Harmony: The Fall of Reverie has a cyberpunk setting and lets you look into the future. Will the makers of Life is Strange land the next hit with it? We”ve taken a look inside.

I used to be crazy about a TV show where a masked magician would reveal the tricks of famous magicians. Whether it was seemingly bombproof restraints, cut women or rabbits in hats – behind everything there was just an ingenious deception

Knowing the truth is exciting, but also a little disappointing. Do I really want to see the invisible threads? Or enjoy the illusion created especially for me? Harmony: The Fall of Reverie is like the magician in the mask. The storytellers behind the great Life is Strange reveal the skeleton of their story from the start in their new adventure.

While the consequences for Max and Chloe were often unpredictable, I now feel my way along story points as if they were bones and joints. An interesting new way to tie gameplay and story even more closely, but also a gamble that can disenchant a narrative. How does that play out? I”m about to tell you.

From dystopia to parallel world – and back

Harmony also shares a lot with Life is Strange, though: a sensitive, everyday story combined with the supernatural that neatly shakes up normality. As Polly, I return years after she moved to Atina, a Mediterranean island controlled by an evil corporation in the best cyberpunk tradition. Drones circle above everything, and anyone who steps out of line gets busted.

But that”s not Polly”s biggest worry. At home, she learns that her mother Ursula has disappeared without a trace. She finds only a strange necklace that promptly sucks her into a parallel world – Reverie.

There appear to her so-called aspirations, actually abstract concepts such as bliss or power, which live there quite similarly to the gods of Olympus in personified form (Hades sends his regards!) and secretly intervene in the fate of the world. Bliss, for example, is an always good-humored, naive child with colorful hair, while Power sits on a gigantic throne as a grim old businessman.

If your head is already spinning, you”ll feel like I did at the beginning of the four-and-a-half hour or so preview in which I got to play the first two acts of Harmony.

Although I”m just clicking through dialogs and text screens like in a visual novel, I feel overwhelmed at first. Add to that a codex with even more info overkill about Oxions (a lost civilization) to Egregore (a psychic mineral that makes the future visible). A more leisurely start would have done the game good.

Nodes in the brain

Recovery for my poor brain is not in sight for the time being, though, because Harmony lets me look into the future right away. I can”t see exactly what”s going to happen, but the so-called mantics show me a network of nodes – vaguely described events and decisions with different conditions.

Behind each of these points is a short story sequence that I play out before I have to make the next decision. Whereas in Life is Strange or Telltale adventures this mostly happens in the background except for certain key moments, here I see which choice opened or blocked which path – or how I need to proceed to unlock a certain route.

This gives me a sense of control that I otherwise lack with often unpredictable consequences in games. Still, the dots remain open enough that the tension isn”t lost. However, Don”t Nod overdid it for me here as well.

Sometimes I need a certain number of crystals, sometimes another node, sometimes I have to play an entire path to unlock a way – or it remains closed because of a previous decision.

Ending up in mantics after every conversation pulls me out of the narrative flow, and all the different blockades, timers, contradictions, or causalities of the stations there work so similarly that they only complicate the decision tree instead of adding gameplay value.

The magic of Life is Strange

But Harmony gets its act together when it comes to the story itself. Whenever I leave Mantic or Reverie again, the action continues in Atina.

Fascinating settings await me there, such as a disused swimming pool where Polly”s patchwork family has made itself at home, or dreamy alleys behind which the futuristic skyline looms ominously. The colorful mix of 2D drawings and 3D backgrounds creates consistently picturesque backdrops that I can hardly get enough of.

I meet Nora, who used to take Polly”s family in. The girl is now an adult and is grudgingly considering taking a job with the evil corporation MK to make ends meet. Ursula”s husband Laszlo, on the other hand, is just a shadow of the once fun-loving bar owner. But why is that?

As Polly, I join Nora in feeling him out. We are able to decide to help him in the bar, which leads to a hilarious evening and causes him to tearfully ask his regulars for help in finding Ursula. This will have repercussions later, as it is how MK and Atina learn of Ursula”s disappearance.

Alternatively, we go for a walk with Laszlo and learn more about his personal problems – Ursula has disappeared, but he is also broke and in danger of losing his bar. This conversation welds him more with Nora, who has grown emotionally distant from him as he grows up.

The conversations in Harmony are incredibly multi-faceted and deep, with much only hinted at and not spoken.

Fast lane or dead end?

This makes the characters very believable and human; for example, it always flashes through that Polly and her mother have a strained relationship. Polly was supposed to become an artist like Ursula, but felt constrained by her mother”s free spirit and took refuge in a conservative medical degree. Still, she loves Ursula and does everything she can to find her.

Harmony: The Fall of Reverie builds a suspenseful mystery around Ursula”s disappearance that somehow has to do with the parallel world of aspirations, the MK corporation, and the defunct Oxions.

Don”t Nod skillfully weaves it all together with its usual delicate dialogue and relationships that make the characters grow on me. I”m dying to know what happens next and what their fate will be.

Only the mantics with their countless junctions feel more like a gimmick than a gameplay revolution for story adventures, precisely because the choices and paths haven”t had much of an effect, at least so far.

I often just learn different or more information, which rewards me in terms of content, but doesn”t really justify the effort. Thus, it remains to be seen if the narrative magic will be enough in the end or if the mantics will maneuver me into a dead end.

Editor”s conclusion

After my first time in Reviere, I was really scared for Harmony: The Fall of Reverie. Creating a complicated, multi-layered universe is a great thing, however, you shouldn”t try to drown someone in it as soon as they set foot in it.

The fact that Harmony then won me over, despite my skepticism, speaks all the more for the story that unfolds before me. All of the major conflicts and concerns in Reverie, much like in the Persona role-playing games, are connected to the inhabitants of the real world and their inner points of contention. How selfish can I be, how much should I sacrifice myself? Can I trust even though I”ve been hurt? Am I allowed to love even though I hurt others?

I feel close to the characters and automatically ponder how I would have or would feel in certain situations. This, along with the twisty story, captivates me in front of the screen in such a way that the preview playtime flies by. As an interactive story, Harmony has already captured my heart much like Life is Strange did with it. However, Don”t Nod still has to do a bit of convincing with decisions and mantics for the release in June so that the concept fully works. Especially when the consequences of my actions are so obvious, they have to have a clear impact on the story. Otherwise it will be revealed that it was just a lazy spell all along.