Harmony: The Fall of Reverie Reviews

This game was divine, it was inspirational and it was burdening you with the weight of never being able to choose right for everyone at the same time. It was about love, it was about loss, it was abut community and strength in the collective, it was about being the kindle of inspiration and it was about finding the balance within your own choices.

This is a visual novel with some of the worst writing I’ve ever experienced in the genre. And I still thoroughly enjoyed it. Let me explain. Harmony: The Fall of Reverie offers mesmerizing music, a stunning visual style, vibrant and emotional voice acting, and, most importantly, a core philosophical concept that is surprisingly deep. The real star, however, is Augural, the branching narrative system that turns what could’ve been a typical visual novel into a kind of cosmological puzzle, where the player isn’t just a decision-maker, but a visionary of the future. For that concept alone, I’m willing to forgive nearly everything else. Now, the writing… It’s incredibly naive. Sometimes even outright dumb. Often boring, repetitive, forgetful, and it frequently feels like it’s leading you nowhere. The narration? Sounds like an old philosopher-grandpa drifting into senility, forgetting what he was talking about every two lines. It’s… weird. And that’s what hurts the most. Such a brilliant instrument, this whole framework, executed at maybe 10% of its potential. But even that 10% was enough for me to spend some genuinely wonderful hours with this game. 8 glue bazookas out of 10.

I really wanted to like this game - and I was able to overlook some of the clunkier aspects other reviews have noted (no skip for the intros to new places, scenes being disrupted by constantly being pulled back to the augury, info-dumping exposition/showing not telling) in the first few acts. The beautiful visuals, excellent voice acting, and interesting (if shallow) mythology couldn't make up for ultimately disappointing storytelling. By the end of act 3, it became apparent that this game is much less "choices matter" than I wanted it to be. The climax of act 3 felt railroaded [spoiler] and the death of Lazlo seemed inevitable, [/spoiler] which feels bad in a game that was marketed as "choices matter". Even the parts where it seemed like momentum and tension were building in the fourth act were poorly paid off [spoiler] by the totally inexplicable collapse of the BBEG corporation (not as a result of my beloved characters hard work, but as an unexplained choice on the part of the corp itself???)[/spoiler] in Act 5. Whole characters got swallowed by plot holes in the final act ([spoiler] the two queer relationships that provided the emotional heft of the middle game? half of one pair gets arrested and then forgotten about, the main character's love interest is just straight up ignored save for a mention in the list of characters the main character remembers fondly at the end - this is not the queer romance I was looking for! [/spoiler] ). At times it seemed like this game had important and life-affirming things to say about community, about love, and about carrying each other through the hard times, but ultimately the themes rung hollow and the storytelling left me unsatisfied.