Dordogne

I want to talk about the scrapbook first, because it's the thing Dordogne gets absolutely right and the thing most people will remember. At the end of each chapter, you sit down with young Mimi and arrange a page from the day's haul: a photograph you framed yourself with a polaroid camera, stickers collected during exploration, ambient sounds you recorded out in the countryside, and fragments of words you pick up throughout the day that you assemble into small found poems. It's a quiet, tactile ritual that no other game in this space quite replicates, and it works because it makes you feel the passage of that particular summer rather than just observe it. The game toggles between two timelines. Adult Mimi in 2002 moves through her late grandmother Nora's house, muted watercolors draining the joy from rooms she can't remember. Young Mimi in 1982 inhabits the same spaces soaked in warm, saturated light, and the contrast is not subtle but it is effective. The art was produced by director Cedric Babouche, who drew on actual childhood summers spent in the southwest French countryside, and that specificity shows in every painted frame. The soundtrack layers synth-tinged ambience against quieter acoustic passages that shift register exactly when the emotional temperature changes. For a game this short, the soundscape carries a lot of weight, and it earns it. Where things get complicated is the moment-to-moment interaction design. Dordogne leans heavily on a physical manipulation system where you grasp, turn, lift, and slot objects in real time rather than pressing a context button. The intention is tactile intimacy, and occasionally it lands beautifully, like the first time you set up the polaroid camera or play back a cassette tape left by Nora and her late husband Edouard. More often in the later chapters it turns mundane tasks into minor friction. Unlocking a door becomes a four-step analog stick sequence. Brushing Mimi's teeth is a chore in both senses. Reviewers and players alike have flagged these stretches as the game working against its own mood, and that criticism is fair. The map-and-sticker puzzle that asks you to connect landmarks from written clues is genuinely clever, but it sits next to interactions that have no narrative payoff at all. There are also completionist-unfriendly missables scattered through each chapter, which can irritate players who want full scrapbook pages without a guide. Runtime lands between three and five hours depending on how much you linger, and the story resolves a family estrangement that has real weight but rushes its conclusion. The answer to why Mimi lost her memories of that summer arrives in a compressed final act that a number of critics noted feels underdeveloped relative to the slow, patient build before it. If you need narrative closure to feel satisfied, this will leave a small gap. If you are the type of person who finds meaning in atmosphere and implication rather than explicit resolution, the gap will feel intentional. Dordogne is emphatically not for players who need mechanical challenge or branching consequences. It sits closer to a walking sim than a puzzle game, regardless of how it's occasionally marketed. What it is, at its best, is a poem about grief and summer light and the grandmothers we did not know well enough.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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