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Chronique des Silencieux: A look back at this Bordeaux investigation game presented during our AGM French Direct 2023
Are you more of a fan of mysteries and other police investigations? If your inner Professor Layton is looking for something to sink his teeth into, we may have just what you need. And good news, it’s French! Eh yes, Chronicle of the Silent by its sweet name, comes from a collective of developers, Pierre Feuille Studio, and was able to honor us with an appearance during our last AG French Direct conference last year. The game has since been available only on PC since January 29. We were able to try it, and although there are many positive points, we must also point out a few pitfalls. Here is our verdict after around 5 hours of play on PC, time to completely finish the game's prologue and make good progress in the second proposed case.
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Bordeaux, 1790s. A young man arrives at the station in search of truth but above all of independence, in search of a long-lost uncle. By discovering his trace in a school like no other, Wales, which rather serves as a Maison Close, Eugène will have to lead the investigation and exonerate his uncle of a terrible murder. The tone is set : Chronicle of the Silent is a game of investigation and association of ideas. If you like playing detective, you will be delighted, as long as you do not shy away from the walls that will stand in front of you.
Not so elementary, my dear Watson!
After the death of his mother and when he no longer has any contact with his father, young Eugène Faury (aged around 16/17 at the start of the game) leaves his grandparents' Italian house to join the city of Bordeaux and more particularly the famous Mériadeck district (today transformed into a commercial district among others) to meet colorful characters: Madame Solange, the manager of Pays de Galles, Blanche, one of Madame's “daughters” Solange, or even a not very strong inspector.
The gameplay of Chronicle of the Silent could be broken down into two very distinct parts but at the same time rather intrinsically linked: the search for information or clues on the one hand, the association of this information and the confrontation of witnesses on the other hand. Do you like reading ? Very honestly, you need it to play Chronicle of the Silent the dialogues are numerous and even rather long. This does not constitute a fault strictly speaking, on the contrary, the writing is even rather well put together, but it is true that these phases of dialogue recur very frequently, further disrupting a pace of the game that is already quite slow due to the back and forth. successive to be carried out.
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Indeed, although the game's prologue only takes you through 4 different locations representing parts of the neighborhoods of the magnificent southwestern city (when you're a chauvinist, you don't want to change your mind). you), the numerous comings and goings to question the same witnesses multiple times tends to make the whole thing a little daunting.
But it is not here that the game shows its greatest potential, it is rather concerning the second part of your investigation, namely the association of these ideas in the form of hypotheses with a very rich, complete, original whole but very very frustrating at times. You will have to carefully and without making a mistake, associate the right sentence from the right dialogue, to the right document or to the right information obtained by properly searching your environment. And this is where the first wall will arise in front of you: you will be blocked. Often. Very often. Too often. The game aims to be very precise, surgically regulated like music paper with almost no room for maneuver in carrying out these investigations, it unintentionally becomes too demanding, and will most certainly end up making you breathe a little sigh of weariness.
Although the number of leads to follow is relatively correct before reaching the outcome of the first investigation, it still took us more than 3 hours to complete it, which may seem like a lot when it only concerns the reading dialogues or documents most of the time. Collecting and associating these ideas will lead you to establish hypotheses by associating two people or objects/places and a verb that you obtain by talking about all the subjects to all your witnesses. If you make the right association, you will open a padlock bringing you closer to the confrontation with one of the characters (we are keeping their identity from you so as not to steal the discovery), the final step before validation of the first investigation.
And here too we don't really know if we made the right choices, the game only mentions for example the number of errors made during this confrontation. The first real chapter (of the two that the game seems to contain) of Chronicle of the Silent for his part, led us 5 years later to Mr Dousvalon asking us to investigate his past with the help of his daughter, in whom Eugène seems particularly interested, with dialogues always well researched and always qualitative staging, with settings changing greatly, one of the strong points of the game.
The cocorico… which takes on water
Indeed, it must be emphasized, Chronicle of the Silent benefits from an original image layout, thanks to its shimmering colors, its point'n click game style from the 2000s, a unique artistic direction which quickly hits the mark and pleasant melodies (although sometimes a little too repeated). This young and fresh French studio shows here the range of its artistic talents by taking care of each visual aspect on the screen.
However, we must regret a lack of polish in the user interface with (very) numerous bugs having forced us to return to the title screen or to completely exit the game to return. Among these bugs, we also noted numerous script bugs, preventing us for example from recording a sound whistled by an old gentleman on a bench, and yet essential to progress in the main story. And this is just an example, we were also faced with textures that were not displayed in the clue search menu (see below), or an inability to exit a tutorial message, thus blocking progress.
All this range of inconveniences ultimately harms the overall experience of the game and the interest or involvement that the player will ultimately want to devote to it. And that’s a shame, especially when everything else is really very high quality. However, we remember that this is a first production and a fortiori coming from an independent studio, but all the same, a little more polish would only have been positive for the user experience following.
Since we are in the area of annoying subjects, let us mention the movements of the characters which are quite rigid and even rather disturbing, not necessarily following the direction taken (especially when using the directional arrows on the keyboard). Note, however, the presence of animated cutscenes and dubbed in French, which is a real added value, making the whole thing much more alive than the scenes composed solely of texts, even if the dubbing could be better mixed (muffled sounds at times). Finally, last point, a small disappointment with the successes of the game, only in relation to the success of the different chapters with or without error, we would have liked a progression more enhanced by concrete actions or discoveries, allowing us to get to the final point. Currently, only 20% of players have completed the prologue and 2% the full game, especially since it is impossible for us to accumulate several save slots from the main menu, overwriting all your progress if you restart a new one. gone, too bad…
Chronicle of the Silent is a successful test strip for the young studio Pierre Feuille Studio which here transmits to us the sum of a titanic work of reconstitution of the past of the capital of Gironde, a work coupled with a very pleasant staging but which tends to sometimes disconcerting, with a meticulousness in the dialogues, a research and a depth concerning its characters quite advanced for a game of this caliber, an aspect which we must note here. There still remain numerous display bugs, several crashes, scripts which do not trigger etc., fairly poor movements and animations and a user interface which could still be greatly improved, making the whole thing quite weak technically, although we should not forget that this is a first independent production. And then… Bordeaux what!
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