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Dordogne review: don’t brush off this sweet summer adventureFlying watercolours
Flying watercolours
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Focus Entertainment
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Focus Entertainment
Memory can be a fickle thing. For thirty-something Mimi, everything before her thirteenth birthday is a blank. What happened before that point is never really interrogated duringDordogne’s three-hour run time, but we do know her father is a stubborn old goat who cut ties with Mimi’s really quite nice grandmother Nora after a summer she spent there as a shy, sheltered twelve-year-old. It’s this summer that seems to be the cork in Mimi’s memory bottle, and it’s also the window in which Dordogne frames its sweet, coming of age tale. As Mimi in the present comes to terms with her grandmother’s recent passing, the objects she finds in Nora’s now-empty summer house trigger important flashbacks to that golden summer, and maybe also the answer to Mimi’s apparent amnesia. Dordogne never demands very much of you during these sequences, but it does know how to luxuriate in life’s little details, and find pleasure in a more leisurely lifestyle.
Adult Mimi gets a little short shrift compared to pre-teen Mimi. Her older segments are largely confined to rooting about the confines of the house to find the next memory object, or coming across old letters hinting at events in the past. Her delightfully old brick phone will occasionally buzz with angry messages from her father Fabrice and possibly boyfriend/colleague Dom, but while you can choose to respond to these texts and get occasional messages back, the conversations never go anywhere, nor do they have any bearing on the story. They’re simply there to provide a bit of extra colour - which, given the altogether more drab colour palette of the game’s gorgeous watercolour visuals in these sections, is sorely needed.
Dordogne - Launch TrailerWatch on YouTube
Dordogne - Launch Trailer
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Focus EntertainmentImage credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Focus EntertainmentThe contrast between the past and present’s colour palette does a wonderful job of heightening their respective moods.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Focus Entertainment
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Focus Entertainment
Puzzles are simple but feel wonderfully tactile on both mouse and keyboard and on a gamepad. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Focus Entertainment
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Focus Entertainment
Talk about emotional baggage. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Focus Entertainment
For a game whose message is ultimately about appreciating the tiny details in life, Dordogne is only partially successful. Its soothingpuzzlesnail this philosophy to a tee, but the restrictions it places around its binder feel like a missed opportunity. Each chapter only lets you take a maximum of ten photos on your polaroid camera, for example, but when you can only use during set scenes and panoramic viewpoints, you’d be hard pushed to find ten unique things to capture in the first place. The same goes for its recorder, which you can only whip out in very limited circumstances. You can, at least create multiple pages in your binder per chapter, but there’s no real incentive to do so when the limits on your expression are so harsh and fussy.
It runs counter to the game’s other main theme, which is Mimi finding her feet in a new environment after the strict upbringing of her grumpy parents. She flourishes under Nora, whose gentle nudges toward independence and self sufficiency see Mimi transform from moody pre-teen into a truly joyful soul who revels in probably the last lazy summer of her childhood. And it’s this newfound responsibility and sense of duty to make things right between Renaud and her gran that brings the game to its dramatic conclusion. Admittedly, I found the central conflict between them involving a lost (or possibly stolen) watch to be a little underpowered when all was said and done, but there’s still plenty of warm fuzziness to be found in its eventual sense of closure.
The scrapbooking side of Dordogne is a little undercooked, but hey, twelve-year-old Mimi can be quite the surprising poet at times! |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Focus Entertainment
As I mentioned at the start, Dordogne is not a taxing game, and it won’t challenge you or make you think differently about the world around you. But it is a very sweet and tender coming of age tale that’s the perfect little mini-break for such a busy time of year, and I enjoyed the three hours I spent gawping at its truly gorgeous watercolour scenery. It’s well worth a pop on Game Pass if you have it, but even if you don’t, you’ll feel much better about yourself at the end of it than spending the same amount of money on the latest Marvel dross at the cinema - and it will no doubt stick longer in the memory, too.
