Waking the Glares - Chapters I and II

My first impression was the kind of quiet wonder I chase in small indie releases: a blizzard-soaked street, shutters hammering against an ominous house in the distance, a narrator's melancholic voice already threading something personal through the cold air. Wisefool Studio, a solo-scale outfit out of Palermo, clearly built this opening with intention. That atmospheric promise is real, and for a few minutes Chapters I and II feel like they might belong in the same conversation as Dear Esther or early Campo Santo work. What happens next is the harder conversation. The game is a first-person, exploration-driven walking sim with light puzzle layering spread across two short chapters. Chapter I puts you inside a snow-locked house where a massive tree has burst through the basement and grown its branches into every room, and each room hides a small environmental task: light something, flood something, coax flowers to bloom. Words and symbols thread the walls. The narrator drops fragmented memories as you move. The central hook is a mysterious book that has fractured protagonist Dawnfall's life and scattered him across time and space, and the game wants you to read the bundled ebook alongside it for a second layer of context. Ambition, clearly, was not the problem. Chapter II moves outdoors to a surreal Paris town square populated entirely by monocled artist mannequins in top hats, gives you a loose list of items to acquire through distraction and light pickpocketing, and ends on a plot twist that actually lands. A slow river-boat segment between the two chapters, piano melody rising under warm sunset light, is the game's single most accomplished moment. But honesty matters here. Both chapters together run under an hour even if you look at everything slowly. The puzzles rarely ask anything of you beyond finding the correct object and pressing a button. There is no inventory to speak of, which strips out the connective tissue that gives adventure-game puzzles their weight. Performance issues, frame-rate drops, clipping geometry, awkward hand animations, and an unresponsive UI break the trance repeatedly. VR mode via Oculus Rift exists but was widely reported as uncomfortable, with forced camera lurches on object interaction. The second chapter's mannequin-filled square is visually more interesting than the house, but the bareness of the geometry becomes harder to overlook in the open air. The game planned seven chapters total, with further releases tied to the reception of these two. At the time of writing no additional chapters appear to have materialized, which means the story simply stops mid-sentence. For players like me who root for small studios and genuinely patient, symbol-heavy narratives, there is something here worth squinting at. The ambient score carries real feeling. The voice acting has a melancholy that evokes the lonely-narrator tradition done right. The structural idea of chapters with different settings and slightly different gameplay rules is exactly the kind of modular worldbuilding I wish more micro-studios would try. The execution, though, is at prototype level rather than release level, and at under an hour of content the experience ends before it can justify its own mysteries. If you come in expecting a polished narrative game, you will feel the gaps. If you come in as someone who reads developer intent the way a conservator reads underpaint, there are genuine brushstrokes worth studying in here.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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