Chronique Des Silencieux – Review

I am a sucker for a gripping mystery as well as being a confessed francophile. Therefore, Chronique Des Silencieux should have been perfectly designed for me. While I did see the enticing yarn through to the end that does come with some caveats.

Right from the very beginning of Chronique Des Silencieux, I was getting strong Broken Sword vibes. There’s something wonderfully stylised about everything in the game. Character art, movements, and how you solve puzzles all have their own distinct feel to them that make it stand out from the crowd. I particularly enjoyed the concept of solving smaller mysteries to metaphysically unlock a confrontation with a key character. This focus on unpicking people as well as clues makes for a deeply engaging gameplay loop.

By connecting pieces of evidence, using the combo of pins and red string, you can progress and reveal conversation topics and therefore drive onward toward a solution. In turn, this gives you keywords and focus points to use to unlock the metaphorical door your suspects put up. It’s a mechanic that wears its Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney influence on its sleeve but it works for the style of Chronique Des Silencieux. At many points in the game, especially when questioning other characters, it almost felt like a third-person Ace Attorney game; that’s a good thing.

However, both the evidence connecting and confrontation unlocking systems have some functional issues. Like any mystery puzzler, the game can be very picky about which things need to be linked to progress and conjure the solution. However, on many occasions, it felt more like trial and error to find the combination Chronique Des Silencieux wanted me to have. Even though I had mentally understood the result I needed to get, very often, the game simply wouldn’t accept alternative solutions that logically lead to the same result. While the developer does include a button to report potential solutions that should work, it didn’t make my playing experience any less frustrating.

Equally, some of the puzzles in the game were borderline unsolvable. Even with a generous hints system built in, I really struggled to get the correct combination or solution for some puzzles. In fact, I straight up skipped some because I just couldn’t figure them out. As a veteran player in the genre, I feel confident in saying that there was clearly something missing that was needed to better guide me towards the solve. Too often, I was frustrated by the lack of a path forward as opposed to being driven to find the answer. Additionally, there is no guidance or direction on when you have everything needed to move forward or whether you have missed some trinket of info somewhere.

That’s a real shame too as Chronique Des Silencieux has a fascinating tale at its core. The intertwining narratives and characters make for a fantastic story. I loved the choice of setting, 1970’s Bordeaux, as it is simply something I haven’t seen in any other title. It also naturally led to some incredibly deep and thoughtful conversations, in-game and out, about topics and perspectives I really hadn’t seen considered in gaming before. Post-war fallout, guilt, honor, and honesty all get wrapped up into an impactful story.

The characters of Chronique Des Silencieux also deserve their time to shine. Each is very clearly defined, has their own arc in the game, and offers something different to the player. It absolutely feels like you are viewing a potential real-world experience and not some manufactured sequences for a game. This bend towards realism adds a lot of narrative weight to the people and places. It is something I really felt, and enjoyed, while trying to piece together the game’s puzzle. Getting to spend just a short amount of time with the characters was a pleasure.

Unfortunately, finding those diamond character and story moments did require quite a lot of digging through dirt. Chronique Des Silencieux‘s first language is not English and it is full of typos and awkward translations. It made reading the evidence and dialogue very difficult at times and led me to question whether what I was reading in English was what it was supposed to say. Not being able to rely on the only thing I had to progress the game was beyond frustrating. In fact, I suspect that some of the challenges I had solving puzzles were based on something that made sense in French but didn’t make sense in the translation.

The developers do admit that they are still working on tightening up typos and the translations but that should really have been done before release. In truth, even though Chronique Des Silencieux has a storied development history, it feels like it needed more testing time. Had this been released with clearer and more forgiving puzzle solutions, accurate translations without typos, and no random game crashes (which I experienced multiple times), I would be recommending this game wholeheartedly. There is so much to love in Chronique Des Silencieux; you just have to ignore a lot of things too.

There is so much to love in Chronique Des Silencieux; you just have to ignore a lot of things too.

Chronique Des Silencieux is available now on Steam.

[GameOrNought was provided with a Steam code for review/content purposes]

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