This year's prettiest indie game will be going straight for your heartstrings on June 13th
The lovely Dordogne finally has a release date
The beautiful watercolour vistas of Dordogne have been on my radar for a while now, and happily developers Un Je Ne Sais Quoi have just announced exactly when we'll be able to smoosh our faces in its lovely, puzzle-y paint pot. It's coming to PC and consoles on June 13th, making it the perfect palette cleanser to all the preceding not-E3 nonsense that will be taking place in the days beforehand. I recently played a short demo of Dordogne, and it really is as lovely as its gorgeous screenshots suggest. I'm looking forward to this one a lot.
While most of its screenshots focus on heroine Mimi's picturesque childhood, the game actually starts in the dreary backseat of adult Mimi's car. She's on her way back to her family home in the Dordogne, following the death of her grandma. As Mimi begins sorting through her grandma's possessions and her own childhood memories of the time she spent with her as a child, the game gradually flips back and forth between the two time periods, with Mimi's past shedding new light on what she's facing in the present.
It's a gentle, narrative puzzler with light point and click elements, in other words, and one that looks set to tug directly on your heartstrings as you explore Mimi's memories. As you might expect, it's beautifully animated, and young Mimi's expressions are particularly well done. She's not best pleased she's got to spend the summer away from her friends and stuck with only her old, fusty grandma for company, and there are some excellent choice scowls and pouts to be found as she settles in for her impromptu holiday.
The environments are gorgeous, too, particularly once Mimi gets hold of a polaroid camera. On a small trip down to the local river, for example, Mimi's gran teaches her how to use it, and aiming it round Dordogne's painterly dioramas in full 3D is chefkiss.gif gorgeous.
At the end of each chapter, you'll be placing your photos in a scrapbook, along with other thoughts and memories you've unlocked along the way. You'll create the latter by clicking on large words that appear in various scenes. The presentation of them reminded me a lot of The Wreck, but the execution is more like Season: A Letter To The Future, as you're free to arrange these photos and thoughts in your scrapbook as you see fit. However, when creating these memories for your scrapbook, it also leaves a lot of blanks for the words you didn't choose, suggesting you'll need a fair few replays to potentially unlock them all. Having just finished Season's excellent scrapbooking adventure, I kinda wish I only saw the ones I'd unlocked during each chapter of Dordogne, as seeing all those blanks made me feel like I was missing out somewhat.
Still, pesky blanks aside, I'm very pumped to see more of Dordogne, so I'm pleased there's now only five short weeks to go before I can play the rest of it. Dordogne is releasing on Steam on June 13th for £13/€15/$15.