Review for Chronique des Silencieux
__medium.jpeg "Chronique des Silencieux Box Cover")
Mystery games are among the adventure sub-genres that keep seeing remarkable innovations. Whether it is the ever-evolving legacy of Frogwares’ Sherlock Holmes or new titles such as ColePowered Games’ Shadows of Doubt, they do an excellent job of putting the player in the shoes of an investigator. Unfortunately, Chronique des Silencieux lacks this essential characteristic. While it has a compelling narrative and some delightful presentation, the gameplay, precision, and logic pales compared to the games mentioned above.
Developed and published by Pierre Feuille Studio, Chronique des Silencieux takes place in the neighborhood of Mériadeck, within the city of Bordeaux, France, sometime in the seventies. Players are in the shoes of a boy named Eugène, who soon finds himself under the tutelage of Detective Yves. The mystery in question revolves around the client, Victor Dousvalon, who hires Eugène to help his daughter, Catherine, to decipher the mystery of his past. The story is well-written, and the mystery keeps building, urging the player to discover intricate and complex answers. The characters have interesting backgrounds, especially those whose lives were touched by the Second World War and the French Resistance. Eugène makes for a great avatar with which to learn about the world, being a relative outsider just settling into his new home.
However, what makes and breaks the overall experience is the gameplay itself. It seems very simple on paper: the player asks for witness testimonies and gathers evidence, then connects these to increase the list of topics to question others about or to add to the page of available “leads” (clues). The game is in chapters, and each chapter ends when players have sufficient evidence and present the findings in an interrogation, represented by a door barred behind padded locks. Players unlock them by tying two topics together with a sensible verb. Each chapter assesses how well a player does based on the number of hints used, the number of mistakes made during interrogations, and how thoroughly leads are settled. There are also minor activities such as Eugène’s recording device, which records and plays music to help move conversations forward, plus a few puzzles spread around the environments.
The execution of these elements makes for a cumbersome and often overwhelming experience. The player gathers relevant and irrelevant information from other characters and abundant evidence from various items and secondary testimonies. The connections that advance the pertinent clues must be precise, and keeping track of all the information at hand is tough. Even if players find a connection that should make sense, Eugène may say he lost track. And in interrogations, what testimony or evidence disproves a false claim is often unclear. The hint system helps a little but doesn’t go into specific detail. While hints that loosely help players are acceptable in certain games, much more assistance is required in this one.
The result is so much information overload that veteran mystery players may find themselves comparing this game, unfortunately, to other similar games. For instance, the recent Frogwares Sherlock Holmes titles reduce information into small, tangible ideas that steer players to more significant leads to solve the case. Then there is the unique example of Shadows of Doubt, which allows players to connect and filter out ideas, ensuring that the case is focused and the correct suspect is apprehended. Chronique des Silencieux does neither, meaning the player will be scrolling through many testimonies and various pieces of evidence. This is a significant impediment to experiencing an exciting story.
What further hinders the gameplay are the technical issues. It isn’t just the occasional crash or bug that is patched by the developers the next day. There was a point in my playthrough where I was missing a topic that I could not bring up no matter what I tried, and also, a lead wasn’t closed when it was supposed to be. Luckily, the developers gave me a suggestion to get around the problem, and I appreciated their help, but issues like this, coupled with the gameplay, almost made me quit the game entirely.
The presentation primarily excels visually. Chronique des Silencieux sports two types of graphics: the in-game, top-down, 2.5D cel-shading and the hand-drawn, 2D cutscenes. Both are well-rendered and crafted. The characters even retain their designs when transitioning between the two. The environments are like moving through various paintings, whether roaming through France’s urban streets or the countryside. The music and ambiance are exceptional as well and vary depending on location. Some locales are silent, others are filled with the lively noises of the environment to provide ambiance and atmosphere, and there are also jazz-like or regal tunes in certain areas.
Then there are the caveats, not bugs but the result of the developers’ choices. There is no voice acting, at least during in-game instances. Voice-overs occur only during cutscenes, which are in French with English subtitles. It is annoying since no English dubbing means paying more attention to subtitles that whiz by quickly rather than viewing the characters’ facial expressions. In-game, most dialogue is in text boxes above a character’s head, making the cutscene-only voicework questionably stick out. Also, while there are background sound effects for ambiance, there are no Foley sound effects, such as feet stomping on the ground when running. It makes specific locations where there is nothing but still air into literal voids. The final weird choice is scene transitions. Moving through scenes and text boxes is done with the left mouse button, which is fine, but extends to “fades to” and “fades out of” black, empty screens (players won’t know this until they see the small text telling them to click to move forward). These aren’t significant problems, but they are somewhat annoying.
One minor complaint is the misspellings within text boxes. The game’s dialogue is a translation from another language, so this is somewhat understandable. However, there are times when mistakes get in the way of understanding specific contexts or clues when looking at the text for the first time.
Chronique des Silencieux is a game that has significant potential. The developers at Pierre Fuille apparently wanted to make a mystery game that would have been an encyclopedist’s dream, collecting and searching through troves of information, comparing and contrasting every detail. However, the concept fails compared to other mystery adventures that nailed how to convey information and ideas adeptly. What should have been a 10 to 12-hour experience turned into a 23-hour slog.
