Harmony: The Fall of Reverie Review — Choose Your Path

Developer DON’T NOD has been exploring choice in video games in interesting ways for years, which shouldn’t be surprising when we’re talking about the group who created Life is Strange. Their latest take on how choice can impact gaming is Harmony: The Fall of Reverie. More of a visual novel than some of their other games, Harmony allows players to see and control the impacts of their choices while still being surprised about where the game is going. It’s fascinating mechanically, but does it come together into a satisfying game?

Two Realms To Explore

Polly left home many years ago after a falling out with her mother. She didn’t plan to return, but that changes when her other family reaches out to let her know her mother has gone missing. Despite their issues, she still cares about her enough to want to come back and help find her. When she arrives back in her hometown of Atina, she plans to start searching the area, but shortly after arriving, she finds a magical necklace that transports her to an entirely different realm.

In this new realm, known as Reverie, she meets a group known as Aspirations, spiritual beings who aren’t quite gods but who embody various elements of humanity. These Aspirations represent our base nature, with names including Bliss, Truth, Power, and Chaos. Polly finds that the world of Reverie is tied to our world through a long-standing agreement where a human must guide them as an advisor, and she seems to be the newest choice. The Aspirations call her Harmony and need her help fixing their realm, which is falling apart, but Polly is already a bit busy trying to find her mom.

While things are initially vague though, Polly soon finds that this necklace lying around her family home was no coincidence and her mother’s disappearance may be tied to Reverie, as well as to a local corporation known as Mono Konzern who have seemingly taken over the entire island of Atina and who may have ties to what’s going wrong in Reverie as well.

Choices To Make

You explore each chapter of Reverie using what’s known as the Augural. It’s a giant flow chart of choices and paths through the game’s story where every choice impacts several others. Each chapter has its chart, and every path you take will open and close different options. Because one of Polly’s powers from her tie to Reverie is the ability to see possible futures, you can see the short-term impact of your choices. Choosing between trusting someone or not trusting them. Whether you want to side with Power or Chaos in a dispute. Even whether you want to spend your free time with your sister or not. These all have impacts and will take you down different paths, and you can get an idea of what those paths will be before you make your choices. You can even reset a chapter if you need to before completing it.

If you could control everything, though, then there wouldn’t be much impact to your choices. While the short-term impacts of your choices are readily viewable, you can only see so far ahead, and you can never see into future chapters, yet your choices will have impacts there that you won’t necessarily be able to account for. Often, you’ll arrive in a new chapter and find that a number of paths are already closed to you based on your past choices. The variety of choices you have provides potential replay value and makes you really think about how your choices will impact the game moving forward. There are often hints in the story that can at least give you an idea of what to expect.

Which Path To Take?

The way you have to manage your choices is fascinating, but it also often leaves you feeling trapped, either by a lack of options or a lack of good options. It wasn’t uncommon for me to reach a new chapter and find I only had one path forward initially because of my past choices. In a game about choice, I would have liked the game to force me down fewer paths, even if those paths were driven by my past decisions. The game’s pacing is excellent, though with short choices, you can quickly jump in and out of it, allowing you to easily play for long periods or enjoy Harmony in short sessions.

Even when I had choices, they often weren’t ones I felt I could follow. Partway through the game, Reverie introduces a mechanic where you have to side with specific Aspirations in a way that will strongly impact the way the game ends. Many of your choices throughout the game put you on the side of an Aspiration, not just in Reverie but back home on Atina as well. If your choice is designed to keep people happy, it will likely side with Bliss. If it’s a powerful and decisive move, it will put you on the side of power. This means if you want a sense of control over the Aspirations you’ll work with, you often have to really focus on choices that fit them. This left my already limited choices even more limited. I like that choices matter in Reverie, but because the opportunities to side with specific Aspirations are quite limited, it leaves you feeling like you barely have a choice at all.

Lacking Depth

As for the story, the two worlds here are both fascinating, and I really like the conflict with Mono Konzern, even if it would have been nice if they were a bit less mustache-twirling levels of evil. Yet I had a hard time really connecting to it because few of the characters are particularly interesting or well-developed. Polly has a lot of family and friends to help her search for her mom, but most of their characterization is somewhat limited and one-dimensional. I think the characters start out okay, and I do like that this is a world where characters of all races, genders, and sexualities are just allowed to exist, as a matter of fact, without the game feeling any need to justify them. Yet actual character development for most of them is somewhere between thin and non-existent.

The Aspirations, by their very nature, are driven by a lone desire, and while some of them are better designed and more enjoyable than others, they don’t evolve or change either. Even Polly, our protagonist, who must make some incredibly hard choices, doesn’t really seem to evolve in any sort of exciting ways. Perhaps a different path through the game would have left me in another place, but Polly I ended the game with felt a lot like the Polly I started the game with, just with different choices.

Harmony never looks anything less than great. Whether we’re talking about the character designs or either world, there’s so much color and life here that it makes for an incredibly inviting experience. That these are so often static images though does detract from some scenes, though, particularly when character images stay the same in wildly different situations where they simply shouldn’t. One scene late in the game made me laugh as it actively showed two characters in their normal outfits while describing them in wildly different ones. It isn’t a big deal, but it took me out of the moment. After listening to Harmony’s soundtrack, I’m convinced that Lena Raine just doesn’t miss. The composer for games like Celeste and Chicory has another fantastic and fitting soundtrack here which I could listen to for hours. The game’s voice acting is a bit more mixed, with some characters like Polly sounding great while others don’t quite work for me.

Conclusion

I’ve really enjoyed some of DON’T NOD’s games and found a lot to love in Harmony: The Fall of Reverie. Beautiful art, a fantastic soundtrack, two interesting worlds, and an intricately designed system designed to really make your choices matter are all worth exploring. Ultimately though, thinly drawn characters and too often feeling like I was being forced down a specific path instead of getting to enjoy the choices the game is designed around kept me from falling in love with Harmony.

Final Verdict: 3/5

Available on: PC (Reviewed), PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Switch; Publisher: DON’T NOD; Developer: DON’T NOD; Players: 1; Released: June 8th, 2023; ESRB: M for Mature; MSRP: $24.99

Full disclosure: This review is based on a copy of Harmony: The Fall of Reverie provided by the publisher.