Year: 2018

Developers: From Software, Japan Studio

Genre&Topics: Fantasy Drama, mature fable, childhood nostalgy, orphans, life & death, PSVR exclusive

This is one of the most meaningful games so far! First of all, since today it’s the privileged testimonial of the new wave of games meant as expressive media, as serious interactive experiences and not necessarily as challenging electronic toys. Why privileged testimonial? Because the mind behind Déraciné is the well reknown Hidetaka Miyazaki, creator of some of the most successfull action-packed, fight-based and challenging games ever: Dark Souls and Bloodborne. I think this is going to help the evolution of gaming market towards the expressive path desired and expected by VGArt; it’s going to recruit new audience and attention for storydriven games intended as virtual experiences, and also for VR. The second benefit is that now you can clearly see the artistic sensibility and expression hidden behind the heavily action-packed, fight-based and challenging gameplay of Dark Souls; now the artist can be truly an artist, free to express his inner thoughts, he needs no more to develop virtual challenges behind which hiding deep contents. Now he can tell stories and put contents at the core of the interactive experience, just like in other forms of expressive art; now you can fully understand your old vague and elusive feeling that Dark Souls had something special and different: the latent artistic sensibility of its author. It’s not so easy to categorize Déraciné, it belongs to none of the usual game categories following mechanics (RPG, FPS, etc.); it belongs to expressive and narrative genres, just as movies, novels or comics do; it’s a fantasy drama! I can understand why so many young critics were difficult to review the last game from Dark Souls creator and gave it low ratings; they obviously were wrong: Déraciné is a virtual interactive experience meant for mature and sensible audience. I want to underline that there are no opposition between traditional games meant as challenges and contemporary games meant as serious virtual experiences, they can peacefully coexist; gaming market is expanding, trying to meet the needs of a more and more mature audience. It’s a natural evolution of the medium; sadly some people, in particular immature gamers that see video games just as usual challenging toys, they have conservative attitude, they are not open minded, they try to foolishly resist the new wave, they cannot understand the importance of artistic, expressive and narrative features; I’m not surprised of this: it’s the history of humankind!

Is Déraciné a so called walking simulator? Not at all! First of all, the label “walking simulator” has no sense, as I explained here; moreover you’re not walking for contemplating open air environments.

You’re a kind fairy teleporting through an orphanage of the XIX century. Déraciné is the french word for “uprooted”, people with no roots, just like the main characters, orphans. Déraciné is a poetic, elegiac, romantic experience. When you wear the headset you’re catapulted in such dreaming past made of ghosts and childhood memories where time cannot flow, just as you’re part of an old family photo album. Nostalgy of childhood and of an idealized past engulfs you. Thanks to the graceful Miyazaki touch for fantasy, you can feel both the magic and the sadness of life through the innocent thoughts of children and their odd adventures. Miyazaki make you feel the children so real and alive, near to you as a family, and orphanage becomes your home, with its secrets and its hearth-warming Victorian style. Child actors and their voice acting are at the state of art, dialogues and monologues are divinely written. Story is really compelling, full of mistery and fantasy, slowly growing towards the surprising and original end.

Despite its undoubtable expressive and narrative value, I cannot say Déraciné to be a masterpiece, because of its static gameplay and not original interactive mechanics. You can just teleport from spot to spot; I would have preferred free smooth locomotion for wandering like a true spirit through the three spatial dimensions. One of the most intriguing feature is the possibility to travel through the fourth dimension, time. That’s a feature so many games have accustomed us to (Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Life Is Strange, The Invisible Hours, Braid, etc.). Manipulation of time is a great resource for Video Games; nevertheless in Déraciné there are no interactive mechanics linked to time manipulation. You just move up and down from present to past and viceversa following the chapters progression. Be careful: you could get lost in time loops! I would have preferred an engaging mechanic for rewinding, forwarding and freezing time at your will, in the style of VR masterpiece The Invisible Hours. When you are exploring the orphanage, children are litterary frozen, suspended in time; that’s very effective for expressive purpose and has not to be meant as a defect. Main mechanic reminded me of The Chinese Room‘s Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture: you can activate memories from the past interacting with little floating circular flames. You have to make flames appear by solving simple environmental puzzles, essentially searching and finding items, putting them in the right place or giving them to the right kid. That’s the only way to move story forward; you’re engaged because you want story to go on, you cannot wait for interacting with children and listening or watching their memories. Once you have unlocked memories, children keep reviving but on the contrary your gameplay is interrupted! That’s not good! Events are told through cinematic cut scenes where you cannot interact or move; Déraciné falls in the traditional detachment between interactivity and storytelling. By the way it makes good use of VR, because you feel really immersed in the virtual scenario and very empathetic with the children, as they were real people.

Maybe not a masterpiece of interactivity, perhaps because of intrinsic technological limits of today VR, but for sure a great meaningful and artistic narrative experience you should not absolutely miss; a delicate and compelling fable for mature audience that allows Miyazaki to fully express his inner and deep art. It is worth of full price, the experience will bring you immersed for about eight unfogettable hours, depending on your game style.

Rating: 84/100