In a gaming generation with a severe handholding issue, minimalism can be a welcome approach. It’s nice for a player to feel as though the developer has enough confidence in his or her intuition that they don’t need to be guided every step of the way. It’s more rewarding and makes us feel smart to discover and solve things without copious objectives popping up in the corner instructing us with what we specifically need to do. But minimalist games walk a tightrope that, if they don’t add up to a rewarding experience, can instead make for unremitting confusion and frustration for the player. Hiversaires is a first-person point-and-click adventure that falls into this latter category. I have no idea what’s going on.
Aside from displaying its title when it opens, Hiversaires (which I believe is French for “giant pain in the ass”) features no text or dialogue of any kind. Three arrows appear at the start to demonstrate to you your ability to tap forward, left, or right to move (you also tap objects to interact with them) and after that you’re on your own in exploring what appears to be some sort of stylish alien contraption. A few onscreen indicators that you must decipher the meaning of do show up on occasion. Your “inventory” consists of three grey lines that turn white when you pick up batteries (the only items you can carry around) and turn grey again when you place them somewhere. A red line also shows up on occasion that either means a dead end or that you’ve done something wrong or… Okay, so I never really figured it out.
Whatever the environment you’re dropped into is, it does look pretty classy. It’s yet another game to go with a black and white palette, but a lot of care has clearly gone into the design and it makes for an attractive albeit cold, technological world. Also, the game isn’t all black and white. At certain points you’ll enter rooms dominated by other colors and the contrast makes it all the more impactful. Sound effects and music are all from the school of subtle, ambient, electronica as the developer is actually apparently more known for his career in this genre of music than he is for game and graphic design. It certainly fits the game’s vibe, but I’m not going to be humming these ponderous, ominous tunes later.
Understanding the game’s initial basics is not difficult. Moving around on the restricted paths with only three directions at your disposal can be a little confusing at first, but it doesn’t take long to adapt. It also becomes clear fairly quickly how batteries are used to power things. The confusion comes from the non-battery-based puzzles, which essentially all fall into the same category of messing with technology with the ultimate goal of activating doors. Your only clues are the funky alien symbols you’ll find printed everywhere. And I mean everywhere.
Wherever you turn you’ll find symbols on doors, walls, and consoles. From the very beginning, they show up in multiple places in various combinations and formations, making it extremely tough to discern which are relevant to your progression. It also just seems like a boring, antiquated style of puzzling in which you have to memorize loads of symbols or keep pen-and-paper around. Though icons sometimes pop up to remind you of things you’ve seen or actions you’ve performed, it’s not enough. I was consistently flummoxed and so overwhelmed with symbols that I quite honestly never figured out which symbols pertained to which consoles. Believe me, I tried; I even watched a video walkthrough, but I was still left running around corridors in an aimless stupor.
I must admit to feeling a tad hypocritical here since my favorite title of the previous year was Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, a game that takes unabashed joy in keeping the player in an uncertain state. However, Superbrothers rewarded you simply for approaching it in a curious, playful manner and also had more apparent indicators of what was important or necessary to interact with. It also had a much more evident narrative. Hiversaires is just a deluge of symbols, doors, and consoles. Everything you see seems as though it could be just as important as everything else and so nothing is obviously worth focusing on, meaning you’ll quickly lose interest in all of it.
Hiversaires is technically so short it can be completed in a matter of minutes (there aren’t even any continue points), but you’re sure to get quite a few hours out of it just from being confused. Evidently, it was the developer’s intent to make the player feel as though he has been dropped into an alien environment and, well, I suppose that’s been achieved. If spatial reasoning and memorizing various weird symbols is your bag, this game is likely to fill you with unbridled joy. For everyone else, this is an adventure game design nightmare.
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