A beautifully elusive piece of mood, Phoenix Springs' blend of tense dystopian detective noir and meandering surrealism is likely to frustrate as much as it intrigues.
Phoenix Springs doesn't begin so much as awakens, adrift in a shimmering void of static before a slightly discordant coral swell. And that's just the title screen. The debut title from developer and art collective Calligram Studio is a surprisingly assured piece of work, featuring a constant, hypnotically churning world of vaguely sketched lines, pitch-black shadows, and austere primary tones that's part woozy expressionist nightmare. and partly a dream in perpetual retreat. It's a game of surprising jump cuts and artful transitions, of rich diegetic soundscapes underscored by menacing synthetic drums. Even its protagonist's ever-present narration crackles and whispers as if transmitted through a transistor radio picking up a signal from another realm.
Phoenix Springs is full of atmosphere; disturbing, disorienting and sometimes intense to the point of suffocation. It's also a game with a keen sense of identity, painting its vision of a fascinating future dystopia with exquisite economics. “Issued by the government, I can search my personal files and some public databases,” protagonist Iris Dormer barks from her computer early on, letting the unspoken implications linger. “Actually, a video,” he observes matter-of-factly in front of a wall mirror. “Collecting data, I'm sure.”
Even before they've set out into the rain-swept city in search of Iris's estranged younger brother, Leo, even before they've seen the university ransacked and filled with deranged ravers chasing a sleep-depriving drug, or one and a half meters high. concrete walls surrounding houses on dirty streets, or uncomprehending, homeless orphans enslaved to their biotech toys: it's clear that something, somewhere, has gone horribly wrong. But Calligram Studio stops at the broad strokes, trusting its audience to fill in the blanks with their own grimly pessimistic details.
In fact, Phoenix Springs' idiosyncratic presentation is so unique that it's surprising to discover that, mechanically, at heart it's a fairly traditional point-and-click adventure. Although one in which tech reporter Iris's inventory is constantly filled not with tangible objects but with ideas and investigative leads. At first, only Leo's name appears in the center of the minimalist UI representing his thoughts, but clues can be combined with other elements in the world, consulted directly by Iris, or included in conversations, opening up new avenues. of investigation, even if they could end up being false leads and dead ends.
The first act of Phoenix Springs is a wonderfully tense piece of neo-noir mystery, engagingly structured in a way that feels like you're organically uncovering clues in a world reluctant to reveal its secrets. It is driven by a real sense of purpose and tangible progression, carefully planting clues to the world's wider mysteries. And it's all brought to life by Iris's terse but surprisingly evocative first-person present-tense narration, delivered in a hypnotic breathy tone (“Eccentric stance,” she comments of one character, “stroking petals as if coaxing a stray cat “). . But then come the fateful words, whispered from the lips of chronological impossibility: “Don't go to Phoenix Springs,” and things take a dramatic turn.
Once Iris disembarks the train at the titular oasis, a vast expanse of green in the heart of a sun-battered desert, tangible reality becomes an elusive dream. It's here that Phoenix Springs sheds the compelling narrative propulsion and lucid focus of its initial mystery, becoming more of a confusing and disorienting mood piece. Gone is the oppressive yet comfortingly familiar form of the city, replaced by a world of indeterminate time and technology, of ancient ruins and carefully tended orchids, where geography and symbolism become indistinguishable, and where its inhabitants are not so much people. like distant people. reflections of themselves, always throwing out airy, enigmatic dialogue that quickly becomes exhausting in its evasion. “Bewildering thought contests, inconsistencies, irrelevant answers,” Iris comments on the growing disengagement from logic.
As it moves into its second half, Phoenix Springs becomes so stubbornly enigmatic, so perpetually secretive, so narratively distant, that it's increasingly difficult to find an emotional or intellectual foothold, and it's not easy to stay engaged with the infuriating nothingness. of all this. Its pacing becomes languid, seemingly aimless, only enlivened by sporadic moments of frenetic revelation, and its puzzle design appropriately but unhelpfully adopts dream logic. It is here, when progress could possibly be linked to any of its deliberately abstruse characters scattered around the world and hidden in the most random of conversation paths, that confusion and the increasingly arduous process of trial and error become the norm. , and when progress is more often defined by investigative dead ends, than Phoenix Springs is more intolerable, though, given Iris's equally growing frustration (“Another sock puppet spewing nonsense,” she sighs in a moment; “These people can't help being useless,” she irritably notes elsewhere), clearly at least to some extent by design.
In its second half, Phoenix Springs is not an easy game to love, or even particularly enjoyable. And yet, as it meandered toward its deliberately unfinished denouement, it got under my skin enough, buzzed enough in my brain, that I almost immediately replayed it. Its final reveal (indeed, its entire structure) suggests a game meant to be revisited, re-interrogated, and picked apart for previously lost clues (even after two playthroughs, Steam tells me I've only seen about 30 percent of possible combinations). of tracks). And recontextualized, at least some clarity can be found in its metaphysical swirl. The world-building of the first half of Phoenix Springs—the discourse on protest and ethics, the recurring motifs of eyes, knowledge and immortality, of memory and self—takes on new meaning, and even the shapeless statements and the elusive symbolism of its second half. they begin to take on some semblance of meaning and form.
In the end, however, I suspect that the promise of a true revelation is just another kind of illusion, condemning players to a fate parallel to the story of Phoenix Springs: a fruitless search for answers in a world made only of questions, that go round and round. and around. Does that make it a completely rewarding game? Probably not, but it's very interesting.
Calligram Studio provided a copy of Phoenix Springs for review.