Earlier this year, I played a little gem of a game called Animal Well. The game took the conventional Metroidvania format, stripped out the combat, and filled that void with multiple layers of secrets that kept me fully enraptured. Now months later, Phoenix Springs attempts to do something similar to the point-and-click genre by cutting out the chaff of traditional genre tropes and replacing them with something truly divergent and wholly enigmatic. Calligram Studios, the developers of Phoenix Springs, describe the game as “modern point-and-click,” which is palpably realised in their design choices. The studio considers itself an art collective in the way they approach the medium of computer games, where form appears to matter just as much, if not more, than function. All it takes is one glance at a screenshot from Phoenix Springs, and you will feel like this game should be hanging in a gallery somewhere. This is not a perfunctory assembly of ideas but rather a singular vision painted to life in elegant brushstrokes.
The visual style of Phoenix Springs takes the graphic novel aesthetic and amplifies the colour saturation to create stunning contrasts. The player navigates the world from a fixed camera perspective in perfectly arranged scenes that feel like a sequence of framed artwork. Your eyes just sink into it. The style also benefits from a brilliant use of lighting, using heavy shadows to direct the players gaze to different points of interest. It is a clever application of the “yellow paint” technique we see in many other games, where the intended path is illuminated by colour contrast to help the player understand what elements on the screen should be investigated closer.
While the camera maintains a fixed look at the environment, certain foreground objects pop with hand-drawn animation. Intentionally sharp and imprecise, like flipping through the pages of a comic book, the animation dials back the frame rate to dial up the novelty. Motion is simultaneously smooth and abrupt. There are also times when the camera will zoom in for a very quick cutscene, allowing the player to see detail that is easy to miss at the wider fixed perspective. I honestly wish there were more of these cutscenes, as they added personality to the various characters and activities you encounter throughout the game. Having some tangible moments of characterisation is a welcome respite from the perplexity that keeps so many of the game’s finer details out of reach.
The soundtrack to Phoenix Springs is ambient and haunting. While the moment to moment is rather quiet, there are occasions when eerie, dissonant vocals will break through the silence to change the tone of a scene. The music is such a soft touch, in fact, that the sound effects take a more prominent role in the audio design. The rustling of grass, the blowing of the breeze, the clack of a train along the track—all just felt a bit eerie in the vacuum of sound that this game presented. The voice acting, while very strong, is also low and monotone in delivery, adding to the solemn mood contrasted against unsettling environmental storytelling.
In terms of gameplay, Phoenix Springs plays out like a standard point-and-click adventure with some unique twists on the genre. Instead of combining physical inventory items to solve puzzles and progress the story, the player will instead unlock a word bank of ideas, phrases, and nouns that can be connected like red strings on a corkboard. This is the central mechanic that drives the mystery, in which the player makes sense of all the conceptual odds and ends they find in the environment to advance their investigation. As an example of an early puzzle, the protagonist, Iris, will have a conversation with an old man that will tip her off to the fact that her brother used to work at a university, but the man doesn’t know which one. After the conversation, the word “university” will be added to the word bank. Later, Iris will find some branded pens with the initials “ULS,” which she can then connect to the word “university” in conversation with the old man to produce the university name as yet another word in the word bank. Connecting ideas like this is as simple as clicking on words/phrases in the word bank and clicking on something in the environment, be it another character or object, to generate new ideas. The word bank keeps growing and changing as Iris explores different plot threads to advance her investigation, unravelling the mystery one idea at a time.
Furthermore, as the story advances, certain words in the word bank disappear to help focus the investigation and guide the player in the right direction. This was a very welcome quality-of-life improvement for the genre, insofar as the player is never overwhelmed by all the things they could do with what they have added to their inventory. Another player-friendly design decision was to give the player the option to mentally rehearse any of the words they previously discovered. By clicking on a particular word in the word bank and then clicking on Iris, she will say a few lines of dialogue to help remind the player of the word’s significance and provide a hint to how they might use the word to solve a current puzzle.
When Iris is not actively working on her word bank, she is walking around the environment with a click of the mouse or a double-click to run. The player will be pouring over the screen to look for things to interact with, which is why I recommend using a large screen if possible to avoid missing any small detail. While the intended, plot-advancing objects are typically highlighted well enough, as mentioned earlier, the peripheral details are easy to overlook. It may seem insignificant since the environmental details are so subtle and restrained, but I found that I needed any help I could get when it came to deciphering the backstory of the characters.
To keep the integrity of the mystery in Phoenix Springs, I am going to avoid talking about the plot other than the narrative setup. Iris’ goal at the beginning of the game is simple: find her brother, Leo Dormer. You have no idea why she is searching for him. What starts off as a slow shuffle between scenes, introducing the player to the mechanics of the word bank, eventually turns into something quite provocative. The story gets weird, goes places, and pulls the rug on the player a number of times. I was consistently fascinated by the writing in this game and felt that the method of the word bank as a deductive tool to unearth the plot was executed wonderfully, even if it was insufficient to fill in the gaps in my understanding.
This is where I must be brutally honest about my experience with this game. Though all the mechanical and narrative components of a great mystery were present, I could not piece enough of the script together by the end to leave satisfied. The story was such a high concept that I struggled to tether its outcome to anything that made sense. While an inscrutable plot could work for a game like Animal Well, which drip-fed the player new mechanics to keep them engaged, it doesn’t work as well in a point-and-click adventure where the story is entirely in focus. I played through the game two times; on my first playthrough I got maybe 30% of my questions answered, and then on my second I got an incremental 5% of my questions answered. Perhaps the Phoenix Springs community will fill in the plot gaps to help re-contextualise my playthroughs, but for now the wonder of the game has been tragically tempered by my overall confusion with the plot.
In summary, Phoenix Springs is equal parts enrapturing and enigmatic. The art style drew me in with high colour saturation, lighting effects, and hand-drawn animation. The sound design expertly used minimal ambient noise to create an unnerving backdrop to the moment-to-moment gameplay. I absolutely loved the word bank system as an alternative to traditional point-and-click inventory management, especially in a game where connecting ideas is the primary player input. However, the payoff of all of these great design decisions just fell flat for me because the narrative was excessively lofty. I hope that months from now, when I have had the benefit of watching dozens of video essays and plot analyses on this game, I will finally be able to process just what on earth happened in Phoenix Springs.
Release Date: October 7th, 2024
Platforms: PC
Price: £14.99
Version Tested: PC + Steam Deck
Many thanks to the developer for the review copy.
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