Déraciné Review

It is genuinely surprising to find this on the same shelf as the studio's other work, and then, twenty minutes in, it is not surprising at all. You are a faerie who exists between the seconds of the children's lives, so the world is a series of paused tableaux you walk through, moving a rabbit, taking a life force from one thing to give it to another, and slowly learning what you have been doing to the people you thought you were helping.

The writing is the best in the studio's catalogue on a line by line basis, plainly told and quietly devastating, and the final act reframes everything that came before with real cruelty. As a game it barely qualifies. Movement is node to node teleporting, interaction amounts to picking objects up, and the puzzles are gentle to the point of decorative. It also requires PlayStation VR, hardware already superseded, which has stranded it more thoroughly than any review could.