Shan Gui

The piano is the best thing in Shan Gui, and I don't offer that as a consolation prize. A handful of themes, mostly solo keys, played at a tempo that assumes you have nowhere to be, and they do nearly all of the emotional lifting across an hour of reading. Underneath them sit hand-painted mountain backdrops: mist pooling in the valley, late-summer light going gold and then going out. This is a Chinese indie kinetic visual novel released in 2014 by a very small team, and it carries the specific confidence of a project that knew exactly one thing it wanted you to feel and refused to chase anything else. Kinetic means what it says. You click, text advances, and that is the entire verb list. No choices, no branches, no routes to unlock, no way to fail or to steer toward a different ending. If your reference point is Western visual novels with flowcharts and affection meters, recalibrate now, because this sits closer to a short film you happen to pace yourself. The story is two young people on a mountain across a few days at the close of summer, one of them arriving from somewhere louder, and it takes the shape most good coming of age vignettes take: proximity, small talk, then two or three moments that land harder than the dialogue around them has any right to set up. There are Steam achievements, trading cards, cloud saves and full controller support, which is quietly funny for something you can finish in one Sunday morning sitting without ever touching a save slot. Where it disappoints is no mystery, and that 72 percent positive rating across a couple thousand reviews maps onto the complaint cleanly. It is slight. Not slow, slight, and there is a difference. I will defend a slow opening all day when the payoff earns it, but Shan Gui's problem is that it stops rather than resolves. The characters are sketched with real affection and then handed back to you before either becomes someone you could describe to a friend. Scenes that could have breathed for another three exchanges cut early instead. The achievements are participation trophies. You also see most of what the art has to show fairly early, which puts even more weight on the score to carry the back half. And with zero interactivity, any stretch where the writing goes flat has nothing at all to hide behind. If plot is what you buy games for, this will read as a screensaver with subtitles, and I understand that reaction even if it isn't mine. What I'd tell you instead is that it is honest about being a mood piece, and mood pieces get judged on whether the mood arrives and holds. This one does, largely because the art direction and the soundtrack are working in the same key rather than competing. It also knows when to end, which is rarer than it sounds. An hour is the correct length for what it has to say, and padding it to four would only have exposed how little narrative machinery is under the hood. Anyone who reads slowly, who lets a track finish before clicking through, will get more from this than someone speed-clicking to find out what happens, because nothing much happens, and that is the design working as intended rather than failing. Play it in one sitting, late, with headphones, and don't multitask. Come to it for the way a painted hillside and a few piano phrases can put a very specific ache in your chest for sixty minutes, not for a story you will retell afterward. That is a genuine thing to offer, and plenty of far bigger games never manage it once.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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