Painting a colourful picture of Bordeaux in the ‘60s and ‘70s, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Chronique des Silencieux is a characterful mystery game. As an apprentice detective, you’re tasked with tracing back the history of an elderly professor, with the man himself being your client. What follows is a story of brothels, resistance efforts, and📖, inevitably, death.

Right off the bat, you’re thrown head-first into the world being construc༺ted. There’s no glossary to refer tꩵo; everything must be inferred from dialogue and documents. Chronique demands your attention and rewards it by putting compelling mysteries in front of you, with just enough evidence to unravel them and take down your secretive ‘opponents’. After my time with the game, I feel like I have a greater understanding of post-war Bordeaux than I’ve ever felt with the likes of Midgar or Whiterun.

Moment-to-moment gameplay is an interesting interplay of two halves. First, you explore a limited section of Bordeaux, a town buzzing with life, to find relevant documents and interview people of note. Some characters can be asked about every ‘topic’ you pick up, while others will simply be asked about one thing, producing a transcript of the conversation. It’s then your job to draw connections between the documents you’ve collected and the conversations you’ve had, highlighting discrepancies to further your understaꦓnding of the unfolding mystery. This is quite open-ended - you’ll end up asking irrelevant questions and finding red herrings, which makes finding the contradictions a true challenge, though it’s an effective way to get you engaging with the stories being told and even exploring beyond them.

While there is a hint system, working the mystery out for yourself is the most satisfying feeling, so it’s a shame that there is little in the way of direction that doesn’t outright state that you’ll be punished for using it. When new characters are made available to speak with or when new areas unlock, they’re as mysterious as the questions you’re asked to solve, so I found myself exploring the entire map more than once to no avail, before working out that the game expects you to simply know when it’s time to stop running around and start making connections to unlock the next section. It’s like♎ old-school adventure games in a lot of ways, where potential solutions or the path forward can be obtuse in ways that, while engaging, occasionally border on the obnoxious.

Another mechanic involves constructing hypotheses using two of your unlocked topics and a verb to link them. Misnamed perhaps, these are more fittingly the conclusions you draw from your detective work and move the story onwards when you correctly identify them. These sequences can often be a little vague and require some trial and error, but I appreciate that you’re required to make some logical deductions with the evidence you’ve collected. This is no 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Ace Attorney; the game puts you squarely in th𒀰e role of apprentice detective and forces you to engage with the questions being asked.

Chronique des Silencieux suffers greatly from its translation (from French, as you may have inferred). The text is riddled with errors in grammar, spelling, and formatting; from incidental dialogue with peopl🦩e on the street to thrilling denouments, you never go long without encountering a💙 mistake. Sometimes, these simply take you out of the moment, but at worst, the bad translation further confounds an already complex mystery.

When your interactions amount to analꦉysing text and finding connections, you need every piece of information drip-fed to you to be accurate in intention. When the translation is this inept, you find yourself second-guessing everything. Is this person lying to me, or is it another mistake? Is the fact that this acronym doesn’t match up with the organisation’s name a quirk of the translation, or is it a typo? Is this less relevant than it seems?

The shoddy translation makes for the game’s largest hurdle and is my biggest warning to those who would play the game in English. When the translation isꦡ on point, however, you can see just how good the writing can be. Characters have robust personalities, the prose is fluid and natural, and i🍌ntrigue woven so delicately through dialogue. It’s a shame that the quality is so uneven that the good periods are dampened by the frustrations of the bad ones. I imagine it’s a different story entirely when playing in French.

While the writing suffers mostly from translation errors, there’s also an issue of taste to address. Twice, I encountered offensive slurs being used with no good excuse. This isn’t about being too sensitive; there are ways to use offensive content to artistic and narrative effect, and none of them were employed here. These were just startling to read and left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I don't know if this is an attempt at commentary on the realities of '70s-era France or just another mark against the translation effort; either way, it detracts from the experience and adds nothing.

Unfortunately, the game ♔is also plagued by bugs. From intermittent shutdowns to freezes and disappearing character models, playing Chronique des Silencieux can sometimes feel like an anxiety-inducing chore. A robust autosave system prevents any progression 𓆏loss, but it’s yet another frustration to add to what is now a pile of them.

It’s fair to say that I’m disappointed with Chronique des Silencieux, but mostly because there is so much here to appreciate. Held ba🐻ck by translation faults and a buggy experience, there are compelling mysteries, lush artwork, and strong characters to enjoy. It feels very much like a game in Early Access that needs a whole lot more cooking before it’s ready to tell its tale.