Phoenix Springs

I mean this thing is mind-blowing. The short description would be that it’s one of those works that seems to’ve been sent to us by superintelligent aliens. I haven’t found a game this good since I played The Last Door and Inside six years ago. I’ve catalogued over 550 third-person graphic adventures and I don’t think anyone’s ever made one this ground-breaking or confident since they crawled onto the scene forty years ago. Or one so *confident* in its originality, as if there were no other way to do an adventure game. It’s the best point-&-click anyone’s made since The Last Door and though I’m extremely fond of that one and LeChuck’s Revenge, this one’s almost certainly the highest artistic peak the medium’s reached. Like most of the greatest narrative works, it’s filled with strange images, phrases and events you can’t easily guess the meaning of but can tell the creator(s) clearly did have a meaning intended, however well hidden. Like most of them, it’s also devoid of cliché, sentimentality and emotional release. It maintains from beginning to end a cool, detached equanimity just as its heroine’s voice keeps its stony neutrality. It was made by a team of three over seven years. An unbelievable length of time for an adventure game, especially one of no great length (most people will probably take 4 to 7 hours). Eleanor Summers should be given some sort of Nobel Prize for the landscapes and character animations she’s created here, whose beauty and stylistic brilliance is beyond all capacity language has have to describe it, so I’m not gonna begin to try. On YouTube there’s a trailer of a jarringly different first draft of the game from 2017, when the team began their work, and making the game looks to’ve largely been a process of paring down, of pruning out, of making the work oblique. Of ‘using negative space both visually and narratively’ as critic Zoë Hannah put it. At one point we meet a sculptor who says of his craft, ‘Like time, we remove more than we add.’

The atmosphere, music, and visual style are outstanding, and the story started strong. But coming back after a break made it hard to reconnect... the logic felt too abstract and symbolic. I had to rely on walkthroughs just to progress and by the second half, the lack of clear structure left me bored rather than intrigued. It felt more like decoding dream logic or something cryptic without any reward or ‘solving’ feeling, which ultimately felt disappointing. . In the end, it was more an aesthetic experience than a narrative one for me. It did trigger some reflection, but not enough to make the journey feel worthwhile or one I’d recommend to others.

nice graphics, but not story whatsoever - one basically runs around trying everything until something happens to be part of a solution. tedious