRPGVisual NovelWholesomeCasualFamily FriendlyAdventureRelaxing

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PLAY IT OR SKIP IT?

Play it if you’re up for a wistful, summertime trip down memory lane—complete with complex and sometimes difficult family dynamics. Dordogne is a straightforward story about a young woman named Mimi who is trying to piece together her memories of her recently departed grandmother Nora, and while the gameplay can at times be simplistic to a fault, the gorgeous artwork and thoughtful character development make this a lazy ride worth taking down a peaceful French stream.

TIME PLAYED

I’ve played about two and a half hours of Dordogne, which has taken me about halfway through the story, up to chapter five. I began as Mimi on a dark and stormy night as she texted with her father about going to clear out her grandmother’s old house, where she’d spent four weeks over the summer when she was twelve years old—a time that she can barely remember at all, for reasons that aren’t immediately clear. As I guided Mimi around the now-empty house, she’d recall moments from that summer and I got to relive them alongside her, from helping her grandmother in the garden and kayaking down the nearby river, to simple little tasks like spreading butter on my toast in the morning and placing stickers in an album. It’s all rendered in a beautiful, bright watercolor style that manages to capture both the simplicity and strangeness of being twelve years old and away from home.

WHAT’S AWESOME

• Gorgeous visuals. Dordogne is named for the river that flows by Nora’s home in rural France, and the countryside comes to life in vibrant, expressionistic watercolors. It’s a lovely way to present the faded memories of a childhood summer, and it gives Dordogne a handcrafted look and feel that lends additional weight to the emotionally hefty story about family members not always accepting or understanding one another, but trying their best to all the same.

• Compassion. As I got deeper into Dordogne, I realized that Mimi isn’t just trying to remember her grandmother, she’s trying to understand her father and what caused the rift between him and his mother. I found old letters indicating that he wanted to join a military academy at one point, and another addressed to Nora and her husband, apologizing for their son’s behavior toward them one evening. Nora is a complicated woman herself, and as I played I learned that during the summer Mimi spent with her, she was still coming to grips with the loss of her husband. There’s hurt and trauma just under the surface of everything that happened as I played Dordogne, but it’s handled with delicate care and compassion.

• The little things. Dordogne’s art style grounds it well, but so does its occasional focus on little daily tasks. As young Mimi, I had to waggle my thumbstick to brush my teeth before bed, then manually pick up a glass of water to rinse and spit afterwards. Helping Nora in the garden involved picking an herb I wanted to plant, then selecting a trowel I’d found earlier, digging a hole, placing the plant, and covering it with the earth I’d dug up. None of these tasks are puzzles, exactly, but they do lend a very pleasant feeling of homeyness to the adventure.

• Relaxed pace. Dordogne is, appropriately, a very laid-back game. There were a couple instances of timers (searching underwater to find Nora’s lost picnic silverware), but generally I had as much time as I wanted to either solve a puzzle or just wander around looking for stickers or new words to add to Mimi’s binder, where she would add a new page each day with a photograph, a poem she’d written, or sound she’d recorded on the Walkman Nora gave her.

WHAT SUCKS

• Clunkiness. While the hand-painted watercolor style is fantastic to look at, it can make getting around a bit annoying sometimes. It wasn’t always clear where I could walk, and this got particularly annoying as I chased a local thief up a tall hill near the river to discover his secrets. It seems as though it’s meant to be an action sequence, and that simply isn’t what this game is good at.

• Frustrating collectibles. Mimi can find stickers, tapes, new words to use in her poetry, and interesting things to photograph during her summer with Nora. I only had one chance to pick up some of these, and a couple of times it wasn’t clear that I was progressing beyond a point where I’d be able to go back and pick one up later. None of it is strictly necessary, but you know how it is with collectibles: Once you know there’s a list of them to tick off, you want to get all of them.

💬 Does Dordogne sound like your idea of a nostalgic and lazy summer afternoon, or will you be staying in the here and now? Let me know what you think in the comments.