In the opening moments of this painterly storybook game, a woman in her 30s returns to her recently deceased grandmother’s empty house in the picturesque Dordogne valley. Mimi’s family implore her to not go; when she was a child, her father became estranged from his mother, for reasons that were never quite explained to her. Mimi’s only contact with her grandmother, Nora, occurred when she spent a reluctant summer at the house as a prepubescent child. What started as a wary relationship strengthened into a familial bond, which now draws the adult Mimi to return. The house, airy and sun-knifed, is due to be ransacked by a removal team in a few days, providing a note of urgency to Mimi’s fact-finding, memory-salvaging mission.
This is a simple game, artfully told. You guide Mimi through the house and, soon enough, the local town, clicking on objects of interest and occasionally performing swipes and tugs of the cursor to open a drawer, for example, and fill it with clothes, or insert a key into a lock and turn it to open a door. Certain scenes and artefacts trigger flashbacks, at which point we inhabit Mimi’s childhood holiday. In this way the colours of nostalgic reminiscence soak into the texture of the experience, while the adult and childhood worlds are held in creative tension.
The game’s exquisite watercolour artwork contributes to the ambience of a childhood summer trip. Dordogne’s creative director, Cédric Babouche, painted every location in the game, and this work infuses the rather pedestrian interactions with a mystical, human quality. Mimi can occasionally take photographs and tape the sounds she hears (on a period portable cassette player), but the shadow of familial conflict stops Dordogne from becoming trite (or “cosy”, as this kind of combat-free game is sometimes disparagingly known).
Through reading old letters, Mimi unearths the adult skirmishes that she was not party to as a child, and could not have understood anyway – a feeling that may be familiar to any player who has cleared a deceased relative’s home. The result is a game that, through simple qualities, elicits a mood that is both comforting and menacing.
