After the inevitable Bury me my love and Inua: a story in ice and time Pixel hunting is back with crash, a new narrative experience focusing on illness and bereavement. We warn you right away, there are several warning triggers in the game: illness, bereavement, toxic relationships and suicide. We share with you our adventure, which will certainly be very subjective.
Test conditions: We had the opportunity to play The Wreck in its entirety. Calculate about 5 hours of narrative experience. We played it all on PC, with both mouse and gamepad.
demons of the past
When the game starts, we find ourselves in front of a computer screen. After launching our scripting software, the adventure begins: internal hospital corridor. We play Juno, a screenwriter who is once again in a difficult life situation: her mother had a stroke, and she is between life and death.
For Juno, this is another trauma among all those that she has already experienced. Without consulting her, her mother listed her as the medical decision maker. A difficult or even impossible decision for Juno. This is how The Wreck begins. During the five hours of this narrative experience, you will return to Juno’s memories to understand the human psyche and thus move forward and grow internally.
If the first hour can confuse many, then in the end we are very quickly immersed in this game that, like a character, repeats itself and conducts introspection to face its demons. Will Juno be able to gradually move forward, accept her past and learn from it? Will she be able to reconnect and get closer to those around her again?
Turn around and turn around
As with other studio products, it’s hard to talk about a real video game experience, but rather a narrative experience with a gaming dimension. In terms of gameplay, The Wreck offers us something simple, accessible, but sure to make a lot of sense in relation to what we are shown and told. We turn and return to our past to reflect even more and to conduct our own psychological reflection in order to move forward.
After that, the game can be played not only with a mouse, but also with a joystick. A good part of the gameplay will be related to the choice of dialogues, but especially the fact of clicking on keywords that will advance Juno’s thoughts on such and such a topic. Many times we find ourselves immersed in the twisted past of our screenwriter by force of circumstances.
From this point on, a second gameplay idea appears, suggesting, with a simple press of a button or triggers, to move through the sequence in order to find the words that will thus determine the order of this mixed story in his mind. A very good idea that makes a lot of sense in relation to the whole text.
We will also highlight the jump cut sequence to also show how Juno’s memory imprinted this period of her life in her memories. The fact remains, unfortunately, most of these sequences remain all the same, and only a few really stand out in terms of implementation.
Neat ambient work
All this is accompanied by a graphic style close to a graphic novel, with, in the end, quite a few animations, but still detailed, in particular on these “flashback” sequences with a dreamlike dimension that can suddenly offer an unexpected twist, showing the brutality shown. situations. The idea of this mise-en-scène by Juno the screenwriter is also a very good idea that could go much further. Every time you exit the game and therefore return to the game menu, restarting the game works as if a new line of script had been written. For lovers of letters, a purely textual version of the adventure could be an original and equally impressive idea.
To add to that dimension, the entire sound part of the title is just as important. And from this side, we really wanted to pay tribute to the musical composition Adrien Larouzi and COLORSWAP – all in electronic pads that rhythmically and brilliantly accentuate each of the game situations.
The game is also fully voiced in English with French voices. This can and will be disturbing at first sight because the French accent is assumed and at times almost brought forward. It’s interesting because we see a desire to make the game accessible to an international audience. However, one might wonder, given that the game uses France as its setting, with characters that are all French, so it would have been impossible to go even further in principle and offer the game in Molière’s language right from the start. vocal level. On the other hand, we can only welcome the work done on dubbing, because it is very clear that we have managed to offer, based on the whole experience of The Wreck, the acting of actresses and actors, subtle and fair in relation to various emotions, all in the non-native language of the actors, this needs to be emphasized.
Come out and reflect on your life
Inevitably, The Wreck asks us questions, marks us and touches us. It makes us think about our own history and experience, about our past and accepting it. And that’s certainly what makes this narrative experience, necessarily close to a serious game, go further than its original offering. A speech that ultimately points to what hurts, but where we become stronger.
The Wreck – if we have enough mental strength to live our experience during these 5 hours of play – this is an invitation to think about our own behavior, howbehavioral and cognitive therapy (TCC) compressed, which we don’t expect, after all, perhaps not so much! But as we warned you earlier, The Wreck has some very complex themes.
Pixel Hunt hits where it hurts again, with a uniquely painful yet moving narrative. A unique narrative experience that will turn you around, make you think, and this is its great strength. It’s hard to talk about a game like The Wreck again, as the feeling will be personal from start to finish. Even comparing it to other studio games won’t be relevant at all times, because in the end it’s people’s sensibility that will make the title tick us off or not.