Harmony: The Fall of Reverie Review: Setting Players on a Poetic Path to Selflessness

Harmony: The Fall of Reverie initially calls to mind the old saw that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. In the game, the citizens of the fictional Mediterranean island of Atina have lost touch with their ancestors, as well as the spiritual Aspirations that guide humanity from the mirror world of Reverie. But by the time you’ve uncovered the mysteries that unite these parallel worlds, you could say that the main theme of this visual novel is more accurately described as “those who ignore the future are doomed to destroy it.”

Early on in DON’T NOD’s game, your playable character, Polly—who’s returned home in search of the overbearing anarchist mother whom she fled—inherits the power of the Oracle and becomes able to see future outcomes. In each of Harmony’s chapters, players must correctly read as much of the Augural, a game board and visual representation of Polly’s gift of foresight, as is visible, working to mend the godlike creatures of Bliss, Bond, Truth, Power, Chaos, and Glory so as to protect Polly’s family, friends, and, ultimately, civilization itself.

That’s an interesting way to simultaneously gamify and pull the curtain from the choose-your-own-adventure structure that defines most visual novels. One character even describes the Augural as a literal board game, complete with built-in analysis paralysis. Savvy players can prevent the consequences of inevitable nodes so long as they first find other nodes that can revoke their effects or avoid satisfying the conditions that would unlock them.

And yet, for all its supposed transparency, Harmony only allows you to see a chapter of each act at a time—and sometimes only a part of that, with the rest hidden behind revelation nodes. The last few chapters have Augural boards that appear intimidatingly complex, until you realize how your earlier choices have already predetermined which barrier nodes are forever closed to you.

Even if the Augural sometimes falls short of its full potential, the game’s writing largely holds up, with poetic descriptions (such as “an ugly phallus of glass and steel”) that enhance Harmony’s colorful, if static, background illustrations. This is true even when the game’s choices escalate in gravitas and begin to hinge on the friction between the people of Atina and the technological intrusions into their daily lives by the Mono Konzern corporation. There are plenty of chilling parallels between our world and theirs, especially the perils of giving a corporation control over a city’s resources and police, and Harmony does a fine job of depicting the Aspirations as “representations of the fallible, malleable human psyche” as opposed to gods.

From a gaming perspective, it’s easy to spot the most desirable ending, as it’s the one that requires the most foresight and planning to keep the six Aspirations in balance. That said, the thoughtfulness and emotional charge of Harmony’s writing is such that each ending is satisfying in its own way, which may be enough to convince players to set off on divergent paths in spite of the approximately six-hour game’s frustrating lack of a fast-forward option.

The most delightfully surprising thing about Harmony is that using the Augural board never feels clinical, given that the choices you make throughout attest to the game’s belief that logic and empathy aren’t mutually exclusive. You almost always know what the rewards are for each of your choices, so picking an option that, say, doesn’t yield egregore, the crystalized energy that fuels each Aspiration and serves as a sort of skill check for certain nodes, demonstrates a real commitment to helping others, not for one’s own sake, but for the sake of others.

This game was reviewed with code provided by Homerun PR.