As a gaming community, we love a good detective story. Be it Sherlock Holmes, Professor Layton, Detective Pikachu, we love pulling at leads and attempting to solve a confounding mystery. Clearly developer Pierre Feuille Studio has noticed this because now the French indie team has debuted its project Chronique des Silencieux, a narrative-heavy, point and click detective title that takes players to a beautifully animated town in southern France to solve a variety of unique but interlinking cases.
The idea at the core of Chronique des Silencieux is simple. It's a detective story where you gather leads by speaking to other characters and then use their personal recounts of an incident to cross reference with other documents to point out lies and to unravel the truth. It's nothing we haven't seen before but Pierre Feuille Studio does go about offering this up in quite a compelling and interesting manner. Both the cases you investigate and the people you meet along the way are engaging and full of mystery, and you want to continue pulling at threads to find the truth.
The main issue that Chronique des Silencieux faces is that it can be a fundamentally challenging game to play a lot of the time. It often feels cumbersome and frustrating to physically move around the world, and the detective and deduction suite comes across as too rigid at many instances. It doesn't feel like there is much, if any, wiggle room with how you approach unravelling the story, as more often than not, there is only one way to progress, and if you can't figure that out, you will get stuck... a lot.
As to how the investigative mechanics work, it's mostly about matching up dialogue excerpts with official documents to prove that a character is lying or withholding the truth. This could be showing that a character's statement incorrectly matches the timeline laid out in a police report, clearly proving that they have something to hide and thus opening the door to a confession that paves the way to new leads and threads to follow. There are a few additional mechanics to add on top of this, such as a lock and key system where you can piece together characters and motives to ultimately prove how they are connected, alongside some other minor puzzles that lead to extra clues to help you on your way. But, don't expect a Professor Layton-style of experience here where clues are everywhere and discovering them opens the door to a whole slew of puzzles to complete, because Chronique des Silencieux focuses on its narrative and its character development primarily.
Pierre Feuille Studio does show a high level of skill in this aspect. The characters are very rich and deep, and have multiple layers that drive their personalities. Plus, despite the world not being very big and there only being a few locations you can ever truly explore, the development team has done well to keep things interesting by constantly having the player travelling between these few areas to find new and formerly hidden clues. The story at the core of this game is a strong one that makes you want to keep playing.
The art style used is also a highlight. The vibrant and drawn direction effortlessly captures the beauty of this adaptation of 1970s southern France and allows you to appreciate the world that Pierre Feuille Studio has built. Plus, the few voiced cutscenes that are dotted within do wonders to bring an extra layer of charm to this delightful project.
Chronique des Silencieux has many strengths and reasons to want to check it out. The storyline is compelling, the art style striking, the gameplay systems simplistic, and the performance so accessible that you could probably run this game on a burner phone. It's these strengths in mind that make me disappointed that the game can be such a frustration to actually play, because the movement and the rigidness of the deduction suite dramatically impact the amount of fun you can have while playing Chronique des Silencieux. Still, there's brilliance and potential shown here, so Pierre Feuille Studio will remain as one of my indie developers to watch going forward.
