Is it better to be overambitious and fail than to be competent but safe? Is a story well told made bad by a poor conclusion? I think those two questions sort of give my opinion on Harmony: The Fall of Reverie away but there is a lot more to it.

I think there are broadly two schools of thought when it comes to branching in Visual Novels/AdventureGames/narrative focused games etc. As mentioned in a previous review, I will call 1 the "Jon Ingold" school wherein the branching is almost entirely opaque. Not to say you will necessarily be entirely ignorant of how your choices or actions will affect the story (even in Heaven's Vault there's a few "will you do X or Y?" moments) but you'll not be allowed to see the internal workings of how the story determines the way forward. "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!" as it were.

Chrono Trigger, Heaven's Vault, (I believe some Silent Hills follow this model as well but I have not played them so I cannot confirm) follow this model and its easy to see why. Its perhaps easy to lose all mistique and worry the player will try to engineer the story rather than experience it, making choices for what they think they want out of it rather than let the designer lead in reaction to their natural choices. On the other hand its no secret this can cause a lot of frustration, there's a reason why a lot of games come with Flowcharts and the like and in a way; gaming the system and engineering the story can be a lot of fun, like solving a puzzle in a way.

On the other hand the "Flowchart Method" used in a myriad games can also be a double edged sword, it can make the story less mysterious, the story's cohesion may be broken with blatant save scumming or become frustrating in a different direction wherein a player will not understand how to navigate said system instead of a designer changing the story on the fly in response to user input.

Similarly there is a subcategory I'm going to call the "Uchikoshi Method" which I guess technically should be the Yu-No method but whatever I shill for the man. This is a transparent method of branching wherein the act of using the flowchart to your advantage is not only allowed, but made diegetic and canon to the story. This has its own set of pitfalls and honestly I'm planning to write an absurdly long piece about VLR when I replay it soon so I'll leave it for then.

Now, why did I spend three paragraphs subdividing VNs here (by no greater authority than myself btw)? Well, in relation to my point about HTFOR's overambition, this game appears to combine all three methods described above into one. Yeah.

I can definitely see the motivation behind this. Harmony puts a lot of stock into its flowchart, every single mechanic is related to its navigation; for better and for worse. If nothing else, I admire the courage in making something whose writing and planning must have been a right pain in the ass and it somewhat works.

But before I get into that in depth I should lay the groundwork for the rest of the game. Harmony : The Fall of Reverie is set in Atina, a fictional city state in the mediterranean run by a sinister corporation, a sort of cross between Hong Kong, Valencia and Athens or something along those lines. Although everyone speaks like they're Bri'ish but never mind.

You play as Polly, who comes back after many years to her hometown after her mother's disappearance. Quickly, she discovers she has become Harmony : An Oracle for a parallel world named Reverie, composed of Aspirations which are personifications of Human's emotions: Bliss, Bond, Power etc. With this power she can see the future, which manifests as being able to see the ingame flowchart in universe. Together with these Aspirations, Harmony's choices lead the story forward of an unfolding intrigue involving the sinister corporation, her missing mother, love, freedom etc.

I really enjoy the aesthetic aspect of HTFOR, the expressive 2D art, the 3D and 2D environment art, the music and sound design, these are all great. The voice acting is decent too (Oh and I inmediately noticed when Nora spoke I was like "Hey that sounds a lot like Philosophy Tube and lo and behold Abigail Thorn shows up in the credits) and the writing is from a first playthrough at least, pretty good, nuanced and entertaining, a lot of focus is given to mythologies and stories, social injustice and the sacrifices made for change.

Im not well versed enough in greek myth to make much sense of it, Polly is actually short for Polyhimnia ; a muse. The communal center turned house where they all live is called the Naiads, which I believe were Greek nymphs? I quite liked the detail of Chaos' paint changing slightly within scenes, it was a nice touch. This ignorance is however why I enjoy this site, whichever blind spots I may have someone else will fill in and give their perspectives on the matter which I can read and get a broader view of the work.

There is also some pretty good LGBT representation, though one character only revealed they were (I want to say NB? Their profile said they had a legal pronoun change and they say they like short hair as it helps them not be mistaken for a woman but I swear Polly refers to them as her at one point but maybe I misread?) at a particular, missable node. There are however at least two other gay characters.

Now, about that branching. I do think it works for the most part, there is a surprising amount of complexity to the game which tries to marry a lot of things. Essentially, your choices are somewhat transparent in the sense that as the story is divided into acts and scenes, which are further subdivided into nodes, your actual visibility of how the story will unfold is limited firstly to the current act or subact, which helps to make things less overwhelming and secondly by the node visibility being tied to various conditions, which you may choose to unlock if a choice mentions which nodes will be revealed as a result. There is also the bond crystals, essentially certain actions favour certain aspirations and other require their cooperation, thus you need to weigh up who you're helping and how that affects the decisions near to you. Furthermore, each act ends with a decision requiring a certain amount of bond crystals from one or more aspirations and further still there is a global running tally of how many bond crystals you have acquired and favouring a certain aspiration in this factors into one of the final choices in the game!

That sounds like a lot, doesnt it? Thats cause it kind of is? But it also kind of isnt. For the most part the game straddles the line of choices being tough to make (though that may be the executive dysfunction talking) but not overwhelming, though I did feel at times that I was always making the worst decision. Now, in theory that can work (Disco Elysium comes to mind) but there is something about your choices in the various acts locking you out of choices in subsequent acts that always feels like a kick in the teeth. Its that thing that theyre trying to have their cake and eat it too, have engineerable short term choices (the individual nodes can be fucking tiny as well, like 2/3 lines of text at times, although it does make the pacing pretty tight, I clocked in 5 hours and it felt like 3) with opaque long term choices which force you out of certain paths. And again, in theory Im fine with that, but at points it just fucks me up.

Case in point : the ending, which I am going to talk in general, nonspecific terms, but some people are really sensitive about these sorts of things so feel free to leave now if youre bothered by this sort of thing : I do recommend the game despite it all and I honestly would welcome more perspectives about it.

The game definitely acknowledges the ridiculousness of the complicated flowchart and demands and needs of the various characters and aspirations which pull on Harmony from a thousand different directions but its still a bit much. And well, if you are planning on playing this game : go all in on at least 1 aspiration! Dont attempt to keep each in balance cause honestly the game seemed disappointed I went for that, which kinda blew but again I have only seen 1 playthrough so perhaps I am misreading it. This is sort of the issue in reviewing any game. I have "finished" it but I have nowhere near enough of a perspective to judge it holistically, but at the same time making oneself fully familiar with the systems of these games can be either extremely hard or ruin the enjoyment entirely, thus making the exercise moot.

Another thing is that there was a choice relating to the future of the city state and what would have been to me the most interesting option became locked because of choices I had made previously and which IMO makes no sense why.

Actual Spoilers Now :
I led a goddamned revolution against MK, couching myself upon the outrage of the populous against its corpo masters but because of some minor bullshit in how I handled the situation later, the option I had to choose was basically status quo liberal democracy : Cringe! I could have also chosen some bullshit thing related to the ancient cultures that created the aspirations in the first place but the way it was phrased it sounded like we would be ruled by a city full of those greek Statue profile pics from Twitter with names like "Retvrn to Ancient Virtue" and only talk about how women having any autonomy is how Rome fell or whatever nonsense.

So Im left with a sour aftertaste. For all its faults I think Harmony is interesting and honestly it kept my attention its entire runtime, so its just doubly tragic how it couldnt stick the landing. I would still recommend if you are interested in branching narratives and a mixed collection of mediterranean cultures.