Dordogne and Harmony: two games make you face the consequences of your actions

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In a medium where inventory items are discarded in one click and lives are ten-a-penny, how much of a narrative touchpoint can loss be? Years of easy resets in first-person shooters have distanced players from the idea that any gaming loss is permanent, but two new titles handle bereavement and disappearance in unique ways.

Dordogne opens with two pieces of bad news: in the same week, French thirtysomething protagonist Mimi loses both her job and her grandmother, Nora, who leaves behind a box of shared memories in her house in the Dordogne. It is a place Mimi has visited but has no memory of because, mysteriously, she can’t remember anything prior to her 13th birthday. Against the wishes of her father, Mimi resolves to go and find the box before the house is sold.

The game jumps back and forth between past and present as you, playing Mimi, gradually recall your relationship with your grandmother. But Dordogne isn’t just about the rediscovery of old memories — it’s about the creation of new ones too. “Places, objects, people have many different lives,” your grandmother remarks in a letter, chastising herself for keeping secrets locked away until her death.

Dordogne encourages you to do the opposite, creating dialogue prompts that emphasise processing your emotions and sharing your feelings, while the point-and-click gameplay focuses on the minutiae: inserting a key into a lock and turning it, say, or funnelling fireflies into a bottle. There are stickers to collect and photos to take — both to reinforce the act of creating memories and to make you admire how pretty the game is. The aesthetic pushes you towards nostalgia: it’s a gorgeous blend of 3D animation and watercolour backdrops whose edges limit the bounds of each memory and imbue them with a rose-tinted palette. 

This all makes for an experience that evokes childhood. In order to truly understand Mimi’s story, it is not enough just to be a bystander; the player must play like a child and remember, as the older Mimi does, what it is they have lost in adulthood. It is no coincidence that young Mimi scoffs at Alain-Fournier’s novel Le Grand Meaulnes, just as many anglophone teenagers cast aside The Catcher in the Rye. She cannot relate, since she has not yet lost the innocence which the novel wants us to yearn for. It’s a shame the narrative isn’t given just a little more exposition, because Dordogne otherwise manages to depict the loss that adulthood brings with beautiful sensitivity.

★★★★☆

In the dystopian near-future of Harmony: The Fall of Reverie, Polly (short for Polyhymnia, so prepare for all manner of mythological subtext) must juggle homecoming and loss as she returns after five years to the fictional Mediterranean island of Atina. Her mother, Ursula, a poet with an antagonistic relationship with the technocrats gradually taking power, has gone missing.

But no sooner has Polly arrived than she is transported to the parallel dimension of Reverie, where her name inexplicably becomes Harmony. She meets the Aspirations — not, in fact, a Motown covers band but melodramatic personifications of dreams (power, glory, truth etc) who warn her of the impending destruction of both worlds. In order to prevent this, you have access to the Augural, a vertical dialogue tree that allows you to see into the near future.

You must therefore decide whether knowing in advance where your actions will lead affects how you make them: sometimes you will have to endure conversations in order to get what you want; at others you will have to bear the consequences of your curiosity. It’s a clever way of deconstructing destiny — one that pits passion against pragmatism, truth against happiness. But it is also frustrating: there are a fixed number of paths you can take, so sacrifices can seem arbitrary, restrictive or ambiguous, and removing the mystery of the game’s outcomes can undermine their impact. It’s not always clear whether Harmony’s apparent punishment of players for meddling with fate is entirely by design.

Dordogne is more linear, but the strictures of the story feel less limiting because they are more convincing. This raises all sorts of deterministic questions about whether the fictions you make for yourself are more or less satisfying than ones written for you — questions that Harmony aims to answer, even if it doesn’t quite succeed.

Both titles illustrate the narrative potential of having to confront the consequences of your actions head-on in a way that only games can. As Polly puts it, “The future is like a car with no brakes, careening out of control. All I can do is choose which road it goes down.”

★★★☆☆

‘Dordogne’ is out now on PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One and Series X/S, Nintendo Switch and PC. ‘Harmony: The Fall of Reverie’ is out now on Nintendo Switch and PC