Polly thought she had left her home and her family behind, but her mother Ursula’s disappearance swiftly brings her back to the island of Atina. And it’s not just Polly’s family that’s in trouble. A mysterious necklace transports her to Reverie, where the Aspirations, a group of humanoid mythical beings, tell her she has the gift of foresight and needs to use it to save their world as well as hers.
The ideas of fate and foresight in Harmony provide a narrative anchor for developer Don’t Nod, which then lays bare exactly how you go about designing the choices in a visual-novel style game such as this. Ahead of each decision in the story, you visit the Augural, a tree with nodes that each represent different choices. Each choice represents an Aspiration’s approach to a problem – Power favours assertiveness, Bliss wants to avoid conflict, and so on – and making a decision locks you out of the alternatives. If you’re not sure what to pick, you can look ahead on the tree and see what your choice may lead to.
It’s an interesting decision to show players the branching structure behind these narrative choices; Detroit: Become Human and As Dusk Falls did this too, but only in retrospect, after you’d finished the game. Alas, though they are more sophisticated than binary, black-and-white morality choices, few of the decisions and consequences in Harmony are really that interesting, and sometimes being able to see what will happen next sucks the suspense out of the whole thing. There are, by design, very few surprises, and it can be oddly frustrating to be repeatedly shown all the options you’ve locked off from yourself with an unrelated earlier decision.
Harmony is solidly written. The visual style and animation are great, and its cast of veteran voice actors does a brilliant job. Characters express themselves in nuanced ways that are easy to empathise with, but for some reason, none of them engender any particular feelings. I didn’t dislike any of them, particularly, but I also didn’t care about them, which made my dalliances with their fate feel even more insubstantial. The potential apocalypse that hangs over the game is supposed to make things feel urgent, but a lot of choices you get to make are pedestrian and lead to similar outcomes, and Don’t Nod draws a simple story out quite a bit in order to create room for more narrative decision-making.
The only real antagonist is Mono Konzern, a shadowy drone-operating megacorporation that is hoping to get into pharma and eventually control the whole island. They are shadowy. They are evil. Did I mention how evil and shadowy they are? For Harmony’s story to work, you need to believe that this is indeed a worrying foe, but MK comes across more like a Bond villain than an actual company because the game only represents it through second-hand accounts (“Remember that evil thing they did?”).
There is both too much and too little going on in Harmony: The Fall of Reverie at any given time. It is a game of many parts that don’t come together – an interesting design study packaged in a mildly boring game.
Harmony: The Fall of Reverie is out now on PC and Nintendo Switch, and 22 June on Xbox and PlayStation; £22.99
