Harmony: The Fall of Reverie

Review

Continuing their long-lasting tradition since Life is Strange, Don’t Nod is back again with another gripping narrative title based on player’s choices and consequences. In this visual novel you play as Polly, a girl returning home to the island of Atina after being away for a very long time. Here she finds out that her mother has mysteriously gone missing.  Polly tries to find clues about what happened by getting in touch with her old friends, and discovers that her hometown has changed over the years because of an evil corporation called MK who aims to control everything.

Thanks to her mother’s necklace, Polly becomes Harmony and is teleported into the world of Reverie; a dreamlike world populated by spiritual beings called Aspirations, who represent different human emotions such as Bliss, Truth, Power, Bond etc. Harmony wants to tell Polly that she is the only one who can save the world. This is of course a typical premise you have probably seen many times, but the interesting thing is that these Aspirations will give you access to the Augural, a branched tree from which you can see the future and view potential consequences based on the different choices you make. Sadly, this is also the only “interactive” game mechanic present. The game is essentially a visual novel in which you take multiple choices, but thanks to the Augural, you can now see the possible outcomes before making any decision. Each Aspiration will approve their preferred choice, which also helps to define Polly’s characterization. Making a choice approved by one of the Aspirations will grant you a token, which you can use later on to unlock a new specific choice that otherwise would have been blocked. This means that you must see in advance the other choices you can make, how many tokens they cost and from which Aspiration you should get them. This also means that you are not really free to make any choice you want, but you must try to plan your path in advance.

While the Augural mechanic is certainly fascinating, nobody loves to have the consequences of their actions spoiled by knowing about them in advance. I mean, part of the beauty of a game based on the player’s choices is precisely not knowing what is going to happen. I understand that this mechanic is linked via the narrative to Harmony’s fate, but on the other side it takes away a few of the story’s surprises. It also removes the freedom of making whatever choice you feel at the moment, only because you haven’t collected enough tokens from a specific Aspiration. Unfortunately, the only interesting gameplay mechanic is also the weakest point of the game for how it’s been wrongly designed, in my opinion.

The writing is great for the most part, with uniquely designed characters and mature dialogues, though sometimes it can be very inconsistent, as it often gets lost in very long explanations and even gets unnecessarily political, as in Life is Strange 2 before. The story is a great allegory of modern times and you understand it soon enough, but the writing keeps pushing the same political themes over and over again like they aren’t already clear, which partially ruins the story. Animations look good enough and I love the vibrant and colorful art style. There are some pretty cutscenes too, but they are often reserved for the more important moments. Characters are fully voiced and they sound really great. The music is also good and changes according to the different characters’ emotions and situations. Unfortunately, visual assets are often re-used through the entire game. You will see all the characters with the same clothes and even the same poses, which is not good for a visual novel that already feels too static and passive due to the lack of interactivity (other than the Augural system).

I love Don’t Nod for what it has achieved in the past with games like Remember Me, Life is Strange or Vampyr and Harmony certainly shows a lot of passion despite being more like a niche project. While its colorful universe is populated by well-voiced characters with distinct personalities, the story never grows in complexity and it’s more like a tale about relationships and an allegory of modern times. The Augural mechanic is interesting on paper, but the execution clearly shows some design problems. Still worth a try if you enjoy visual novels that lack interactivity but somehow compensate with beautiful art style and lot of choices.

Review written by Sonic Punk for Zeepond.com

Harmony: The Fall of Reverie Steam Store Page