Au fil de l'eau Reviews

Prepare for a short break from the endless cycle of office life, grab your things and drive to relaxation! In this short, but very stylised adventure you collect your kayak and camping equipment before driving to a river. With pastel colours and use of comic book framing, this hour long journey takes you to the outdoors, with flowing waters and tweeting birds to find the perfect place to pitch your tent. The game follows a simple story but is told beautifully through it's use of colour palette and framing. With environments that are relatively detailed for their conservative art style. Featuring the use of comic book frames during the adventure helps to break up and diversify longer stretches of travel. This game comes from a young solo developer and their ability is really shown here. You can tell they had a clear vision and they have achieved it, this is a rather wonderful little game. Although some may not like them, I feel the developer really nailed the rowing mechanics, the single paddle feels rather realistic and uses momentum rather than direct input. The game is not perfect, it does have a few bugs/problems. Most noticeably is the camera, at times it becomes rather difficult to operate and can also clip into the environment/objects. Although, with patience, it can be resolved so this does not overly prevent the game from being completed. Another thing is the interaction detection is too small, this can mean you have to walk around an object and repeatably hit the interact button to pick an object up, once again with patience it will work. Overall, for the price I think this is a great short game and supports a smaller developer with clear bold ideas that express them superbly. 7/10 Playtime: 1hour~ Controller support: Yes Language support: English/French (Although only on the menu, everything else uses images rather than words) Settings menu: None Achievements: None

[i] If it wasn't for some technical problems, this would be an awesome visual experience. There are 2 major problems when it comes to interacting with objects and kayaking controls - let's just say the game is not very responsive. Essentially it's a walking simulator, there are a few different segments like walking, riding a car, and kayaking - almost like an interactive cutscene. The game can be completed around 1 hour, there were a few forks in the river but I think they all lead to the same place. Kayaking is the biggest portion of the game, and surprisingly you can leave your boat and swim around, but I wish the developer would take advantage of that by adding some optional exploration. The game has a lot of cool visual transitions, some of them I have never seen done before, without going into spoilers, I'll just say that it was very creative. Please don't take this negative review out of context, I think there are many good ideas here, the artist just needs to find someone to help him with programming. Serious talk here, if this game was very polished and had more content, it would be one of my favorites, so much potential. Oh and one more thing, this experience works best when there is music in the background, but the game was lacking sound effects and music in some areas. Update: The game has been somewhat improved, but it still has too many clunky parts to recommend in good faith. But hey, thx to the dev for the fixes, and if you want to support an interesting game with some issues, perhaps give it a try if the price is right. [/i]