Harmony: The Fall of Reverie Review

ign.com:

If you could peer into the future and visualize the most immediate outcomes of your actions, would you be able to make the best decisions, or would the weight of your past choices still hold you back? Harmony: The Fall of Reverie artfully takes a microscope to this idea by giving you the power of foresight to make conscious choices about which direction the story flows between its otherwise linear conversations. It took a few hours to get past all the necessary exposition before Harmony really got its hooks in me, but the story it eventually unravels into is a must-play visual novel. It does an eloquent job of mixing its classic choose-your-own-adventure style of decision-making with modern stakes that effectively hold a mirror up to the events of our own world.

Developer Don’t Nod’s deft first swing into proper visual novel territory is told from the perspective of Polly and her alter-ego, Harmony, who dons the title of “Oracle” in a place called Reverie. Reverie is an alternate dimension that exists on top of the in-game equivalent of our real world, where the spirit-like Aspirations of humanity use their essence to silently shape the growth of human history. You’ll switch between text-heavy story passages and visits to the time-bending Augural, where you’re faced with the next decision that guides the path of the story. That’s all you get to work off of, but this simplicity makes for a relaxed cadence, and aside from some rough early exposition, there’s only one main issue: Polly comes with baggage.

When she enters the spirit world and dons her identity as Harmony, Polly is given the ability to see into the future using the power of the Augural. A literal map shows the outcome of certain choices and is powered by